@ DonnyEMU
Ok, you've asked for a history lesson.
DirectX was introduced into NT4 with SP3. It gives NT4 basic DirectDraw capabilities, so that it could do what average home users take for granted, for example video acceleration when playing movies, taking advantage of technology on graphics cards such as MPEG-2 decoding capabilities. DirectX on NT4 is equivalent to DX3 on other Windows operating systems. DirectX cannot be updated on NT4, save vulnerability patches.
1994 was a damn long time ago... and hold on... NT4 was released in 1996!!!
Microsoft may advise a lot of things, but as experience shows regarding technical points on their products, particularly nowadays, they're the last people to ask.
I used NT4 for about four years IIRC. I played StarCraft, Half-Life, Quake 1/2/3 (in the case of Quake 1, Winquake, downloadable freeware), and a good few other games that only require basic DirectDraw capabilities. I got as good as, or better framerates than I did in Win98, dualbooted.
If NT4 didn't have DirectX at all, playing DVDs would have been an exercise in CPU saturation!
Quake 3 that you mention is a windows 2000 product that just happens to run, cause 3rd parties went in and wrote drivers that did this, but never because microsoft wanted it, they just wanted a visualization workstation to compete with SGI/Sun..
Wrong. There are no OpenGL drivers included in the Q3 install, except for the installation of DirectX, but then 99% of Windows systems have enough DirectX functionality to play Q3.
If you believe drivers are installed, take an installation of Q3 from any Windows [OS] box, and copy it to any other installation of Windows, including NT4. No installation of anything occurs whatsoever, yet game works flawlessly, provided DX works and half-decent graphics drivers are installed. I haven't installed Q3 in years, yet I've reinstalled Windows many times over the years.
Quake 2 and 3 make very basic DirectDraw calls. After that, they're making basic DirectSound calls and OpenGL calls.
