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Direct3D

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Direct3D is a low-level API for drawing primitives with the rendering pipeline, or for performing parallel operations with the compute shader. See the content below for more information.

For info about obtaining and installing Direct3D, see Direct3D 12 programming environment setup.

In this section

Topic Description
Getting started with Direct3D Discusses Direct3D in more depth, different application models, different versions, rendering, and compute.
Direct3D 12 graphics Direct3D 12 provides an API and platform that allows your application to take advantage of the graphics and computing capabilities of PCs equipped with one or more Direct3D 12-compatible GPUs.
Direct3D 11 Graphics You can use Microsoft Direct3D 11 graphics to create 3-D graphics for games and scientific and desktop applications.
DXGI DXGI handles enumerating graphics adapters, enumerating display modes, selecting buffer formats, sharing resources between processes, and presenting rendered frames to a window or monitor for display.
HLSL HLSL is the high-level shader language for DirectX. Using HLSL, you can create C-like programmable shaders for the Direct3D pipeline.
DDS The DirectDraw surface file format (DDS) supports uncompressed and compressed (DXTn) textures, mipmaps, cube maps, and volume maps. It's supported by DirectXTex, DirectXTK, legacy D3DX, and other DirectX tools.