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How can I determine the highest GPU-supported DirectX version?

How can I determine the highest GPU-supported DirectX version?

On Windows 7 / Vista how can I determine what DirectX version is really supported by the GPU?

Asked by: Guest | Views: 207
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"Use GPU-Z though it will only tell you for what type of DirectX it was designed, so that's often the DirectX version at the time of release.

In case you were wondering if it also supports older versions, here's a quote from Wikipedia on DirectX:

Various releases of Windows have
included and supported various
versions of DirectX, allowing newer
versions of the operating system to
continue running applications designed
for earlier versions of DirectX until
those versions can be gradually phased
out in favor of newer APIs, drivers,
and hardware.

APIs such as Direct3D and DirectSound
need to interact with hardware, and
they do this through a device driver.
Hardware manufacturers have to write
these drivers for a particular DirectX
version's device driver interface (or
DDI), and test each individual piece
of hardware to make them DirectX
compatible. Some hardware devices only
have DirectX compatible drivers (in
other words, one must install DirectX
in order to use that hardware). Early
versions of DirectX included an
up-to-date library of all of the
DirectX compatible drivers currently
available. This practice was stopped
however, in favor of the web-based
Windows Update driver-update system,
which allowed users to download only
the drivers relevant to their
hardware, rather than the entire
library.

Prior to DirectX 10, DirectX runtime
was designed to be backward compatible
with older drivers, meaning that newer
versions of the APIs were designed to
interoperate with older drivers
written against a previous version's
DDI. The application programmer had to
query the available hardware
capabilities using a complex system of
""cap bits"" each tied to a particular
hardware feature. For example, a game
designed for and running on Direct3D 9
with a graphics adapter driver
designed for Direct3D 6 would still
work, albeit most likely with degraded
functionality.

However, the Direct3D 10 runtime in
Windows Vista cannot run on older
hardware drivers due to the
significantly updated DDI, which
requires a unified feature set and
abandons the use of ""cap bits"".

Direct3D 11 runtime will introduce
Direct3D 9, 10, and 10.1 ""feature
levels"", compatibility modes which
only allow the use of hardware
features defined in the specified
version of Direct3D. For Direct3D 9
hardware, there will be three
different feature levels, grouped by
common capabilities of ""low"", ""med""
and ""high-end"" video cards; the
runtime will directly use Direct3D 9
DDI provided in all WDDM drivers."