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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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the game, provide some type of intelligence to the bad guys, and so on.

Something had to happen to take the workload off the CPU. The answer

came from video cards.

Video cards were developed with smart onboard GPUs. The GPU helped

the CPU by taking over some, and eventually all, of the 3-D rendering duties.

These video cards not only have GPUs but also have massive amounts of

RAM to store textures.

But a problem exists with this setup: How do we talk to these cards? This

is done by means of a device driver, of course, but wouldn’t it be great if we

could create standard commands to speed up the process? The best thing to

do would be to create a standardized set of instructions that any 3-D program

could send to a video card to do all the basic work, such as “make a cone” or

“lay texture 237 on the cone you just made.”

The video card instructions standards manifested themselves into a series

of application programming interfaces (APIs). In essence, an API is a library

of commands that people who make 3-D games must use in their programs.

Programs use these APIs to issue generic commands that the device drivers

for many different video cards will understand. The device drivers for each

card translate the API commands into instructions the hardware on that card

will understand, and then send these instructions down to the graphics

hardware.

Several APIs have been developed over the years, with two clear winners

among all of them: OpenGL and DirectX. The OpenGL standard was

developed for UNIX systems but has since been ported, or made compatible

with a wide variety of computer systems, including Windows and Apple

computers. As the demand for 3-D video grew increasingly strong, Microsoft

decided to throw its hat into the 3-D graphics ring with its own API, called

DirectX. We look at DirectX in depth in the next section.

NOTE Two other standards are making inroads these days. The open

source folks have started to embrace Vulcan. Apple is pushing its in-house

Metal API.

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