The ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090, a DirectX 12 Ultimate-compliant graphics card from NVIDIAĪs the tools offered by DirectX evolve, it’s important for PC gamers and PC builders to be aware of the DirectX capabilities, divided between major versions and finer-grained feature levels, that their PCs’ graphics cards support. Because of this relationship, companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel work closely with Microsoft on the development of future versions of the DirectX API and the capabilities it includes. It defines the things that software can ask a GPU to do and what requests the chip itself can fulfill. That’s because an API is a bit like a contract between the game software, the Windows graphics driver, and ultimately the hardware chip that accelerates the rendering of 3D graphics. It’s a set of tools that are constantly evolving and expanding as game developers explore new ways to push the envelope with ever-larger worlds and ever-more-realistic graphics.Īn API like DirectX isn’t just of interest to software developers-it also matters to the engineers who build graphics processing units, or GPUs. DirectX is how the vast majority of game developers make their titles run on the Windows platform.

You see and hear its output almost every time you play your favorite games. If you’re a PC gamer, you’re already familiar with Microsoft’s DirectX application programming interface (API), even if you don’t know it by name.

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