Graphics card or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a hardware while DirectX is an API that a software need to access the functionality of the graphics card. You can’t directly access the GPU without using a graphics API, at least not on Windows. So you can think of DirectX as a driver for your graphics card.

Does DirectX need graphics card?

DirectX is a runtime environment for multimedia and graphics (it’s basically a library of programming functions used to render media), so you do not need to have a discrete graphics card to use DirectX.

Does DirectX improve graphics?

Microsoft: DirectX 12 will increase your graphics performance by an additional 20 percent. … Now we know by how much: just by using DirectX, executives said, you’ll see an additional 20 percent improvement in your graphics frame rate, and a drop in CPU utilisation to boot.