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93-428: Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows . Part of DirectX , Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if available on the graphics card , allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes

186-538: A computer programmer who is incorporating it into software. An API is often made up of different parts which act as tools or services that are available to the programmer. A program or a programmer that uses one of these parts is said to call that portion of the API. The calls that make up the API are also known as subroutines , methods, requests, or endpoints . An API specification defines these calls, meaning that it explains how to use or implement them. One purpose of APIs

279-544: A procedural language such as Lua could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or handle errors while an API for an object-oriented language , such as Java, would provide a specification of classes and its class methods . Hyrum's law states that "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." Meanwhile, several studies show that most applications that use an API tend to use

372-420: A software framework : a framework can be based on several libraries implementing several APIs, but unlike the normal use of an API, the access to the behavior built into the framework is mediated by extending its content with new classes plugged into the framework itself. Moreover, the overall program flow of control can be out of the control of the caller and in the framework's hands by inversion of control or

465-496: A user interface , an API is typically not visible to users. It is an "under the hood" portion of a software system, used for machine-to-machine communication. A well-designed API exposes only objects or actions needed by software or software developers. It hides details that have no use. This abstraction simplifies programming. Building software using APIs has been compared to using building-block toys, such as Lego bricks. Software services or software libraries are analogous to

558-486: A " retained mode " 3D API. Both types of API were already offered with the second release of Reality Lab before Direct3D was released. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw , both were based on COM . The retained mode API was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold

651-449: A broad term describing much of the communication on the internet. When used in this way, the term API has overlap in meaning with the term communication protocol . The interface to a software library is one type of API. The API describes and prescribes the "expected behavior" (a specification) while the library is an "actual implementation" of this set of rules. A single API can have multiple implementations (or none, being abstract) in

744-517: A business ecosystem. The main policies for releasing an API are: An important factor when an API becomes public is its "interface stability". Changes to the API—for example adding new parameters to a function call—could break compatibility with the clients that depend on that API. When parts of a publicly presented API are subject to change and thus not stable, such parts of a particular API should be documented explicitly as "unstable". For example, in

837-411: A client would need to know for practical purposes. Documentation is crucial for the development and maintenance of applications using the API. API documentation is traditionally found in documentation files but can also be found in social media such as blogs, forums, and Q&A websites. Traditional documentation files are often presented via a documentation system, such as Javadoc or Pydoc, that has

930-560: A concept of " feature levels ", but new features are supported exclusively by new hardware which expose feature level 10_1. The only available Direct3D 10.1 hardware as of June 2008 were the Radeon HD 3000 series and Radeon HD 4000 series from ATI ; in 2009, they were joined by Chrome 430/440GT GPUs from S3 Graphics and select lower-end models in GeForce 200 series from Nvidia . In 2011, Intel chipsets started supporting Direct3D 10.1 with

1023-435: A consistent appearance and structure. However, the types of content included in the documentation differs from API to API. In the interest of clarity, API documentation may include a description of classes and methods in the API as well as "typical usage scenarios, code snippets, design rationales, performance discussions, and contracts", but implementation details of the API services themselves are usually omitted. It can take

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1116-442: A display system to be "Direct3D 10 compatible". This is a significant departure, with the goal of streamlining application code by removing capability-checking code and special cases based on the presence or absence of specific capabilities. Because Direct3D 10 hardware was comparatively rare after the initial release of Windows Vista and because of the massive install base of non-Direct3D 10 compatible graphics cards,

1209-415: A few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, and gives developers more control over image quality. Features include finer control over anti-aliasing (both multisampling and supersampling with per sample shading and application control over sample position) and more flexibilities to some of the existing features (cubemap arrays and independent blending modes). Direct3D 10.1 level hardware must support

1302-488: A geometry shader, increased generalization of resource access using a view, removed legacy hardware capability bits (caps). Direct3D 10.1 was announced by Microsoft shortly after the release of Direct3D 10 as a minor update. The specification was finalized with the release of November 2007 DirectX SDK and the runtime was shipped with the Windows Vista SP1 , which is available since mid-March 2008. Direct3D 10.1 sets

