An Application Programming Interface (API) developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to access various hardware, most often the graphics card and sound card. Despite being produced by Microsoft, DirectX isn't actually all that bad, if you can get past Microsoft's abominable coding style.

The Microsoft DirectX Window System (nicknamed "direct hex" by programmers) is an implementation of the X Window System for, unsurprisingly, Windows. It offers superior video output performance on the ATI and NVidia processors and inferior video output performance on all other processors, including the ones from AMD and Intel. It should be noted that Microsoft doesn't participate in either holy war, instead preferring to remain completely neutral in the question of vendor preference. For another example of Microsoft's neutrality, see x64.

DirectX differs from the official X implementation, which is stolen from XFree86, in the following minor details:

* It isn't stolen. Theoretically, nobody can steal it as well, and practically, nobody cares. Occasionally, the Free Sockpuppet Foundation goes nuts and shouts, "You Wine heretics, you stole it all, you gave up to the evil empire, we're doooomed!!" but it's been quite a while since anyone actually listened to them.

* It has made Ctrl-Alt-Del a well-known key combo.

* It is object-oriented to the point of granularity, passing thru your hands if not micromanaged a small grain at a time in order to produce the smallest of inputs. Its object orientation is language-independent, but crappy in the one true language. Unless you manage to find a cool wrapper library, which will immediately slow down performance almost to the point when you forget about y...

Also known as Direct X, Microsoft's universal windows graphic, audio, gaming perphiperial communications interface. It is known for its declining stability after more games are installed, since many game developers expect that their product is the only thing you'll have on your computer, and thus, would make changes in your system settings to "optimize" gameplay performance.