Direct3d Download Windows 7 64 Bit

[Milan Skidmore]

Direct3Dis 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 it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering,[1] W-buffering,[2] stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, texture blending,[3][4] clipping, culling, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, programmable HLSL shaders[5] and effects.[6] 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 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Direct3D contains many commands for 3D computer graphics rendering; however, since version 8, Direct3D has superseded the DirectDraw framework and also taken responsibility for the rendering of 2D graphics.[7] Microsoft strives to continually update Direct3D to support the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 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 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.[8]

As part of DirectX, Direct3D 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.

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.[15]Two versions of this API were released.[16] Microsoft bought RenderMorphics in February 1995, bringing its staff on board to implement a 3D graphics engine for Windows 95.[17] 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 a "retained mode" 3D API.[18] Both types of API were already offered with the second release of Reality Lab before Direct3D was released.[16] 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 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 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.[19] (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.

In December 1996, a team in Redmond took over development of the Direct3D Immediate Mode, while the London-based RenderMorphics team continued work on 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,[21] and the final version shipped with DirectX 5.0 in August 1997.[22]

Besides introducing an easier-to-use immediate mode API, DirectX 5.0 added the SetRenderTarget method that enabled Direct3D devices to write their graphical output to a variety of DirectDraw surfaces.[23]

DirectX 6.0 (released in August, 1998) introduced numerous features to cover contemporary hardware (such as multitexture[24] and stencil buffers) as well as optimized geometry pipelines for x87, SSE and 3DNow! and optional texture management to simplify programming.[25] Direct3D 6.0 also included support for features that had been licensed by Microsoft from specific hardware vendors for inclusion in 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 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.[26]

DirectX 7.0 (released in September, 1999) introduced the .dds texture format[28] and support for transform and lighting hardware acceleration[29] (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 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.[30] The complexity of 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 a separate API.[31][32] 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[33] (released in December, 2002) added a new version of the High Level Shader Language[34][35] support for floating-point texture formats, Multiple Render Targets (MRT),[36] Multiple-Element Textures,[37] texture lookups in the vertex shader and stencil buffer techniques.[38]

Direct3D 9Ex[39] (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 the use of the advantages offered by Windows Vista's Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) and is used for Windows Aero.[40] 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.[41] Direct3D 9Ex was previously known as version 1.0 of Windows Graphics Foundation (WGF).

Windows Vista includes 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[42] features an updated shader model 4.0 and optional interruptibility for shader programs.[41] 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, 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.

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