1395-524: A given API, it is possible to infer the typical usages, as well the required contracts and directives. Then, templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data. In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation of Java embedded in the Android operating system. Google had not acquired any permission to reproduce the Java API, although permission had been given to

1488-520: A greatly increased instruction count, and more C-like language constructs. In addition to the previously available vertex and pixel shader stages, the API includes a geometry shader stage that breaks the old model of one vertex in/one vertex out, to allow geometry to be generated from within a shader, thus allowing for complex geometry to be generated entirely by the graphics hardware. Windows XP and earlier are not supported by DirectX 10.0 and above. Furthermore, Direct3D 10 dropped support for

1581-409: A lower level of hardware abstraction than earlier versions, enabling future applications to significantly improve multithreaded scaling and decrease CPU utilization. This is achieved by better matching the Direct3D abstraction layer with the underlying hardware, through new features such as Indirect Drawing, descriptor tables, concise pipeline state objects, and draw call bundles. Reducing driver overhead

1674-598: A major update to the Direct3D API. Originally called WGF 2.0 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0), then DirectX 10 and DirectX Next, Direct3D 10 features an updated shader model 4.0 and optional interruptibility for shader programs. In this model shaders still consist of fixed stages as in previous versions, but all stages support a nearly unified interface, as well as a unified access paradigm for resources such as textures and shader constants. The language itself has been extended to be more expressive, including integer operations,

1767-441: A modular software library in the 1940s for EDSAC , an early computer. The subroutines in this library were stored on punched paper tape organized in a filing cabinet . This cabinet also contained what Wilkes and Wheeler called a "library catalog" of notes about each subroutine and how to incorporate it into a program. Today, such a catalog would be called an API (or an API specification or API documentation) because it instructs

1860-527: A new version of the High Level Shader Language support for floating-point texture formats, Multiple Render Targets (MRT), Multiple-Element Textures, texture lookups in the vertex shader and stencil buffer techniques. Direct3D 9Ex (previously versioned 9.0L ("L" standing for Longhorn, the codename for Windows Vista)), an extension only available in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11, allows

1953-470: A number of forms, including instructional documents, tutorials, and reference works. It'll also include a variety of information types, including guides and functionalities. Restrictions and limitations on how the API can be used are also covered by the documentation. For instance, documentation for an API function could note that its parameters cannot be null, that the function itself is not thread safe . Because API documentation tends to be comprehensive, it

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2046-440: A programmer on how to use (or "call") each subroutine that the programmer needs. Wilkes and Wheeler's book The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer contains the first published API specification. Joshua Bloch considers that Wilkes and Wheeler "latently invented" the API, because it is more of a concept that is discovered than invented. The term "application program interface" (without an -ing suffix)

2139-871: A render target, option to bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader and retrieve it, option to create larger constant buffers than a shader can access, option to discard resources and resource views, option to change subresources with new copy options, option to force the sample count to create a rasterizer state, option to clear all or part of a resource view, option to use Direct3D in Session 0 processes, option to specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher, support for shadow buffer on feature level 9, support for video playback, extended support for shared Texture2D resources, and on-the-fly swapping between Direct3D 10 and 11 contexts and feature levels. Direct3D 11.1 includes new feature level 11_1, which brings minor updates to

2232-546: A separate API. Direct3D subsumed all remaining DirectDraw API calls still needed for application development, such as Present(), the function used to display rendering results. Direct3D was not considered to be user friendly, but as of DirectX version 8.1, many usability problems were resolved. Direct3D 8 contained many powerful 3D graphics features, such as vertex shaders , pixel shaders , fog , bump mapping and texture mapping . Direct3D 9.0 (released in December, 2002) added

2325-538: A separate feature level; each upper level is a strict superset of a lower level. Tessellation was earlier considered for Direct3D 10, but was later abandoned. GPUs such as Radeon R600 feature a tessellation engine that can be used with Direct3D 9/10/10.1 and OpenGL, but it's not compatible with Direct3D 11 (according to Microsoft). Older graphics hardware such as Radeon 8xxx, GeForce 3/4 had support for another form of tesselation (RT patches, N patches) but those technologies never saw substantial use. As such, their support

