In today’s post, we will attempt to understand why Microsoft DirectX 9 legacy overlay planes don’t work with Miracast displays on Windows 11/10 with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 2.0 graphics drivers on Windows systems.
Before we dive into the subject matter proper, 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 handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth.
The name DirectX was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the X standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection.
What is Miracast?
Miracast is a screen-mirroring protocol that lets you broadcast anything from an Android device or recent Intel computer to your TV. Whatever you see on the small screen will appear on the big screen. If everything syncs up properly, there’s almost no lag, making it ideal for watching videos or using productivity software, although it’s not quite reliable enough to run most games.
What is Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)?
Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista.
It is a replacement for the previous Windows 2000 and Windows XP display driver model XDDM/XPDM and aims to enable better performance graphics and new graphics functionality and stability. Display drivers in Windows Vista and Windows 7 can choose to adhere to WDDM or XDDM. With the removal of XDDM from Windows 8, however, WDDM became the only option.
WDDM is required for rendering the Windows DWM (Desktop Windows Manager) and device driver interfaces for Direct3D 10.
DirectX Legacy Overlay Planes don’t work with Miracast displays
Microsoft DirectX 9 legacy overlay planes don’t work with Miracast displays on Windows 10 with WDDM 2.0 graphics drivers. Any application that tries to use legacy overlays while it’s running on a Miracast display receives an error message.
How this error is communicated to the user depends on the application’s handling of the error. Users may see any of the following symptoms when they encounter this issue:
- The application hangs.
- The application crashes.
- Error messages are displayed by the application that’s trying to use legacy overlays.
- Video playback is blank.
You’ll experience this issue because according to Microsoft – legacy overlays aren’t supported with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 2.0 graphics drivers on Windows 11/10.
I hope you find the information in this post useful!
