DirectDraw
Encyclopedia
DirectDraw is part of Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's DirectX
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

 API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

. DirectDraw is used to render
Rendering (computer graphics)
Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...

 graphics
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....

 in applications where top performance is important. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration
Hardware acceleration
In computing, Hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the general-purpose CPU...

 if it is available on the client's computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

. DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory
Video memory
Video memory is a term generally used in computers to describe some form of writable memory, usually RAM, dedicated to the purpose of holding the information necessary for a graphics card to drive a display device...

, hardware overlay
Hardware overlay
In computing, hardware overlay, a type of video overlay, provides a method of rendering an image to a display screen with a dedicated memory buffer inside computer video hardware. The technique aims to improve the display of a fast-moving video image — such as a computer game, a DVD, or the signal...

s, hardware blitters
Bit blit
Bit BLIT is a computer graphics operation in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a raster operator....

, and page flipping
Double buffering
In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete version of the data, rather than a partially-updated version of the data being created by a "writer"...

. Its video memory
Video memory
Video memory is a term generally used in computers to describe some form of writable memory, usually RAM, dedicated to the purpose of holding the information necessary for a graphics card to drive a display device...

 manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting
Bit blit
Bit BLIT is a computer graphics operation in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a raster operator....

 and color decompression capabilities of different types of display adapters
Video card
A video card, Graphics Card, or Graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors...

.

DirectDraw is a 2D
2D computer graphics
2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them...

 API. That is, it contains commands for 2D rendering and does not support 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...

 hardware acceleration. A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but the rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D
Direct3D
Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface . Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems , and for other platforms through the open source software Wine. It is the base for the graphics API on the Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems...

 which does support 3D hardware acceleration.

As of DirectX version 8.0, DirectDraw was merged into a new package called DirectX Graphics, which is really just Direct3D with a few DirectDraw API additions. DirectDraw can still be used by programmers, but they must use older DirectX interfaces (DirectX 7 and below). As of the release of the June 2010 DirectX SDK package, the DirectDraw header file
Header file
Some programming languages use header files. These files allow programmers to separate certain elements of a program's source code into reusable files. Header files commonly contain forward declarations of classes, subroutines, variables, and other identifiers...

 and library are no longed included.

DirectDraw has been deprecated since version 7 but is still included with DirectX, although updates are no longer made. Developers have been instructed to use textured quads in Direct3D for 2D graphics. Managed DirectX
Managed DirectX
Managed DirectX is an API to DirectX programming under .NET developed by Microsoft. MDX can be used from any language under the .NET runtime .MDX can be used to develop multimedia and interactive applications Managed DirectX (MDX) is an API to DirectX programming under .NET developed by Microsoft....

 includes a managed wrapper for DirectDraw.

DirectDraw is now replaced by Direct2D
Direct2D
Direct2D is a 2D and vector graphics application programming interface designed by Microsoft and implemented in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and also Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and Platform Update Supplement for Windows Vista and for Windows Server 2008 & KB2505189 update...

.

See also

  • DirectDraw Surface
    DirectDraw Surface
    The DirectDraw Surface file format , from Microsoft, is a standard for storing data compressed with the lossy S3 Texture Compression algorithm, which can be decompressed in hardware by GPUs and consoles like the Playstation Portable, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360...

  • Direct3D
    Direct3D
    Direct3D is part of Microsoft's DirectX application programming interface . Direct3D is available for Microsoft Windows operating systems , and for other platforms through the open source software Wine. It is the base for the graphics API on the Xbox and Xbox 360 console systems...

  • DirectX
    DirectX
    Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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