2418-643: A shipping company API that can be added to an eCommerce-focused website to facilitate ordering shipping services and automatically include current shipping rates, without the site developer having to enter the shipper's rate table into a web database. While "web API" historically has been virtually synonymous with web service , the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0 ) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol ( SOAP ) based web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) towards more direct representational state transfer (REST) style web resources and resource-oriented architecture (ROA). Part of this trend

2511-414: A significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders , were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode API after DirectX 3.0. For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by

2604-404: A similar mechanism. An API can specify the interface between an application and the operating system . POSIX , for example, specifies a set of common APIs that aim to enable an application written for a POSIX conformant operating system to be compiled for another POSIX conformant operating system. Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution are examples of operating systems that implement

2697-441: A small part of the API. Language bindings are also APIs. By mapping the features and capabilities of one language to an interface implemented in another language, a language binding allows a library or service written in one language to be used when developing in another language. Tools such as SWIG and F2PY, a Fortran -to- Python interface generator, facilitate the creation of such interfaces. An API can also be related to

2790-687: A source or destination, MultisampleEnable only affects line rasterization (points and triangles are unaffected), and is used to choose a line drawing algorithm. This means that some multisample rasterization from Direct3D 10 are no longer supported, Texture Sampling – sample_c and sample_c_lz instructions are defined to work with both Texture2DArrays and TextureCubeArrays use the Location member (the alpha component) to specify an array index, support for TextureCubeArrays. Unlike Direct3D 10 which strictly required Direct3D 10-class hardware and driver interfaces, Direct3D 10.1 runtime can run on Direct3D 10.0 hardware using

2883-492: A system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing its different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands. DirectDraw DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft 's DirectX API . DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it

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2976-454: Is a challenge for writers to keep the documentation updated and for users to read it carefully, potentially yielding bugs. API documentation can be enriched with metadata information like Java annotations . This metadata can be used by the compiler, tools, and by the run-time environment to implement custom behaviors or custom handling. It is possible to generate API documentation in a data-driven manner. By observing many programs that use

3069-815: Is a superset of DirectX 11.2 running on the Xbox One . It includes some features, such as draw bundles, that were later announced as part of DirectX 12. Direct3D 11.3 shipped in July 2015 with Windows 10; it includes minor rendering features from Direct3D 12, while keeping the overall structure of the Direct3D 11.x API. Direct3D 11.3 introduces optional Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed Unordered Access View Loads, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), optional Standard Swizzle, optional Default Texture Mapping, Conservative Rasterization (out of three tiers), optional Unified Memory Access (UMA) support, and additional Tiled Resources (tier 2) (Volume tiled resources). Direct3D 12 allows

3162-644: Is able to run on Direct3D 9 and 10.x-class hardware and drivers using the concept of "feature levels" , expanding on the functionality first introduced in Direct3D 10.1 runtime. Feature levels allow developers to unify the rendering pipeline under Direct3D 11 API and make use of API improvements such as better resource management and multithreading even on entry-level cards, though advanced features such as new shader models and rendering stages will only be exposed on up-level hardware. There are three "10 Level 9" profiles which encapsulate various capabilities of popular DirectX 9.0a cards, and Direct3D 10, 10.1, and 11 each have

3255-430: Is an API response . A weather forecasting app might integrate with a number of weather sensor APIs, gathering weather data from throughout a geographical area. An API is often compared to a contract . It represents an agreement between parties: a service provider who offers the API and the software developers who rely upon it. If the API remains stable, or if it changes only in predictable ways, developers' confidence in

3348-512: Is an architectural approach that revolves around providing a program interface to a set of services to different applications serving different types of consumers. When used in the context of web development , an API is typically defined as a set of specifications, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages, along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually in an Extensible Markup Language ( XML ) or JavaScript Object Notation ( JSON ) format. An example might be

3441-713: Is an update to the API that ships with Windows 8 . The Direct3D runtime in Windows 8 features DXGI 1.2 and requires new WDDM 1.2 device drivers. Preliminary version of the Windows SDK for Windows 8 Developer Preview was released on September 13, 2011. The new API features shader tracing and HLSL compiler enhancements, support for minimum precision HLSL scalar data types, UAVs (Unordered Access Views) at every pipeline stage, target-independent rasterization (TIR), option to map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE, shader processing of video resources, option to use logical operations in

