What is the use of DirectX?

Question

Windows upgrades the Direct X in it's newer versions. But only the games require Direct X during the installation.Is it only useful for games or does it have any other useful purpose?

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms.

It's targeted mostly for game development. DirectX provides interfaces for features that are commonly used in games, like GPU-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, input from controllers, networking etc. It's also used by applications that require accelerated graphics or high-performance drawing, like programs that visualize 3D data or media players. Here's a screenshot from VLC Media Player showing available choices for video output methods, including few DirectX options:

Answer 2

AutoCAD and the rest of the AutoDesk suite is one group of non-game applications that I know uses it.

DirectX is meant to provide an API for any application to render graphics using dedicated graphics hardware. There's no restriction on the type of application.

There's no exhaustive list of all applications that use DirectX that I know of. Documentation provided with your applications should tell you. Anything that uses hardware acceleration to render graphics could potentially use it.

This now includes Internet Explorer and possibly Firefox (the DirectX SDK is required to build).

If you are managing a number of Windows systems, it's something you should generally keep updated unless you have a quirky application that requires a specific version of it.

Answer 3

DirectX is a collections of APIs and libraries, which include Direct3d and DirectSound, among others. Direct3D is the part of the collection most people think when talking about DirectX because it is often used for games on Windows and XBox, it is also used in some 3D applications like some CAD software.

The DirectX Math libraries are also useful for some math applications.