Windows Graphics API Index

GDI (Graphics Device Interface)

The venerable Windows GDI API offers a stable and widely compatible way to draw 2D graphics. While often superseded by newer technologies for high-performance needs, it remains essential for many legacy applications and certain UI elements.

• GDI Functions
• Device Contexts (DC)
• Bitmaps and Metafiles

Direct2D

Direct2D is a hardware-accelerated 2D graphics API that provides high performance and advanced rendering features, including anti-aliasing, gradients, and effects. It's ideal for modern UI elements, vector graphics, and interactive visualizations.

• ID2D1Factory
• ID2D1RenderTarget
• ID2D1PathGeometry
• Effects and Bitmaps

Example of Direct2D usage:

// Basic Direct2D drawing
ID2D1RenderTarget* pRenderTarget = ...;
ID2D1SolidColorBrush* pBrush;
pRenderTarget->CreateSolidColorBrush(D2D1::ColorF(D2D1::ColorF::Blue), &pBrush);
D2D1_RECT_F rect = { 10.0f, 10.0f, 50.0f, 50.0f };
pRenderTarget->FillRectangle(&rect, pBrush);
pBrush->Release();
                        

DirectWrite

DirectWrite is a text rendering API that provides high-quality, hardware-accelerated text display. It supports advanced typography features, including international text, font fallback, and glyph shaping.

• IDWriteFactory
• IDWriteTextFormat
• IDWriteTextLayout
• Glyph Runs and Text Rendering

DirectUI

DirectUI is a framework for building rich user interfaces using hardware acceleration. It's used internally by many Windows components and offers a powerful way to create modern, responsive UIs.

• UI Elements and Controls
• Layout and Styling
• Event Handling

Windows Imaging Component (WIC)

WIC provides a standardized framework for image decoding, encoding, and manipulation. It supports a wide variety of image formats through codecs.

• IWICImagingFactory
• IWICBitmapDecoder
• IWICBitmapEncoder
• Pixel Formats and Transformations

Media Foundation

Media Foundation is a robust framework for processing multimedia streams, including audio, video, and images. It's used for playback, encoding, decoding, and real-time capture.

• Media Source and Sink
• Media Session and Topology
• Sample and Buffer Management

Direct3D (DirectX Graphics)

Direct3D is the cornerstone of 3D graphics on Windows. It provides a low-level, hardware-accelerated interface to the graphics card, enabling the creation of complex 3D scenes, games, and professional visualization tools.

• Direct3D 11
• Direct3D 12
• ID3D11Device / ID3D12Device
• Shaders (HLSL)
• Meshes, Textures, and Render Targets

Key concepts include:

• Graphics Pipeline
• Shader Model
• Resource Management

DirectX Raytracing (DXR)

An extension to Direct3D 12, DXR enables real-time ray tracing for photorealistic rendering and advanced lighting effects.

• Raytracing Acceleration Structures
• Ray Generation, Intersection, and Closest Hit Shaders

XNA Framework

While largely superseded by Unity and Godot, XNA was a popular framework for developing XBox and Windows games using C# and DirectX.

• Content Pipeline
• Game Loop

DirectXMath Library

A high-performance math library for DirectX, providing vector and matrix operations optimized for modern CPUs.

• XMFLOAT types
• Matrix and Vector Operations