DirectDraw is part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to render graphics in applications where top performance is important. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen instead of embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the client's computer. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of $39. ... DirectX is a collection of APIs for easily handling tasks related to game programming on the Microsoft Windows operating system. ... An application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for service to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. ... Render may refer to: Rendering (computer graphics), generating the pixels of an image based on a high-level description of its components XRender, or Render, an X Window System rendering extension Industrial rendering, the processing of waste animal parts to separate the fat from the bone and protein Kitchen rendering... Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ... In computing, hardware acceleration is the use of of hardware to perform some function faster than is possible in software running on the normal CPU. Examples of hardware acceleration include blitting acceleration functionality in graphics processing units (GPUs) and instructions for complex operations in CPUs. ... An illustration of a modern personal computer. ...

DirectDraw is a 2D API. That is, it contains commands for 2D rendering and does not support 3D hardware acceleration. A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but the rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D which does support 3D hardware acceleration. 2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

As of DirectX version 8.0, DirectDraw was no longer updated and available directly in DirectX. Some of DirectDraw's functionality was rolled over into a new package called DirectX Graphics, which was 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).

External link

• Microsoft's MSDN DirectDraw documentation (archived content)