And, they repeated that same guillotine exercise with DX12. When Windows Vista came along Microsoft chose to use DirectX as a carrot to encourage users to upgrade, choosing to make DX10 unavailable to Windows XP.

Windows 98 was the first OS to ship with DirectX bolted in and it’s been a critical part of the software infrastructure of Windows ever since. The Razer Blade is a light and powerful place to start with DirectX 12įor those of us old enough to remember the very early, and exciting days of 3D Hardware acceleration, DirectX came along late to the party.Įarly versions didn’t support 3D hardware at all, and initially, it was more a means to connect control peripherals than a blueprint for constructing 3D environments.Īt this time game developers had a stark choice between using a proprietary API, like Glide exclusively on the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics cards, or OpenGL if they wanted to support the wider range of accelerated video hardware.Įventually, Microsoft realised the potential and through successive enhancements to the DirectX API began to provide an alternative to OpenGL that would work on any 3D accelerated video card with a compliant driver.ĭirectX became the banner name for a whole slew of Direct APIs, with individual functionality proportioned out initially into Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay and DirectSound.Īs Direct X evolved the API was also adapted for Microsoft’s Xbox console so that some level of cross-platform development could be achieved.

Windows 8.1 dx12