What is Direct3D?

Direct3D

     Microsoft's Direct3D is part of the DirectX standard that takes away one of the great burdens of 3D software development: addressing display hardware efficiently. Direct3D is a type of API called a hardware abstraction layer that stands between the application and the hardware that will display it. The developers of the software (usually a game) write instructions to Direct3D, which then translates them to the graphics card. To take advantage of the API, therefore, both the application and the graphics card must support Direct3D.
     Direct3D is a subset of DirectX, Microsoft's proprietary (Windows only) API for creating multimedia and gaming applications. The entire DirectX suite allows a programmer to integrate many technologies and features into an application, including: 2D and 3D graphics, sound and music, user input from keyboard, mouse, and joysticks, and network communication for multiplayer games. Direct3D is the subset of DirectX that controls the drawing of 3D graphics.
     For those of you have done graphics programming before, you are probably more than well aware of the difficulty involved in putting simple renderings on the screen. (If you think it's easy, you're either living in a fantasy land or you haven't read any of Jim Blinn's books). The overhead involved in developing a graphics pipeline is overwhelming for a single or small group of developers. For this reason, graphics programmers use "abstraction layers" to seperate themselves from the pain of converting what their program thinks should go on the screen to what actually goes out to the video card.
     Direct3D is an abstraction layer. When you use Direct3D to draw your 3D graphics, you don't have to worry about what type of video card it's going to be drawn on, you don't have to worry about any limitations of the video card; Direct3D seperates you from the hardware. You're almost guaranteed that if you send your bits to the Direct3D driver on the system that they will be shown properly to the user.

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