DirectDraw® is a DirectX™ SDK component that allows direct manipulation of display memory, hardware blitters, hardware overlays, and flipping. DirectDraw provides this functionality while maintaining compatibility with existing Microsoft® Windows®-based applications and device drivers.
DirectDraw is a software interface that provides direct access to display devices while maintaining compatibility with the Windows graphics device interface (GDI). It is not a high-level application programming interface (API) for graphics. DirectDraw provides a device-independent way for games and Windows subsystem software, such as 3D graphics packages and digital video codecs, to gain access to the features of specific display devices.
DirectDraw works with a wide variety of display hardware, ranging from simple SVGA monitors to advanced hardware implementations that provide clipping, stretching, and non-RGB color format support. The interface is designed so that your applications can enumerate the capabilities of the underlying hardware and then use any supported hardware-accelerated features. Features that are not implemented in hardware are emulated by DirectX.
DirectDraw provides the following benefits that were previously available only to applications that included code for specific display devices:
·Support for double-buffered and flipping graphics
·Access to, and control of, the display card's blitter
·Support for 3D z-buffers
·Support for hardware-assisted overlays with z-ordering
·Access to image-stretching hardware
·Simultaneous access to standard and enhanced display-device memory areas
DirectDraw's mission is to provide device-dependent access to display memory in a device-independent way. Essentially, DirectDraw manages display memory. Your application need only recognize some basic device dependencies that are standard across hardware implementations, such as RGB and YUV color formats and the pitch between raster lines. You need not worry about the specific calling procedures required to utilize the blitter or manipulate palette registers. Using DirectDraw, you can manipulate display memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display hardware without becoming dependent on a particular piece of hardware.
DirectDraw provides world-class game graphics on computers running Windows 95 and Windows NT® version 4.0 or later.