DirectX Raytracing (DXR) was added to Windows 10 in 2018 and introduced real-time ray tracing.

It also worked nicely with multi-GPU systems including AMD CrossFireX or Nvidia SLI setups. The most important update here was allowing for more efficient resource utilisation, the goal of which was to achieve 'console-level efficiency on phone, tablet and PC'. DirectX 12 launched with Windows 10 in 2015.A version of it was also used on the Xbox One. DirectX 11 launched in 2008 and bought improved support for multi-threading so developers could make the most of multi-core CPUs.DirectX 10 was a major upgrade to DirectX that was only available in the ill-fated Windows Vista.It introduced Shader Model 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0. DirectX 9 was released in 2002 and worked with Windows 98 and XP.Since then DirectX has been through several iterations with upgrades to improve how it worked: It was Valve's President Gabe Newell (who then worked for Microsoft) who led the project to port Doom into DirectX and that's how the future of PC gaming began. Before that Doom ran via MS-DOS and had to be ported to work with Windows. Doom was the first game published with DirectX. After all, every gaming PC is different and certainly not as universal internally as something like the Xbox Series X console.ĭirectX quickly became an essential part of gaming on Windows. It was developed to make it easier for games to access these essential components while also maintaining the security and integrity of your machine.ĭirectX is useful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it acts as a bridge in this way to gaming computers all over the world which naturally have a variety of different components in them. Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow games to 'talk' to various components in your gaming machine, including your graphics card, RAM and more.

See more PC Gaming coverage in association with Nvidia GeForce RTX.

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