Written by: Tom Curry
Participates: Patty Buchanan and Harris Phram
DirectX began life as part of the Windows95 revolution and Microsoft’s increasing effort to give the user every bit of functionality they could possibly want out of a computer under windows, and render DOS a thing of the past. DOS was the people’s operating system for many years, and though the public embraced windows with seemingly gracious acceptance, game developers had their own issues about porting their wares over to this remarkable GUI platform. Under windows, it was virtually impossible to achieve the level of audio and video quality that the game industry demanded. Under DOS, a game application could literally "take over" the entire machine and have all of the machines resources at its disposal. Writing applications under windows, however, forced the developer to access windows through the Win32 API, which was largely designed to support business applications, and the limited access to the audio and video components of the system made any type high quality game programming an impossibility. Even running games through a DOS shell under windows was agonizing, because the huge overhead of windows had a paralyzing effect on any DOS application (game or otherwise) that ran under it.
In spite of the developers having all of the system’s resources available under DOS, developing game applications under DOS was not with out it’s difficulties. The variety of audio and video hardware out there was so vast, that often times game developers had to generate thousands of lines of complex code just to keep up with it. Since Creative Labs so innocently became the first to implement a DAC chip along with their SoundBlaster card, becoming the new standard in digital PC sound, every company since has rushed their products to the market to be the all-important ‘first’. This practice is quite visibly obvious in the 3D hardware acceleration arena, and has created a quite prevalent lack of standards, for all hardware has their strengths and weakness. These strengths and weaknesses are too vast to where any competitors can produce a like product, and they can differ so much in architecture to where they will both exploit the strengths and weaknesses of the other. This has created quite a dilemma for video game developers who have been writing code "straight to the metal" to achieve the best performance out of their game applications with each hardware configuration, because each 3D chipset had a different set of instructions.
It was all of these issues that lead Microsoft to begin development on what was then called the Game SDK, and later called DirectX. The original concept of DirectX was to encapsulate the features and functionality of all past, present, and future hardware components within a set of drivers and an API, that would promote device independence and allow developers to create products independent of a machine’s hardware configuration. With that in mind, Microsoft put together a list of features and requirements that included:
The first versions of DirectX up to DirectX2, did their best to fully exploit what the current hardware configurations had to offer, taking full advantage of digital sound, emerging modem/network technology, and 2D windows acceleration of the video cards. This still left the playing field open, because there was a whole new wave of 3D accelerator video cards coming out that intended to right the wrong, and rectify the fact that a $2000 dollar computer employing the best consumer technology money could by, could still not out-perform a $300 dollar video game console. What is now Direct3D was purchased by Microsoft in early 1995 from RenderMorphics, a British company founded in 1993 by Servan Keondjian, Kate Seekings, and Doub Rabson. Formerly called Reality Lab, Direct3D was modified to integrate with the rest of the currently developed DirectX, and was released to the public in its full version as DirectX3.
Direct3D was definitely what launched DirectX into the public eye as a video game platform, with the promise to be a driving force in the video game industry. DirectX3 remained prevalent for a while, growing to include the new wave of MMX technology into its fast arsenal of multi-media weaponry. DirectX 5 was released, and shortly thereafter DirectX 6.0. Version numbers quickly rising and the feature list ever growing and changing to keep up with the new waves of video game hardware and technology, specifically including the advancements made DVD, hardware 3D rendering technology, and force-feedback technology implemented in some input devices.