Through the Hardware Emulation Layer (HEL), DirectX is capable of emulating graphics functions in software that are not built into the graphics card. When DirectX was introduced, vendors quickly developed drivers that exposed low-level functions of their graphics hardware to the application.
To obtain the speed, gaming companies had to write drivers for a variety of graphics cards, which was a development headache.ĭirectX provides the interface to access the frame buffer and advanced features of the graphics card, which are not provided in the standard Windows GDI graphics interface. Before DirectX, games for the PC were written in DOS in order to redraw the screen fast enough for real-time animation. The first DirectX API was introduced in late 1995 to encourage game developers to move their software to Windows. DirectX provides a high-level interface for accessing low-level functions "directly." It accesses the hardware abstraction layer in Windows (see HAL). Windows developers program to the DirectX APIs, and the manufacturers of sound and graphics cards write DirectX drivers to be included with their hardware. This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing ( ) DirectXA set of Windows interfaces from Microsoft for programming graphics and sound.
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