36.2 Software: Graphical API

Graphical API

A graphical API (Application Programming Interface) are protocols and tools which are used to create software and applications. An API gives values to the software component, inputs, outputs, types and operations. It is also referred to as a web tool. Software companies release their API so that other software developers can create products with their API. An example of this would be Amazon. Amazon released an API so that web developers could access Amazon’s product with ease and it allowed third party websites to give links directly to the product with updated information such as price. An API is an extension to the program.

OpenGL (GL – Graphics Library) is one of the most common used graphical APIs. This is because it was created to give users the maximum performance for the GPU as the API communicated with the GPU to speed up rendering times. Also, it depends on the operating system as well as the network. It allows game developers to create high-end graphical applications. It is the standard and is used to render 2D/3D vector graphics. For gaming, this is useful as the games will run smooth and load times will be fast.

Direct-X is an API which is developed by Microsoft and it is a library of sounds, graphics, textures, lighting effects etc. which is used for games running on Windows to utilise. By heading into Direct-X you can check to see if everything is functioning such as system, display, sound 1, sound 2 and input. Direct-X has incrementally increased with quality as you can see with the image below, the left side is Direct-X 9 and you can see that when the versions have been upgraded, the quality has also increased as the lighting is better on the right side which is Direct-X 11. The latest version of Direct-X is Direct-X 12.





You can see in this image the differences of Direct-X 12 and Direct-X 11, DX11 is using 90% of the CPU whilst DX12 is using 54%, this is a major difference as the CPU can be used for another process to speeds things up and it saves memory.