Most of the times the newer versions of DirectX include all functions of older releases with some exceptions. If there are problems with older games on newer PCs that run a higher version of DirectX than the game's manual specifies, one can try to install the Direct X Version that came with the game.

The most recent version, DirectX 12, is only available for Windows 10. Windows Vista and 7 are restricted to DX 11, Windows 8.1 can use up to DX 11.2. For Windows 98, ME, and 2000, DX 9.0c is the last version available, for Windows XP it is 9.29. The last available version for Win 95 was DX 8.0a. The first release was DirectX 1 for Windows 95. Direct X was adopted quite fast by the industry as well as the end users.

In a way this also helped the programmers as they did not have to write code specific to all the different video cards that were released to the marked, increasing the compatibility immensely. It provided access to graphics and sound hardware. Applications now had to access hardware functions through well defined interfaces and drivers. With the release of Windows 95 access to the hardware was made more difficult to prevent misbehaving programmes from freezing the PC. The same is true for the Windows versions up to 3.11, which were basically only GUIs for DOS. Before the rise of Windows to dominance over the PC marked, most games were written for the older DOS operating system, where access to the hardware was always possible as there were no protective measures in place to prevent programmes from manipulating any resources installed in the machine.

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