DirectDraw

DirectDraw is a deprecated API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the client's computer. DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory, hardware overlays, hardware blitters, and page flipping. Its video memory manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display adapters.

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.

DirectDraw was introduced for Windows Mobile in Windows Mobile 5.0, replacing the graphics component of GAPI, which was then deprecated.

DirectDraw has been deprecated since version 7. As of DirectX version 8.0, DirectDraw was merged into a new package called DirectX Graphics, which extended 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). As of the release of the June 2010 DirectX SDK package, the DirectDraw header file and library are no longer included.

Microsoft APIs and frameworks

Graphics	Desktop Window Manager Direct2D Direct3D D3D (extensions) GDI / GDI+ WPF Silverlight WinRT XAML Windows Color System Windows Image Acquisition Windows Imaging Component DirectX Graphics Infrastructure(DXGI) Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform

Audio	DirectMusic DirectSound DirectX plugin XACT Speech API XAudio2

Multimedia	DirectX Media Objects Video Acceleration Xinput DirectInput DirectShow Image Mastering API Managed DirectX Media Foundation XNA Windows Media Video for Windows

Web	MSHTML RSS Platform JScript VBScript BHO XDR SideBar Gadgets TypeScript

Data access	Data Access Components (MDAC) ADO ADO.NET ODBC OLE DB Extensible Storage Engine Entity Framework Sync Framework Jet Engine MSXML OPC

Networking	Winsock LSP Winsock Kernel Filtering Platform Network Driver Interface Specification Windows Rally BITS P2P API MSMQ MS MPI DirectPlay

Communication	Messaging API Telephony API WCF

Administration and management	Win32 console Windows Script Host WMI (extensions) PowerShell Task Scheduler Offline Files Shadow Copy Windows Installer Error Reporting Event Log Common Log File System

Component model	COM COM+ ActiveX Distributed Component Object Model .NET Framework

Libraries	Framework Class Library Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) Active Template Library (ATL) Windows Template Library (WTL)

Device drivers	Windows Driver Model Windows Driver Foundation KMDF UMDF WDDM NDIS UAA Broadcast Driver Architecture VxD

Security	Crypto API CAPICOM Windows CardSpace Data Protection API Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI)

.NET	ASP.NET ADO.NET Remoting Silverlight TPL WCF WCS WPF WF

Software factories	EFx Factory Enterprise Library Composite UI CCF CSF

IPC	MSRPC Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) Remoting WCF

Accessibility	Active Accessibility UI Automation

Text and multilingual support	DirectWrite Text Services Framework Text Object Model Input method editor Language Interface Pack Multilingual User Interface Uniscribe

DirectDraw

See also