Display Drivers

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The display device driver interface (DDI) is a subset of the Microsoft® Windows NT® DDI. The Microsoft Windows® CE operating system (OS) uses only the basic graphics engine functions and driver functions from the Windows NT display DDI. Windows CE-based display drivers differ from Windows NT-based display drivers in the following ways:

  • Because Windows CE–based display drivers have consistent functionality, the graphics device interface (GDI) does not query a driver for information about its capabilities.
  • Windows CE–based display drivers cannot reject an operation as too complex, and then call back into GDI to have the operation broken into simpler primitives. Because all Windows CE–based display drivers support the same functionality, the GDI separates complex operations before calling the display driver.
  • Windows CE–based display drivers are compiled as user-mode dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).

Windows CE-based and Windows NT-based display drivers are implemented similarly. For more information, see the Microsoft Windows 2000 Driver Development Kit (DDK).

See Also

Display Driver Architecture | Display Driver Extensions | Display Driver Performance | Display Driver Samples | Device Drivers

 Last updated on Tuesday, May 18, 2004

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