DirectX... help me understand in abstract terms what goes on.

[Maximilian]

Lets just take an average PC game that uses directX. The game sends messages to directX (dosent it?) which then does... what? Is the cycle of communication game --> directX --> drivers --> hardware?

Also whats the terminology for this communication, i see the word "calls" being used sometimes.

Its just nice to know generally how stuff like this is all related/works after having used it for so long to game with

 

[Jaydip]

I mean do you want to debug through a sample directx application in action or do you want to know more about directx?

 

[Markbnj]

Yeah, more or less. Drivers encapsulate and provide an interface to the hardware. DirectX encapsulates and provides an interface to the drivers. Essentially a game pumps shaders, textures, and vertex buffers to DirectX as the game runs and the model is rendered, and DirectX does some preprocessing and pumps all that stuff to the drivers, which in turn send it to the hardware.

 

[BrightCandle]

At a high level the program does indeed call the directx api and then that is passed to the user space GPU driver. That driver queues up the frames and passes them through the OS to the kernel space GPU driver to put the actual frame into the GPU. The GPU will then handle how it gets out to the display.