| DirectX compliance |
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| June 2011 | |
 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. A set of APIs developed by Microsoft that enables programmers to write programs that access hardware features of a computer without knowing exactly what hardware will be installed on the machine where the program eventually runs. DirectX achieves this by creating an intermediate layer that translates generic hardware commands into specific commands for particular pieces of hardware. In particular, DirectX lets multimedia applications take advantage of hardware acceleration features supported by graphics accelerators. There are alternatives to the DirectX family of APIs, with OpenGL having the most features. Examples of other APIs include SDL, Allegro, OpenMAX, OpenML, OpenAL, OpenCL, FMOD, etc. Many of these libraries are cross-platform or have open codebases. On November 10, 2000 Nvidia announced that it has fully implemented Microsoft's new DirectX Video Acceleration (DirectX VA) standard, an application programming interface (API) that optimizes the interactions between all of the company's graphics processors and today's broad range of video decoder software products. With full DirectX VA support, NVIDIA enables accelerated video decoding, including copy protected DVD movies, under Microsoft Windows 2000. Return to Advanced Features page |