3534-432: Is available for Windows 95 and above, and is the base for the vector graphics API on the different versions of Xbox console systems. The Wine compatibility layer, a free software reimplementation of several Windows APIs, includes an implementation of Direct3D. Direct3D's main competitor is Khronos' OpenGL and its follow-on Vulkan . Fahrenheit was an attempt by Microsoft and SGI to unify OpenGL and Direct3D in

3627-521: Is available on the client's computer . DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory , hardware overlays , hardware blitters , and page flipping . Its video memory manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display adapters . Because DirectDraw is a 2D API, it contains commands for 2D rendering and does not support 3D hardware acceleration. A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but

3720-516: Is created in one place dynamically can be posted and updated to multiple locations on the web. For example, Twitter's REST API allows developers to access core Twitter data and the Search API provides methods for developers to interact with Twitter Search and trends data. The design of an API has significant impact on its usage. The principle of information hiding describes the role of programming interfaces as enabling modular programming by hiding

3813-399: Is first recorded in a paper called Data structures and techniques for remote computer graphics presented at an AFIPS conference in 1968. The authors of this paper use the term to describe the interaction of an application—a graphics program in this case—with the rest of the computer system. A consistent application interface (consisting of Fortran subroutine calls) was intended to free

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3906-453: Is now the most common meaning of the term API. The Semantic Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001 included "semantic APIs" that recast the API as an open , distributed data interface rather than a software behavior interface. Proprietary interfaces and agents became more widespread than open ones, but the idea of the API as a data interface took hold. Because web APIs are widely used to exchange data of all kinds online, API has become

3999-469: Is related to the Semantic Web movement toward Resource Description Framework (RDF), a concept to promote web-based ontology engineering technologies. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple APIs into new applications known as mashups . In the social media space, web APIs have allowed web communities to facilitate sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that

4092-1144: Is the main attraction of Direct3D 12, similarly to AMD's Mantle . In the words of its lead developer Max McMullen, the main goal of Direct3D 12 is to achieve "console-level efficiency" and improved CPU parallelism. Although Nvidia has announced broad support for Direct3D 12, they were also somewhat reserved about the universal appeal of the new API, noting that while game engine developers may be enthusiastic about directly managing GPU resources from their application code, "a lot of [other] folks wouldn't" be happy to have to do that. Some new hardware features are also in Direct3D 12, including Shader Model 5.1, Volume Tiled Resources(Tier 2), Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value, Typed UAV Load, Conservative Rasterization(Tier 1), better collision and culling with Conservative Rasterization, Rasterizer Ordered Views (ROVs), Standard Swizzles, Default Texture Mapping, Swap Chains, swizzled resources and compressed resources , additional blend modes , programmable blend and efficient order-independent transparency (OIT) with pixel ordered UAV. Pipeline state objects (PSOs) have evolved from Direct3D 11, and

4185-440: Is to hide the internal details of how a system works, exposing only those parts a programmer will find useful and keeping them consistent even if the internal details later change. An API may be custom-built for a particular pair of systems, or it may be a shared standard allowing interoperability among many systems. The term API is often used to refer to web APIs , which allow communication between computers that are joined by

4278-460: Is too slow for most real-time 3D applications and is typically only used for debugging. A new real-time software rasterizer, WARP , designed to emulate the complete feature set of Direct3D 10.1, is included with Windows 7 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 with the Platform Update; its performance is said to be on par with lower-end 3D cards on multi-core CPUs. As part of DirectX , Direct3D

4371-539: The Google Guava library, the parts that are considered unstable, and that might change soon, are marked with the Java annotation @Beta . A public API can sometimes declare parts of itself as deprecated or rescinded. This usually means that part of the API should be considered a candidate for being removed, or modified in a backward incompatible way. Therefore, these changes allow developers to transition away from parts of

