What is DirectDraw?

DirectDraw® is a DirectX® SDK component that allows you to directly manipulate display memory, the hardware blitter, hardware overlay support, and flipping surface support. DirectDraw provides this functionality while maintaining compatibility with existing Microsoft® Windows®-based applications and device drivers.

DirectDraw is a software interface that provides direct access to display devices while maintaining compatibility with the Windows graphics device interface (GDI). It is not a high-level application programming interface (API) for graphics. DirectDraw provides a device-independent way for games and Windows subsystem software, such as 3-D graphics packages and digital video codecs, to gain access to the features of specific display devices.
DirectDraw works with a wide variety of display hardware, ranging from simple SVGA monitors to advanced hardware implementations that provide clipping, stretching, and non-RGB color format support. The interface is designed so that your applications can enumerate the capabilities of the underlying hardware and then use any supported hardware-accelerated features. Features that are not implemented in hardware are emulated by DirectX.

DirectDraw provides device-dependent access to display memory in a device-independent way. Essentially, DirectDraw manages display memory. Your application need only recognize some basic device dependencies that are standard across hardware implementations, such as RGB and YUV color formats and the pitch between raster lines. You need not call specific procedures to use the blitter or manipulate palette registers. Using DirectDraw, you can manipulate display memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display hardware without becoming dependent on a particular piece of hardware.

DirectDraw provides world-class game graphics on computers running Windows 95 and Windows NT® version 4.0 or later.