directx question

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you all tired off my threads i know , and if you do not wish for reply , don't do...

go and take care of your job ok no pressure on you!


i do not know that whether i asked but something makes me crazy about directx !

for example there existed a geforce fx 5200 graphics card and it supported directx 9 as a hardware

in these days i have a geforce 6800 xt card and it supports directx 9c . The thing i want to learn is that why do we use directx 9c drivers (considering 6800 card) if it has already offered
directx 9c ?



shortly , my card includes directx 9c feature so that why do i have to download or install its drivers (it comes with card you know) ?

 

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When you download new drivers for your graphics card, you are not downloading directX you are downloading code that can make the card respond faster or you are downloading commands for the card that improve its performance under heavy graphics processing.

 

I think you misunderstand. When a driver says it supports directx n, it is saying that the card and its driver as configured so that it understands the instructions sent by the directx system up to and including the specified version number (ie, a directx 9 capable card can understand instructions sent by any version up to and including version 9).

It DOESNT mean that the card does directX out of the box. No graphics card does that, DirectX is a software application, not something in the card.

On a side note, please stop with the bold, multicolouring and changing fonts. Its not neccessary to ask your questions, and hurts my poor eyes.

 

you mean if an operating system is needed to run hardware , directx is needed to run gaming
or graphics applications ?

 

Sort of, I suppose.

Windows provides an API for interacting with the computer hardware. This exposes a set of instructions to any applications that want to (for instance) save files onto the hard-drive. Programmers dont need to worry about how the actual saving is done, they just call the method on the API, and windows (or linux, etc) does the action.

However, the OS API for interacting with the graphics card isnt overly complex. Instead, DirectX has been produced. Its another API for interacting with the Graphics hardware. It basically encodes instuctions for the Graphics card in a specific manner. The Graphics card's hardware (and drivers) are configured so that they know what to do with those instructions. However, every version of DirectX modifies or adds to that set of instructions. So a card configured to run DirectX7 cant understand the instructions send from DirectX9.

More info on DirectX can be found Here

 

beat me to it.

 

Okay, DirectX is a runtime environment specifically developed to make Windows suitable for multimedia applications - like in particular, multimedia applications (games, movie playback, and the devices associated with them to be used like joypads. It serves as a layer that provides abstraction, meaning that any device connected to your system that supports DirectX will be seen by Windows itself as a generic device because calls are made through the DirectX API in communication between Windows and the device when runnig such applications. How does this all relate to your graphics card?

The Driver: This is a small piece of software that acts as a layer beween Windows and your graphics card. See it as a language interpreter that accepts generic requests from windows and converts these requests into the specific graphics card instruction set (like 'write such-and-such vertices to the frame buffer and apply various transformation and render'). If you didn't have the driver Windows itself can only perform basic functions with your card.

DirectX Runtime Environment: When games and other multipmedia applications are created, development teams have several choices available to them:

1. Write their own low-level rendering routines litterally in say assembly and C/C++. (Not advised!)
2. Use an Application Programming Interface (API) like DirectX that already has the above implemented. Now when applications are created using an API, Windows and other systems need to be told how to handle the calls from the application specific to the API at hand. This is where runtime environments come in. Windows needs to be told how to interpret these DirectX calls to that various images can be drawn on-screen.

So in summary:

Driver: This is responsible for letting your operating system talk to the hardware for which it has been developed.

DirectX Runtime Environment: This allows Windows to communicate with the software written using the DirectX API.

This is a very, very basic overview to get the message across. Hope this helps!

 

oh dude so many thanks for you

 

sorry

graphics card doesn't contain direct x , just supports.

if you placed the graphics card and it says "new hardware has been found" , when
you see graphics features , it doesn't show this "graphics card features applied to windows"

for this , driver is used ? (mean to activate running hardware)

and these will be enough to play the game , according to stuff i told , directx is not needed just driver?

 

actually windows has a basic driver and a version of directx installed, a newer version is installed with SP2 for windows XP. To play new games you'll need directx 9.0c and the latest drivers or the games graphics will look poor.

grim

 

Correct - most modern games depend on both DirectX (or sometimes OpenGL - which is a competing system) and the graphic card drivers.

Harry.

 

Mostly right.
Kobem, go to the start button and then use the run command and type in dxdiag you will open a diagnostic tool for directx. Here you will see the version of directx that you currently have.
When you install the graphics card windows can use it but just with basic features. To run it and get the benefit of the full features you also need to install the drivers for the card.

 

Ok Direct X exists solely because the original Windows Graphics API sucked soooo badly at anythiing other than basic graphics. A skunk works team in microsoft managed to create something and shoe horn it into the OS, this is what we now call Direct X. Its a hardware abstraction layer for multimedia support and mostly high performance graphics, in design its fairly close to OpenGL and a whole family of other graphics APIs that have evolved from workstations.

Its an abstraction layer for graphics services, alot of these services can be provided by software emulation, so you could use Direct X without a Direct X compliant graphics card in theory, in reality the performance would be horrible and the more advanced features are not supported in software. If your card is a low end card these features may not be supported in hardware either, thats what makes some cards better or more compliant than others, they support more of the API's featureset. When the Game and Driver load a bunch of stuff happens, the driver enumerates the hardware to configure itself turning features on and off as necessary as one driver may support many cards. The Game performs a similar activity based on the responses from the driver and OS it configures itself with the reccomended settings.

This can involve little work in some cases as the Direct X abstraction deals with the changing of frame rate resolution etc. In other cases it might mean alot of work for the game developers as different models and textures may be loaded.

The driver, versioning and performance issues happen all the time, I've said this before on these boards. Your card may have new features that the current direct X API does not make the most use of, so later you upgrade your Direct X runtime. Its the same with your processor and the OS, new instructions are added, etc and the OS needs to be updated to catch up. Look at 64 bit computing...

 

shall we say this ?


graphics driver is used for activating the graphics card contents and for use via windows xp
and for example

as you said windows xp comes with directx 9 but
my card supports directx 9c features

something i didn't figure out is when we installed graphics driver update we all earn
that card provide.

and cause of this direct x is not needed?