4464-682: The Java language in particular. In the 1990s, with the spread of the internet , standards like CORBA , COM , and DCOM competed to become the most common way to expose API services. Roy Fielding 's dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures at UC Irvine in 2000 outlined Representational state transfer (REST) and described the idea of a "network-based Application Programming Interface" that Fielding contrasted with traditional "library-based" APIs. XML and JSON web APIs saw widespread commercial adoption beginning in 2000 and continuing as of 2021. The web API

4557-501: The Java remote method invocation API uses the Java Remote Method Protocol to allow invocation of functions that operate remotely, but appear local to the developer. Therefore, remote APIs are useful in maintaining the object abstraction in object-oriented programming ; a method call , executed locally on a proxy object, invokes the corresponding method on the remote object, using the remoting protocol, and acquires

4650-535: The Linux Standard Base provides an ABI. Remote APIs allow developers to manipulate remote resources through protocols , specific standards for communication that allow different technologies to work together, regardless of language or platform. For example, the Java Database Connectivity API allows developers to query many different types of databases with the same set of functions, while

4743-673: The Microsoft Talisman page for details). DirectX 7.0 (released in September, 1999) introduced the .dds texture format and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration (first available on PC hardware with Nvidia's GeForce 256 ), as well as the ability to allocate vertex buffers in hardware memory. Hardware vertex buffers represent the first substantive improvement over OpenGL in DirectX history. Direct3D 7.0 also augmented DirectX support for multitexturing hardware, and represents

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4836-479: The internet . There are also APIs for programming languages , software libraries , computer operating systems , and computer hardware . APIs originated in the 1940s, though the term did not emerge until the 1960s and 70s. An API opens a software system to interactions from the outside. It allows two software systems to communicate across a boundary — an interface — using mutually agreed-upon signals. In other words, an API connects software entities together. Unlike

4929-399: The video card on the user's computer does not support that feature, Direct3D will not emulate it, although it will compute and render the polygons and textures of the 3D models, albeit at a usually degraded quality and performance compared to the hardware equivalent. The API does include a Reference Rasterizer (or REF device), which emulates a generic graphics card in software, although it

5022-712: The 1990s, but was eventually canceled. In 1992, Servan Keondjian, Doug Rabson and Kate Seekings started a company named RenderMorphics, which developed a 3D graphics API named Reality Lab , which was used in medical imaging and CAD software. Two versions of this API were released. Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in February 1995, bringing its staff on board to implement a 3D graphics engine for Windows 95 . The first version of Direct3D shipped in DirectX 2.0 (June 2, 1996) and DirectX 3.0 (September 26, 1996). Direct3D initially implemented an " immediate mode " 3D API and layered upon it

5115-456: The API that will be removed or not supported in the future. Client code may contain innovative or opportunistic usages that were not intended by the API designers. In other words, for a library with a significant user base, when an element becomes part of the public API, it may be used in diverse ways. On February 19, 2020, Akamai published their annual “State of the Internet” report, showcasing

5208-489: The API will increase. This may increase their use of the API. The term API initially described an interface only for end-user-facing programs, known as application programs . This origin is still reflected in the name "application programming interface." Today, the term is broader, including also utility software and even hardware interfaces . The idea of the API is much older than the term itself. British computer scientists Maurice Wilkes and David Wheeler worked on

5301-403: The API, in exchange for the time-to-market advantage to the licensing vendor. S3 texture compression support was one such feature, renamed as DXTC for purposes of inclusion in the API. Another was TriTech's proprietary bump mapping technique. Microsoft included these features in DirectX, then added them to the requirements needed for drivers to get a Windows logo to encourage broad adoption of

5394-496: The POSIX APIs. Microsoft has shown a strong commitment to a backward-compatible API, particularly within its Windows API (Win32) library, so older applications may run on newer versions of Windows using an executable-specific setting called "Compatibility Mode". An API differs from an application binary interface (ABI) in that an API is source code based while an ABI is binary based. For instance, POSIX provides APIs while

5487-496: The PSO is immutable. Root signatures introduce configurations to link command lists to resources required by shaders. They define the layout of resources that shaders will use and specifies what resources will be bound to the pipeline. A graphics command list has both a graphics and compute root signature, while a compute command list will have only a compute root signature. These root signatures are completely independent of each other. While

5580-604: The Retained Mode. The Redmond team added the DrawPrimitive API that eliminated the need for applications to construct execute buffers, making Direct3D more closely resemble other immediate mode rendering APIs such as Glide and OpenGL . The first beta of DrawPrimitive shipped in February 1997, and the final version shipped with DirectX 5.0 in August 1997. Besides introducing an easier-to-use immediate mode API, DirectX 5.0 added

5673-594: The SetRenderTarget method that enabled Direct3D devices to write their graphical output to a variety of DirectDraw surfaces. DirectX 6.0 (released in August, 1998) introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture and stencil buffers ) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87 , SSE and 3DNow! and optional texture management to simplify programming. Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in

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5766-550: The addition of two new texture compression algorithms for more efficient packing of high quality and HDR/alpha textures and an increased texture cache . First seen in the Release Candidate version, Windows 7 integrates the first released Direct3D 11 support. The Platform Update for Windows Vista includes full-featured Direct3D 11 runtime and DXGI 1.1 update, as well as other related components from Windows 7 like WARP , Direct2D , DirectWrite , and WIC . Direct3D 11.1

5859-515: The advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering , W-buffering, stencil buffering , spatial anti-aliasing , alpha blending , color blending, mipmapping , texture blending, clipping , culling , atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping , programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites , providing

5952-401: The application programming interface separately from other interfaces, such as the query interface. Database professionals in the 1970s observed these different interfaces could be combined; a sufficiently rich application interface could support the other interfaces as well. This observation led to APIs that supported all types of programming, not just application programming. By 1990, the API

6045-738: The beginning, the immediate mode also supported Talisman 's tiled rendering with the BeginScene/EndScene methods of the IDirect3DDevice interface. No substantive changes were planned to Direct3D for DirectX 4.0 , which was scheduled to ship in late 1996 and then canceled. In December 1996, a team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate Mode, while the London-based RenderMorphics team continued work on

6138-413: The bricks; they may be joined together via their APIs, composing a new software product. The process of joining is called integration . As an example, consider a weather sensor that offers an API. When a certain message is transmitted to the sensor, it will detect the current weather conditions and reply with a weather report. The message that activates the sensor is an API call , and the weather report

6231-400: The common-shader core, integer and bitwise shader operations, organization of pipeline state into 5 immutable state objects, organization of shader constants into constant buffers, increased number of render targets, textures, and samplers, no shader length limit, new resource types and resource formats, layered runtime/API layers, option to perform per-primitive material swapping and setup using

6324-404: The features in other vendors' hardware. A minor update to DirectX 6.0 came in the February, 1999 DirectX 6.1 update. Besides adding DirectMusic support for the first time, this release improved support for Intel Pentium III 3D extensions. A confidential memo sent in 1997 shows Microsoft planning to announce full support for Talisman in DirectX 6.0, but the API ended up being canceled (See

6417-515: The first Direct3D 10-compatible games still provide Direct3D 9 render paths. Examples of such titles are games originally written for Direct3D 9 and ported to Direct3D 10 after their release, such as Company of Heroes , or games originally developed for Direct3D 9 with a Direct3D 10 path retrofitted later during their development, such as Hellgate: London or Crysis . The DirectX 10 SDK became available in February 2007. Direct3D 10.0 level hardware must support

6510-516: The following features: Multisampling has been enhanced to generalize coverage based transparency and make multisampling work more effectively with multi-pass rendering, better culling behavior – Zero-area faces are automatically culled; this affects wireframe rendering only, independent blend modes per render target, new sample-frequency pixel shader execution with primitive rasterization, increased pipeline stage bandwidth, both color and depth/stencil MSAA surfaces can now be used with CopyResource as either

6603-436: The following features: the ability to process entire primitives in the new geometry-shader stage, the ability to output pipeline-generated vertex data to memory using the stream-output stage, multisampled alpha-to-coverage support, readback of a depth/stencil surface or a multisampled resource once it is no longer bound as a render target, full HLSL integration – all Direct3D 10 shaders are written in HLSL and implemented with

6696-420: The form of different libraries that share the same programming interface. The separation of the API from its implementation can allow programs written in one language to use a library written in another. For example, because Scala and Java compile to compatible bytecode , Scala developers can take advantage of any Java API. API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved. An API for

6789-476: The growing trend of cybercriminals targeting public API platforms at financial services worldwide. From December 2017 through November 2019, Akamai witnessed 85.42 billion credential violation attacks. About 20%, or 16.55 billion, were against hostnames defined as API endpoints. Of these, 473.5 million have targeted financial services sector organizations. API documentation describes what services an API offers and how to use those services, aiming to cover everything

6882-646: The hardware page tables present in many current GPUs. WARP was updated to fully support the new features. There is no feature level 11_2 however; the new features are dispersed across existing feature levels. Those that are hardware-dependent can be checked individually via CheckFeatureSupport . Some of the "new" features in Direct3D 11.2 actually expose some old hardware features in a more granular way; for example D3D11_FEATURE_D3D9_SIMPLE_INSTANCING_SUPPORT exposes partial support for instancing on feature level 9_1 and 9_2 hardware, otherwise fully supported from feature level 9_3 onward. Direct3D 11.X Direct3D 11.X

6975-528: The hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were considered extremely awkward to program at the time, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D) Rather than adopt OpenGL as a gaming API, Microsoft chose to continue improving Direct3D, not only to be competitive with OpenGL, but to compete more effectively with other proprietary APIs such as 3dfx 's Glide . From

7068-490: The implementation details of the modules so that users of modules need not understand the complexities inside the modules. Thus, the design of an API attempts to provide only the tools a user would expect. The design of programming interfaces represents an important part of software architecture , the organization of a complex piece of software. APIs are one of the more common ways technology companies integrate. Those that provide and use APIs are considered as being members of

7161-560: The introduction of Intel HD Graphics 2000 (GMA HD). Direct3D 11 was released as part of Windows 7. It was presented at Gamefest 2008 on July 22, 2008 and demonstrated at the Nvision 08 technical conference on August 26, 2008. The Direct3D 11 Technical Preview has been included in November 2008 release of DirectX SDK. AMD previewed working DirectX11 hardware at Computex on June 3, 2009, running some DirectX 11 SDK samples. The Direct3D 11 runtime

7254-405: The new concise pipeline states mean that the process has been simplified. DirectX 11 offered flexibility in how its states could be altered, to the detriment of performance. Simplifying the process and unifying the pipelines (e.g. pixel shader states) lead to a more streamlined process, significantly reducing the overheads and allowing the graphics card to draw more calls for each frame. Once created,

7347-475: The pinnacle of fixed-function multitexture pipeline features: although powerful, it was so complicated to program that a new programming model was needed to expose the shading capabilities of graphics hardware. Direct3D 7.0 also introduced DXVA features. DirectX 8.0 (released in November, 2000) introduced programmability in the form of vertex and pixel shaders , enabling developers to write code without worrying about superfluous hardware state. The complexity of

7440-595: The programmer from dealing with idiosyncrasies of the graphics display device, and to provide hardware independence if the computer or the display were replaced. The term was introduced to the field of databases by C. J. Date in a 1974 paper called The Relational and Network Approaches: Comparison of the Application Programming Interface . An API became a part of the ANSI/SPARC framework for database management systems . This framework treated

7533-621: The rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D which does support 3D hardware acceleration. DirectDraw was introduced for Windows Mobile in Windows Mobile 5.0, replacing the graphics component of GAPI , which was then deprecated. With the release of DirectX version 8.0, DirectDraw was merged into a new package called DirectX Graphics , which extended Direct3D with a few DirectDraw API additions. DirectDraw can still be used by programmers, but they must use older DirectX interfaces (DirectX 7 and below). In June 2010, DirectDraw

7626-442: The result to be used locally as a return value. A modification of the proxy object will also result in a corresponding modification of the remote object. Web APIs are the defined interfaces through which interactions happen between an enterprise and applications that use its assets, which also is a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to specify the functional provider and expose the service path or URL for its API users. An API approach

7719-443: The retained mode API which had been a part of Direct3D since the beginning, making Windows Vista incompatible with 3D games that had used the retained mode API as their rendering engine . Unlike prior versions of the API, Direct3D 10 no longer uses "capability bits" (or "caps") to indicate which features are supported on a given graphics device. Instead, it defines a minimum standard of hardware capabilities which must be supported for

7812-410: The root signature lays out the types of data for shaders to use, it does not define or map the actual memory or data. Application programming interface In contrast to a user interface , which connects a computer to a person, an application programming interface connects computers or pieces of software to each other. It is not intended to be used directly by a person (the end user ) other than

7905-582: The shader language, such as larger constant buffers and optional double-precision instructions, as well as improved blending modes and mandatory support for 16-bit color formats to improve the performance of entry-level GPUs such as Intel HD Graphics . WARP has been updated to support feature level 11_1. The Platform Update for Windows 7 includes a limited set of features from Direct3D 11.1, though components that depend on WDDM 1.2 – such as feature level 11_1 and its related APIs, or quad buffering for stereoscopic rendering – are not present. Direct3D 11.2

7998-408: The shader programs depended on the complexity of the task, and the display driver compiled those shaders to instructions that could be understood by the hardware. Direct3D 8.0 and its programmable shading capabilities were the first major departure from an OpenGL-style fixed-function architecture, where drawing is controlled by a complicated state machine. Direct3D 8.0 also eliminated DirectDraw as

8091-448: The similar OpenJDK project. Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle v. Google case that APIs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. and that a victory for Oracle would have widely expanded copyright protection to a "functional set of symbols" and allowed the copyrighting of simple software commands: To accept Oracle's claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out

8184-638: The use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties. Direct3D contains many commands for 3D computer graphics rendering; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics . Microsoft strives to continually update Direct3D to support the latest technology available on 3D graphics cards. Direct3D offers full vertex software emulation but no pixel software emulation for features not available in hardware. For example, if software programmed using Direct3D requires pixel shaders and

8277-534: The use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) and is used for Windows Aero . Direct3D 9Ex, in conjunction with DirectX 9 class WDDM drivers allows graphics memory to be virtualized and paged out to system memory, allows graphics operations to be interrupted and scheduled and allow DirectX surfaces to be shared across processes. Direct3D 9Ex was previously known as version 1.0 of Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF). Direct3D 9Ex improvements - Win32 apps Windows Vista includes

8370-455: Was defined simply as "a set of services available to a programmer for performing certain tasks" by technologist Carl Malamud . The idea of the API was expanded again with the dawn of remote procedure calls and web APIs . As computer networks became common in the 1970s and 80s, programmers wanted to call libraries located not only on their local computers, but on computers located elsewhere. These remote procedure calls were well supported by

8463-1016: Was dropped from newer hardware. Microsoft has also hinted at other features such as order independent transparency , which was never exposed by the Direct3D API but supported almost transparently by early Direct3D hardware such as Videologic's PowerVR line of chips. Direct3D 11.0 features include: Support for Shader Model 5.0, Dynamic shader linking, addressable resources, additional resource types, subroutines, geometry instancing, coverage as pixel shader input, programmable interpolation of inputs, new texture compression formats (1 new LDR format and 1 new HDR format), texture clamps to limit WDDM preload, require 8-bits of subtexel and sub-mip precision on texture filtering, 16K texture limits, Gather4(support for multi-component textures, support for programmable offsets), DrawIndirect, conservative oDepth, Depth Bias, addressable stream output, per-resource mipmap clamping, floating-point viewports, shader conversion instructions, improved multithreading. Other notable features are

8556-526: Was removed from the DirectX SDK package, but in 2012, the DirectX SDK was merged into the Windows Platform SDK, and DirectDraw was included once again. There has been a deterioration of Windows compatibility with old games that rely upon DirectDraw, with Command & Conquer , Warcraft 2 , and Theme Hospital among those affected. In newer Windows versions, some games will refuse to run under

8649-407: Was shipped with Windows 8.1 . New hardware features require DXGI 1.3 with WDDM 1.3 drivers and include runtime shader modification and linking, Function linking graph(FLG), inbox HLSL compiler, option to annotate graphics commands. Feature levels 11_0 and 11_1 introduce optional support for tiled resources with shader level of detail clamp (Tier2). The latter feature effectively provides control over

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