DirectX, every mention
29 scenes across 6 shows · ← back to DirectX
tap a year for its mentions
Acquired 22
How I Built This 4
the a16z Podcast 2
TBPN 2
Latent Space 1
No Priors 1
every year every show Acquired 22 How I Built This 4 the a16z Podcast 2 TBPN 2 Latent Space 1 No Priors 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: passages where DirectX comes up on Acquired, How I Built This, the a16z Podcast, TBPN, Latent Space
Ben Thompson Explains the XBOX Disaster
- ▶ 0:51 unnamed speaker I want to know, first, let's go back in time a little bit, and I want you to reality check me on the, the, the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox, and I think it stems with DirectX,… 2 times in the scene
We Need An Ecosystem in AI, And Every Company Can Win A Place In It
- ▶ 15:14 Satya Nadella Adobe built Autodesk built, uh, or even like take what Jensen said, we built DX and he built, you know, CUDA on top of it.
Satya Nadella on AI: @NoPriorsPodcast x Latent Space Crossover Special at Microsoft Build 2026
- ▶ 14:31 Satya Nadella We built DX and he built, you know, CUDA on top of it.
NVIDIA: Jensen Huang. From near collapse to becoming the world’s biggest company
- ▶ 16:43 Jensen Huang And Windows 95 has a API called DirectX, and DirectX does it the right way, and we were incompatible with DirectX. 3 times in the scene
Exploding Kittens: Elan Lee. How cat-themed Russian Roulette changed game night forever
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:08:23 Ben Gilbert Windows 95, they shipped DirectX, that changed the world, they became a real gaming platform.
- ▶ 2:08:49 David Rosenthal DirectX was so important in that late nineties era for PC gaming, you know, Quake, Counter-Strike, everything that happened, Half-Life later.
- ▶ 2:09:11 David Rosenthal PC hardware without something like DirectX and hardware acceleration.
- ▶ 2:19:06 David Rosenthal So I think the vision for this was kind of like, hey, we're going to take DirectX and bake it into the operating system and allow the operating system to use GPU hardware acceleration.
How Discord Became a Developer Platform
- ▶ 1:55 Jason Citrin Like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it.
- ▶ 30:15 Jason Citrin If you want, you know, I, I mean, I built games back then and it was like, you know, firing up C++ and, and like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang · Acquired
- ▶ 3:39 Ben Gilbert It comes back, and of the 32 DirectX blend modes, it supports eight of them, and you have to convince the market to buy it, and you got to convince developers not to use anything but those eight blend modes.
- ▶ 5:00 Jensen Huang And so anyways, Riva one, 28 was a reset of our company because by the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX.
- ▶ 5:10 Jensen Huang It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia's architecture.
- ▶ 5:50 Jensen Huang Well, the first thing that we did was we decided that, look, DirectX is now here.
- ▶ 5:55 Jensen Huang We're not going to fight it.
- ▶ 5:56 Jensen Huang Let's go figure out a way to build the best thing in the world, uh, for it.
- ▶ 6:48 Jensen Huang If we built it right, we accelerated everything, we implement everything in DirectX that we knew of, and we build it as large as we possibly could, then obviously nobody can build something faster than that.
- ▶ 51:58 Ben Gilbert Sort of like to build DirectX.
- ▶ 52:11 Jensen Huang And DirectX was an API that made it possible for operating system to directly.
- ▶ 52:18 David Rosenthal But DirectX didn't exist when you started NVIDIA, right?
- ▶ 53:14 Jensen Huang If you look now, when CUDA came along, there was OpenGL, there was DirectX, um, but there's, there's still another, uh, extension, if you will, and that extension is CUDA, and that CUDA extension allows a chip that
- ▶ 53:28 Jensen Huang Got paid for running DirectX and OpenGL to create an install base for CUDA.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:33:05 David Rosenthal All the blend modes in, in DirectX, you know, you don't need all of them.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 37:48 David Rosenthal And of course anybody who knows about the history of this, that becomes direct X.
- ▶ 37:52 Ben Gilbert And DirectX made some pretty different design decisions than NVIDIA had made.
- ▶ 59:04 David Rosenthal So like you're a game developer, you develop in, you know, Microsoft direct three D becomes direct X or open GL is the open source.
- ▶ 1:53:47 Ben Gilbert There was a large team that did DirectX.
- ▶ 1:54:56 Ben Gilbert I think your assessment of Microsoft did basically nothing except make really good strategic decisions is, like, reasonable enough for DirectX, but totally is not fair for Xbox.