The Take on Tech

For those of you who aren’t quite willing to jump on the Windows 7 bandwagon and instead are sticking with Vista,  Microsoft has rolled out an update for Vista, bringing its graphics capabilities up from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11, the same level as Windows 7.

For those of you who are curious what DirectX is, it’s an API, an Application Programming Interface. The basic function of an API is to provide a set of standards allowing different programs to communicate with each other on a computer. It is akin to the use of language between two people (stand-ins for programs), Bob and Joe, so that they can get what they want. If Bob wants something (say he’s Joe’s boss and he wants a report from Joe about something), he tells Joe that he wants a report. APIs facilitate the “tell” part. Bob doesn’t need to know anything about how Joe makes a report. Joe simply gives Bob a report. DirectX is an umbrella of APIs which covers everything from 3D graphics to sound. The reason that DirectX gets new version (and why any API gets updated) is to incorporate new items, or, sticking to our Bob and Joe analogy, new vocabulary. Let’s say that suddenly Joe acquires the ability to make PowerPoint Presentations. Bob with his current “API” can only request a report; he simply doesn’t know how to say anything else, so even if Joe can make presentation slides, Bob can’t get any. He has to update his vocabulary with “presentation slides” in order to take advantage of Joe’s new abilities. Likewise, if new abilities appear on the programing scene, new APIs or updates to old APIs must be created to allow other programs to take advantage of these abilities.

Not many games been released using the DirectX 11 API (Application Programming Interface), though to be fair when DirectX 10 came out for Vista the situation was similar. Likewise, just as with the DirectX 10 launch, hardware support for DirectX 11 is also currently limited (AMD/ATI’s 5xxx series are the only graphics card on the market right now that support DirectX 11 and currently there are only two flavors: 58xx and 57xx). However, it is still nice for Vista owners to know that their OS is “future-proofed” at the moment against new games should they decide not to install Windows 7.

The download link for this update can be found here. It should also appear in Windows Update on Vista machines. Vista Service Pack 2 is a prerequisite for this update.