DirectX 9 legacy overlay planes don’t work on Windows 10
In today’s post, we will try to understand why Microsoft DirectX 9 Legacy overlay plans do not work with Miracast displays in Windows 10 with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 2.0 graphics drivers in Windows 10.
Before delving into the subject itself, let’s take a look at the brief description of Miracast, WDDM and Microsft DirectX, for the benefit of our new readers.
What is Microsoft DirectX?
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing multimedia-related tasks, especially game and video programming, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all started with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, etc.
The name DirectX was coined as an abbreviated term for all of these APIs (the X replacing particular API names) and quickly became the name of the collection.
What is Miracast?
Miracast is a screen mirroring protocol that lets you stream anything from a recent Android device or Intel computer to your TV. Everything you see on the small screen will appear on the large screen. If everything synchronizes correctly, there is almost no lag, which makes it ideal for watching videos or using productivity software, although it is not reliable enough to run most games.
What is the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)?
Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is the graphics driver architecture for video card drivers running versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows Vista.
It replaces previous Windows 2000 and Windows XP XDDM / XPDM display driver models and aims to enable better graphics performance and new graphics functionality and stability. Display drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 can choose to join WDDM or XDDM. However, with the removal of XDDM from Windows 8, WDDM has become the only option.
WDDM is required for rendering Windows DWM (Desktop Windows Manager) interfaces and device drivers for Direct3D 10.
Legacy DirectX 9 overlay plans do not work with Miracast displays
Legacy Microsoft DirectX 9 overlay plans don’t work with Miracast displays on Windows 10 with WDDM 2.0 graphics drivers. Any application that tries to use legacy overlays when it runs on a Miracast screen receives an error message.
How this error is communicated to the user depends on how the application handles it. Users may see one of the following symptoms when they experience this problem:
- The application hangs.
- The application hangs.
- Error messages are displayed by the application trying to use the inherited overlays.
- Video playback is blank.
You will run into this problem because, according to Microsoft, legacy overlays are not supported with WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 2.0 graphics drivers on Windows 10.
I hope you find the information in this article useful!