directX

I have a GeForce GTS 450 card. No reason to change that.
Some year ago I had on my PC (W10 Pro 64 bit) directX 11.2 installed. With this card it had no sense to upgrade to directX 12.
With a certain app I get now the message: no directX installed (this app is not really important to me).
Surprised, I checked that, and see that during some Windows update now directX 12 is installed on my system.
Should I do something? Uninstalling 12 and re-installing 11.2? Does not seem wise, since with the next Windows update it will install again 12, I assume.

DirectX 12 is software and backwards compatible to DirectX 9. That is what you get with Windows 10.

Your hardware is only DirectX 11.1 capable, you can only get DirectX 12 features in software emulation which is slow.

To see what is supported run DXDIAG from the Run box. You will see a Feature Level list back to DirectX 9.1

Normally an application requiring DirectX 9/10/11 will install some components to be compatible with DirectX 12 as supplied by Windows 10.

DirectX 12 is software and backwards compatible to DirectX 9.

Not true, many programs require dll files from DX9. After installing DX9 Redistributable (see above), do not forget to add DirectPlay.

do not forget to add DirectPlay.

Indeed, the app required DirectPlay.
Since I solved the issue with the app in another way, I will leave DirectX as it was.
But thanks for all info.

muchomurka said:

Not true, many programs require dll files from DX9. After installing DX9 Redistributable (see above), do not forget to add DirectPlay.

I know this thread is getting a bit old, but it has taken me days to find the problem I was having with DirectX where I would get a message something like "Failed to Initialize DirectX 9.0 or Later" even though I had a functional DirectX 12 on Windows 10 64-bit.

I finally narrowed it down and discovered that at least one DirectX DLL was not on my system.
At least d3dx9_31.dll, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions were missing, and who knows what else?

Enabling the Legacy Components is a whole lot easier than looking for missing DirectX DLLs.

So, in summing up. DirectX 12 does not fully support DirectX 9 requirements.

Thanks, Mucho.