At the heart of DirectX are its application programming interfaces, or APIs. The APIs act as a sort of bridge between the hardware and the software to "talk" to each other." This means that both the X800 and 6800 use DirectX to communicate with whatever game, or any other graphics software, is running at that time. Looking at the new features offered by the latest version of DirectX while ATI simply chose to optimize and improve the DirectX features used by the previous RADEON 9XXX series It might seem that this gives NVIDIA an advantage, but in reality it falls short NVIDIA's implementation of some of the newer DirectX features is nice, ATI's "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach seems to work and run much smoother. What has been fixed, and increased in significantly, are the speeds of each of these