Any one all over the earth ever played any game on P.C or on gaming console like Xbox or ever got into any kind of media file on a Microsoft platform is surely aware of DirectX.Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interface (APIs) for handling tasks related multimedia. This includes mainly game programming and video on Microsoft platforms. Microsoft start naming its APIs all starting with Direct, for example-Direct3D, DirectDRaw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so on. Direct X then was the generic term for all of the Microsoft APIs and became the name of the collection. Microsoft also released a multiplatform game development APIs such as Xinput, which are designed to supplement or replace individual DirectX components, after the release of Xbox. The DirectX software development kit or SDK consist of runtime libraries in redistributable binary form, along with accompanying documentation and headers for use in coding. But in the start runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. Windows 95 was originally not launched with DirectX, but it was included with Windows 95 OEM service release 2. Windows 98 and NT 4.0 both was launched DirectX, and after that DirectX was part of every Window release after that. The SDK available as a free download. While the runtime are proprietary, closed source software.

Success of Microsoft in software is very much dedicated to DOS. DOS allowed direct access video cards and mouse, sound devices, and all other parts of the system.

Microsoft needed a way that could let programmers what they wanted, and they wanted it quickly; the operating system was only month away from being launched. Eiser, St John, and Engstorm worked together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX. The first version of DirectX was released in September 1995 as the Windows Games SDK. It was Win32 replacement for the DCI and WinG APIs for Windows 3.1.

DirectX allows all versions of Microsoft Windows to incorporate high quality multimedia.

In console specific version, DirectX was used as a basic for Microsoft Xbox and Xbox 360 console API was developed jointly between Microsoft and Nvidia, who developed the custom hardware used in the original Xbox. The Xbox was code named DirectXbox, but this was shortened for it’s commercial name. In 2002 Microsoft released DirectX 9 with support for the use of much longer shader programs than before with pixel and vertex shader version 2.0. Since then Microsoft is updating DirectX suite. Although there are alternatives of the DirectX family of APIs, but with a combination of libraries –SDL, Allergo, OpenMAX, OpenML, FMOD, etc.—its hard to catch DirectX.

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