How to know the version of DirectX installed in Windows

Anyone lucky enough to find the heyday of games for the DOS system, no doubt, remember the time when the first versions of DirectX appeared. Then, few of the users of the personal computer understood the significance of this innovation from Microsoft. In fact, at that time there was a kind of revolution in the methods of creating applications. Now, as before, many are wondering how to learn the version of DirectX. Before answering the question, let's recall the history of the appearance of the software components DirectX.

Developers of programs designed to work in the environment of DOS and the first versions of Windows (before Win 95), had to solve many related tasks, which are rarely remembered now. When creating applications of those days, programmers had to take into account the hardware features of the user's computer . It was rather difficult because one computer used a video adapter and a CGA class monitor, the other one had Hercules, the third one had EGA, and the lucky ones used VGA and even SVGA. The same applied to sound cards: it could be Covox, Adlib, Sound Blaster or a banal computer speaker (speaker). Create an application to work on strictly defined components - then doom it to oblivion, because in this case it was impossible to achieve popularity. To avoid this, it was necessary in the program code to provide the opportunity to work with most of the components. Each programmer used his decisions, and there was no question of any standards.

To ensure the growth of the popularity of its latest operating system Windows 95, Microsoft rightly judged that it is enough to offer programmers a convenient application development tool to start the process of creating new and new programs for the line of Win 9x. This solution was a set of software libraries DirectX. From this moment the question often began to sound: how to learn the version of DirectX? DirectX-based programs allow the developer not to worry about the hardware components of the computer, but to assign the solution of these issues to the operating system. New programming capabilities are also available. It is important to understand how to learn the version of DirectX. And not only installed in Windows, but also supported by hardware: to fully take advantage of the created with DirectX programs can only with the support of components. In other words, to see the graphics features of pixel shaders 1.3, you will need a video card of GeForce 4 class. Here, knowledge of how to know the version of DirectX is useful, because support for this version of shaders appeared in DirectX 8.0.

This is the history of appearance. Currently, all video card manufacturers are trying to release a product with support for the latest version of DirectX - this makes it competitive. However, sometimes the release is delayed, and as a result, the video card can not work with the latest version of DirectX. This happened with nVidia cards, which for a long time were deprived of support for DirectX 11 (as opposed to AMD). It is possible that the situation in the future can happen again.

How do I know the version of DirectX windows 7? This is available to every user. First of all, you should know that this system initially includes DirectX 10 components. Having installed the missing libraries, you can add support for the 11th version and previous releases. It is recommended to do this without fail. Older files do not replace new ones! DirectX can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. To learn the version of DirectX, you must press Win + R combination (where Win is the button with the Windows logo) or select "Run" in the Start menu. In the window, type dxdiag. The current version of DirectX will be listed on the diagnostics main screen. The most recently installed version is specified: the system can have 8-11, but only 11 are displayed. In modern systems, there is less and less need to determine the version of DirectX.