Microsoft DirectX 8.0 (Visual Basic)

The Power of DirectX Graphics

Microsoft® Direct3D® is designed to enable world-class game and interactive three-dimensional (3-D) graphics on a computer running Microsoft Windows®. It is a drawing interface that provides device-dependent access to 3-D video-display hardware in a device-independent manner.

Direct3D is a low-level 3-D API that is ideal for developers who need to port games and other high-performance multimedia applications to the Windows operating system. Direct3D provides a device-independent way for applications to communicate with accelerator hardware at a low level.

Direct3D is a software interface that provides direct access to display devices while maintaining compatibility with the Windows graphics device interface (GDI), providing a device-independent way for games and Windows subsystem software, such as three-dimensional (3-D) graphics packages, to gain access to the features of specific display devices.

Direct3D provides excellent game graphics on computers running Windows 95 or later, or Windows 2000.

Some of the advanced features of Direct3D are:

These features combine to enable you to write applications that easily outperform standard Windows GDI-based applications and even MS-DOS applications.

The world management of Direct3D is based on vertices, polygons, and commands that control them. It enables immediate access to the transformation, lighting, and rasterization 3-D graphics pipeline. If hardware isn't present to accelerate rendering, Direct3D offers robust software emulation.

Direct3D provides simple and straightforward methods to set up and render a 3-D scene. The key set of rendering methods is referred to as DrawPrimitive methods. They enable applications to render one or more objects in a scene with a single method call. For more information about these methods, see Rendering Primitives.

Direct3D enables a low-overhead connection to 3-D hardware. This comes at a price, however. You must provide explicit calls for transformations and lighting, you must provide all the necessary matrices, and you must determine what kind of hardware is present and its capabilities.