QUESTION = Why does every steam game I install need to install it's own copy of directx? GENERATION = The DirectX is an API for the game engine. It's used to develop and maintain the game's environment, so it's a very useful tool for developing a game. When you install the game, you're basically installing the DirectX, which is why you need to. It's like asking why you need to have a car before you buy it. It's because you're using it to build a car. It's the same with the game engine. When you install a game, you're basically installing the DirectX, which is what it's for. When you're done installing the game, you're free to use the game engine to build your own game. It's the same with DirectX, it's used to build the game, which is what it's for. If you don't install the game, you're free to use the game engine to build your own game, which is what it's for. It's a bit like asking why you need to have a car before you buy it. It's because you're using it to build your own car, which is what it's for. RETRIEVAL #0 = Microsoft Developer Network---only with the "MSDN Premium Subscription" and even so only "directly related to the design, development and test and/or documentation of software projects" as stated in the MSDN licensing FAQ. As would be expected, any software created with the development tools (like Visual Studio), along with the runtime components needed to use it, isn't restricted in any way by Microsoft either — such software can and regularly is used for business production purposes. The license agreement refers to several other items in the subscription and grants additional similar exceptions as appropriate. An MSDN subscriber is entitled to activate as many copies as needed for his/her own development purposes. Therefore, if a computer enthusiast has 20 computers (actual or virtual) for software development (and aren't acting as part of a business, for example, a server farm), one subscription allows all 20 of those computers to be running their own separate copy of Windows, Office, and any other Microsoft product. After a few installations, the activation keys will stop allowing automatic product activation over the Internet, but after a telephone call to the Product Activation hotline to confirm that the installations are indeed legitimate and consistent with the license agreement, the activations are granted over the phone. Even though an MSDN subscription is on an annual basis (for retail RETRIEVAL #1 = DirectX---and headers for use in coding. Originally, the runtimes were only installed by games or explicitly by the user. Windows 95 did not launch with DirectX, but DirectX was included with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2. Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 both shipped with DirectX, as has every version of Windows released since. The SDK is available as a free download. While the runtimes are proprietary, closed-source software, source code is provided for most of the SDK samples. Starting with the release of Windows 8 Developer Preview, DirectX SDK has been integrated into Windows SDK. Section::::Development history. In late 1994, Microsoft was ready to release Windows 95, its next operating system. An important factor in the value consumers would place on it was the programs that would be able to run on it. Three Microsoft employees—Craig Eisler, Alex St. John, and Eric Engstrom—were concerned because programmers tended to see Microsoft's previous operating system, MS-DOS, as a better platform for game programming, meaning few games would be developed for Windows 95 and the operating system would not be as much of a success. This was compounded by negative reception surrounding the Windows port of the video game "The Lion King". The game used WinG, which crashed on RETRIEVAL #2 = Steam (software)---game's executable files for the given user, which allows them to install it multiple times and on multiple devices, and make backup copies of their software. Once the software is downloaded and installed, the user must then authenticate through Steam to de-encrypt the executable files to play the game. Normally this is done while connected to the Internet following the user's credential validation, but once they have logged into Steam once, a user can instruct Steam to launch in a special offline mode to be able to play their games without a network connection. Developers are not limited to Steam's CEG and may include other forms of DRM and other authentication services than Steam; for example, some games from publisher Ubisoft require the use of their UPlay gaming service, and prior to its shutdown in 2014, some other games required Games for Windows – Live, though many of these games have since transitioned to using the Steamworks CEG approach. In September 2008, Valve added support for Steam Cloud, a service that can automatically store saved game and related custom files on Valve's servers; users can access this data from any machine running the Steam client. Games must use the appropriate features of Steamworks for Steam Cloud to work. Users can disable this feature on a per-game and per-account basis. In RETRIEVAL #3 = DirectX---operating systems. As of January 2007, Windows 2000 or XP is required. This also introduced Shader Model 2.0 containing Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0. Section::::Versions.:DirectX 10. A major update to DirectX API, DirectX 10 ships with and is only available with Windows Vista and later; previous versions of Windows such as Windows XP are not able to run DirectX 10-exclusive applications. Rather, programs that are run on a Windows XP system with DirectX 10 hardware simply resort to the DirectX 9.0c code path, the latest available for Windows XP computers. Changes for DirectX 10 were extensive. Many former parts of DirectX API were deprecated in the latest DirectX SDK and are preserved for compatibility only: DirectInput was deprecated in favor of XInput, DirectSound was deprecated in favor of the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool system (XACT) and additionally lost support for hardware accelerated audio, since the Vista audio stack renders sound in software on the CPU. The DirectPlay DPLAY.DLL was also removed and was replaced with dplayx.dll; games that rely on this DLL must duplicate it and rename it to dplay.dll. In order to achieve RETRIEVAL #4 = Xen---following systems can operate as paravirtualized Xen guests: BULLET::::- Linux BULLET::::- FreeBSD in 32-bit, or 64-bit through PVHVM; BULLET::::- OpenBSD, through PVHVM; BULLET::::- NetBSD BULLET::::- MINIX BULLET::::- GNU/Hurd (gnumach-1-branch-Xen-branch) BULLET::::- Plan 9 from Bell Labs For an updated list differentiating PV and PVHVM support, see DomU Support for Xen. Section::::Guests.:Microsoft Windows systems as guests. Xen version 3.0 introduced the capability to run Microsoft Windows as a guest operating system unmodified if the host machine's processor supports hardware virtualization provided by Intel VT-x (formerly codenamed Vanderpool) or AMD-V (formerly codenamed Pacifica). During the development of Xen 1.x, Microsoft Research, along with the University of Cambridge Operating System group, developed a port of Windows XP to Xen — made possible by Microsoft's Academic Licensing Program. The terms of this license do not allow the publication of this port, although documentation of the RETRIEVAL #5 = XG Station---256MB DDR3 for approximately A$375. Section::::References. Additional references RETRIEVAL #6 = Direct Rendering Manager---limited subset of the DRM API supported by those nodes—provided they have file system permissions to open the device file. Display servers, compositors and any other program that requires the modeset API or any other privileged operation must open the standard primary node that grants access to the full DRM API and use it as usual. Render nodes explicitly disallow the GEM "flink" operation to prevent buffer sharing using insecure GEM global names; only PRIME (DMA-BUF) file descriptors can be used to share buffers with another client, including the graphics server. Section::::Hardware support. The Linux DRM subsystem includes free and open-source drivers to support hardware from the 3 main manufacturers of GPUs for desktop computers (AMD, NVIDIA and Intel), as well as from a growing number of mobile GPU and System on a chip (SoC) integrators. The quality of each driver varies highly, depending on the degree of cooperation by the manufacturer and other matters. There is also a number of drivers for old, obsolete hardware detailed in the next table for historical purposes. Some of them still remains in the kernel code, but others have been already removed. Section::::Development. The Direct Rendering Manager