That's very concise! That reminds me of some old games which often demand for the same directX direct link library version to be installed despite it's installed earlier on. I might want to say there is no need to worry about compatibility troubles than to download these extensions if anybody ran into any error in that case. Is that statement correct?
Yes. The "DXv9-0c-20xx-xx_redist" has two parts: 1) DXv9-0c core 2) DXv9_v10_v11_Extensions If you will run it on WXP or W2000 both parts will be installed, so your lower DXversion on those systems will be updated to DXv9-0c. On Windows 2000 last redist, which you will be able to install, is DXv9-0c-2010-02(February) (so 2nd latest one) since the latest DXv9-0c-2010-06(June) redist no longer supports Windows 2000. But when this redist is runned on Windows Vista and newer, it only installs the missing extensions and it doesn't touch anything other. So there will no troubles at all...
Why is it impossible to disable the 'direct3D acceleration' and other features in this current feature level 11 at the DirectX Diagnostic Tool? I can remember I used to do that in Windows XP as early as 2012.
Probably because after disabling the OS would "kick" you from Aero (DirectDraw) to that basic style. Even in W8-x there is still somewhat Aero inside and even that basic style (inaccessible but visible for second or two, when you for example update graphic drivers in W8-x in VMware by installing VMware Tools).
Back in the day, graphics chipsets had distinct separate ways to do 2D and 3D, which resulted in stuff you may have never heard of like a "3D Accelerator card" (such as Voodoo2), and this was true in DirectX up until DirectX 8 when 2D pipelines were deprecated and everything HAD to use 3D (in other words, the 2D API was actually using 3D acceleration), which caused QUITE the stir in the Gaming Tech Support world, as now people still had ancient cards like SiS, Prophets, and old Matrox which lacked even the hardware to do all this 3D acceleration yet worked fine on DirectX 7, but as games were required by Microsoft to ship with the version of DirectX that was available when they were mastered --- not necessarily the version actually developed for --- people with these ancient/crappy cards found themselves being unable to play DirectX-based games they even had previously installed (if they didn't BSOD); at best, they got software acceleration even for 2D. TLDR: The reason is because modern graphics cards and APIs are optimized just for 3D and use that even for 2D, so you can't disable the acceleration unless you want to default back to software-based acceleration. On a different note, I wonder if the Xbox One will support DirectX 12 at least in compatibility? If not I'd expect even Xbox-centric developers to focus more on a wider market of cross-platform code like Mantle.
sorry to dredge up an old thread, but is directx 12 eventually coming to 8.x ? some sites say it's exclusive to 10 others say 8 & 10 but not 7.