Audience
People looking for a low-level API to draw triangles, lines or points per frame or to start highly parallel operations on the GPU
About Direct3D
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. 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. You can use Microsoft Direct3D 11 graphics to create 3-D graphics for games and scientific and desktop applications. 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 is the high-level shader language for DirectX. Using HLSL, you can create C-like programmable shaders for the Direct3D pipeline. The DirectDraw surface file format (DDS) supports uncompressed and compressed (DXTn) textures, mipmaps, cube maps, and volume maps.