What is DirectX/DirectDraw?

    DirectX is a set of finely-tuned application programming interfaces (APIs) that provides developers necessary resources to design high-performance realtime multimedia applications.

    When Microsoft created DirectX, one of its primary goals was to promote games development for the Windows environment.With DirectX, game developers get the benefits of device independence without losing the benefits of direct access to the hardware.

    DirectDraw is a component of the DirectX API that accelerates hardware and software animation techniques by providing direct access to bitmaps in off-screen display memory, as well as extremely fast access to the blitting and buffer-flipping capabilities of the hardware.

    The bad news is that DirectX is based on the Component Object Model (COM), but the good news is you, as a developer, can use DirectX with very little COM knowledge.