In the early days, most of the applications communicated directly with the hardware of the PC, which in turn could crash your PC if they were not coded so well. Microsoft tried to address this issue by placing the hardware under the control of Windows, but programmers became reluctant to such an idea since Windows added way too much work for the video process and slowed down the work. For any demanding program like a video game, direct access to the hardware was the only way to work.
APIs became a solution to this problem and one of the most popular APIs or Application Programming Interfaces you can find today is DirectX.
What is DirectX?
As a solution windows unveiled a new set of protocols called DirectX. Programmers began to use DirectX to take control of certain piece of hardware and started talking directly to the hardware like this. With these, the speed necessary to play advanced games made easier.
The goal of putting DirectX out was to build a series of products to enable Windows to run 3-D games without disruptions. It is not that Windows were unable to run 3-D games before DirectX but Microsoft was just not into API when it was racing in the market. Microsoft’s primary concept of creating DirectX was to provide stable environment with hardware access to run 3-D application and games within the windows especially to make things easier for programmers.
Updates for DirectX
Microsoft since then has been regularly updating DirectX. All the latest games for example requires latest DirectX.
You do not need to manually update all of these latest release, windows do it for you automatically. You can check the version of DirectX you have on your system with DirectX Diagnostic Tool (dxdiag). Simply type dxdiag in the search bar. There you will see the version under System tab inside the system information typically at the bottom of the information.
Choosing a video card
If you are confused which video card to buy, there are so many options to pick from. One of the first step you can take is to shorten down the process by looking for the hottest video card of the time within your budget. Of course, there is one thing you should know, the higher you budget, the high-end graphics card you will have.
If you need further guidance straight from the tech community, here are some listed websites you can go, which is advised by the tech professors, for example Mike Meyers. They are Arstechnica, Hardcop, Tomshardware, Anandtech.
Feel free to visit these websites and ask for recommendations, also check out their blogs. Note, these are just recommended websites, you should also make an extensive research online. Look for the latest graphics card based on your budget and see what kind of results you get. Pick one of the result that appeals you the most based on your interest and read those articles. In addition, if you feel kind of not into reading, you can simply go for the video links. There are lot of people on YouTube with great and updated contents with legit reviews.