QUESTION = Why does every steam game I install need to install it's own copy of directx?

GENERATION = On top of what everyone else is saying: It is possible to create custom version of DirectX, although it is still a feature that is not built into the game. The reasons for this include: 1) It adds functionality that a non-game would not have, 2) It will allow you to have a profile of what the game is doing and does something different depending on what game you are developing, 3) It has the benefit of free customization if you do not develop as many games as you do installs. As to why developers choose DirectX and not OpenGL: Generally, DirectX and OpenGL have different goals. This includes the specific way the game looks and interacts with the hardware. Microsoft tends to push on DirectX while OpenGL pushes on OpenGL, so you might want to develop your game differently if you are porting to Windows or OSX. As a developer, you are willing to try to get a focus on DirectX because it gives you a good view of your game and how it does things. With OpenGL, you do not have as much control over the hardware and also don't care if the game looks good or bad. 

RETRIEVAL #0 = 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 #1 = 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 #2 = 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 #3 = XG Station---256MB DDR3 for approximately A$375. Section::::References. Additional references 

RETRIEVAL #4 = 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 

RETRIEVAL #5 = Debian---not hosted at Debian. A notable third party repository exists, formerly named debian-multimedia.org, providing software not present in Debian such as Windows codecs, libdvdcss and the Adobe Flash Player. Even though this repository is maintained by Christian Marillat, a Debian developer, it is not part of the project and is not hosted on a Debian server. The repository provides packages already included in Debian, interfering with the official maintenance. Eventually, project leader Stefano Zacchiroli asked Marillat to either settle an agreement about the packaging or to stop using the "Debian" name. Marillat chose the latter and renamed the repository to deb-multimedia.org. The repository was so popular that the switchover was announced by the official blog of the Debian project. Section::::Hardware support. Section::::Hardware support.:Hardware requirements. Hardware requirements are at least those of the kernel and the GNU toolsets. Debian's recommended system requirements depend on the level of installation, which corresponds to increased numbers of installed components: The real minimum memory requirements depend on the architecture and may be much less than the numbers listed in this table. It is possible to install Debian with 170 MB of RAM for x86-64; the installer will run in low memory mode 

RETRIEVAL #6 = Steam (software)---this case; Valve ultimately decided against offering the game on Steam, arguing that while it "[respects] developers' desire to express themselves", there were "costs and risks" associated with the game's content, and the developers had "chosen content matter and a way of representing it that makes it very difficult for us to help them [find an audience]." Section::::Platforms. Section::::Platforms.:Microsoft Windows. Steam originally released exclusively for Microsoft Windows in 2003, but has since been ported to other platforms. More recent Steam client versions use the Chromium Embedded Framework. To take advantage of some of its features for newer interface elements, Steam uses 64-bit versions of Chromium, which makes it unsupported on older operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows Vista. Steam on Windows also relies on some security features built into later versions of Windows. Steam support for XP and Vista were dropped in 2019. While users still on those operating systems are able to use the client, they do not have access to newer features. Around only 0.2% of Steam users were affected by this when it began. Section::::Platforms.:macOS. On March 8, 2010, Valve announced a client for Mac OS X. The announcement was preceded by a change in the Steam beta client to support the