The Best 11 Microsoft DirectX Alternatives

  • OpenGL icon

    OpenGL

    OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux Android iPhone BSD Haiku

  • Vulkan

    Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux Android Chrome OS Tizen OS SteamOS

  • SDL

    Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux iPhone BSD iPad Windows Mobile S60

  • WebGL

    WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.

    Free Open Source Web

  • Allegro

    Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 are cross-platform, libraries mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux iPhone

  • GLFW

    GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan development on the desktop. It provides a simple API for creating windows, contexts and surfaces, receiving input and events.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux BSD

  • PyOpenGL

    Python bindings for OpenGL API.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux

  • GDI

    GDI++.dll is a replacement for the Windows default font rasterizer, which gives you a better font-smoothing capability, just like Mac OS X. Note: It runs as a...

    Free Open Source Windows

  • SlimDX

    SlimDX enables developers to easily build DirectX applications using .NET technologies such as C#, VB.NET, and IronPython. It is an efficient, simple, and lean wrapper...

    Free Open Source Windows

  • Crystal Space

    Crystal Space is a mature, full-featured Software Development Kit (SDK) providing real-time 3D graphics for applications such as games and virtual reality. It is free...

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux