Of course this emulation is not perfect and the final result will be that the game won’t have the same image quality as if it were run in a genuinely DirectX 9 hardware. If you, for instance, have a DirectX 9 game in your PC and a video card whose graphic chip is DirectX 8, when the game requests a command that DirectX knows your video card won’t understand, it will make an emulation to execute the command. You must have DirectX version 9.0 or superior installed in your machine to run this game, and preferentially hardware of the same generation or superior, too. When we say that a game is DirectX 9, for instance, it means this game uses DirectX version 9.0 instructions. There are several versions of the DirectX. Instead of writing a game for a specific hardware, it is written using DirectX (or OpenGL) commands that will convert the commands sent by the game into instructions that the hardware (such as the video card and the sound card) understands. The advantage of this technique is that the programmer doesn’t need to know the specifics of the hardware the user has the programming interface converts what the programmer wants into a command that is compatible with the hardware the user has.ĭirectX and OpenGL are currently the most popular programming interfaces for video cards. The program can also be written for a programming interface that serves the same purpose. So, instead a programmer writing programs to a specific hardware, s/he writes programs for the operating system, in which a driver will translate what the program wants and will access the hardware according to what was requested. This stuffing makes the “translation” of the communication between the software and the hardware. What go between these slices are the drivers and the programming interfaces (API). The hardware is one of the bread slices and the software is the other. Imagine that your computer is a sandwich. There are several DirectX versions available and in this short tutorial we will explain what the main differences between them are.

DirectX is a programming interface that allows programs (like games) to talk with your PC hardware (like your video card).

Directx 8.1 windows xp