Sounds familiar eh..? Well this term mostly pops up at the very mention of multimedia or games. DirectX is a software developed by Microsoft, which helps smoothening the multimedia performance of your PC. It is an Application Programming Interface or API in short. All latest operating systems from Microsoft have this software as a standard feature built into them. Because of the continuos developments taking place, newer versions of Direct X are launched frequently, thus calling for the need to upgrade. ( This software can be downloaded by the Microsoft's site.) This software's basically provides an interface for the different applications and games, helping it to access the different features of the gaming hardware such as the 3-D accelerator graphics cards, soundcard, input devices such as joysticks, etc. If a particular 3D card supports a plethora of radically new features, it would amount to nothing if the API does not support these functions.
The primary aim of the Direct X was to simplify the task of application development. This was done by creating a standard consisting of a set of tools and interfaces providing programmers with the building blocks necessary for developing applications that run independent of the hardware, thus allowing developers to concentrate more on the applications without worrying about the hardware. Earlier, software developers had to develop products in such a way that they worked optimally on a variety of hardware configurations as there was no real standard for doing this. ( Remember the old DOS games which required you to manually set the Sound Card's settings manually). Thus it hindered the achievement of optimal performance. Direct X provides what is called a Hardware Abstraction Layer or HAL, which makes use of software drivers to communicate with the application and the hardware. In other words it is a seperate entity acting as an interface between the drivers and the actual hardware.
This simplified programming a lot as the software developers, while writing a code, had to work on Direct X compatibility and didn't have to worry about the hardware, as all hardware that is DirectX compliant will run this software. With the help of DirectX, the developer is in control of the low-level functions such as 2D graphics acceleration, sound generation, mixing and reproduction, and support for input services such as mouse and the joystick. All these low-level functions are supported by various components that are sub-divisions of DirectX. They are as follows: Direct 3D, Microsoft Direct Input, Microsoft Direct Draw, Microsoft Direct Sound, Microsoft Direct Play, and Microsoft Direct Music.
Now a bit of detail on each of these features:
Direct Draw: This is feature helps access the display adapter's
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