This is an older but extremely successful and long-used version of Microsoft's graphics API. It works as a so-called high-level interface, which means that much of the complex work, such as memory management and scheduling tasks for the graphics card, is done by the driver for the programmer. While this simplifies development, it can lead to lower performance on modern multi-core processors. DirectX 11 introduced key technologies such as Tessellation for refining 3D models and Compute Shaders for general graphics card computations. For many years it was the absolute standard for PC gaming.