DirectX - Behind Gaming

We all love to play games, we all have games, we all enjoy games, but what makes the games tick? What is the mechanism in which computer gaming works? How come a game works with many versions of an operating system?

The most important component that helps gaming in a Windows PC is DirectX. DirectX is a collective word used for Direct Music, Direct Play, Direct 3D etc. In short it is an Application Programming Interface ( API ),
which is related with multimedia operations. Thus, when a game is created, it has to only be interfaced with Direct X to work.

There are many versions in DirectX. The latest one is DirectX 11, which is present in Windows 7. The most popular one was DirectX 9, the one in Windows XP. DirectX 10 ( the version that was released with Windows Vista )  was not such a big success as it did not have any great advancement over its previous version. Both DirectX 9 and 10 almost look similar. But there are heavy expectations over DirectX 11 as it brings in much more realistic gaming. I will be discussing about directX 11 in the upcoming posts.