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WDDM Architecture

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The WDDM display driver model architecture is composed of user-mode and kernel-mode parts. The following figure shows the architecture required to support WDDM.

diagram illustrating the wddm architecture.

A graphics hardware vendor must supply a user-mode display driver and display miniport driver (also known as a kernel-mode display driver or KMD).

  • The user-mode display driver is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that the Direct3D runtime loads.

  • The display miniport driver communicates with the DirectX graphics kernel subsystem.

For more information about the user-mode display driver and display miniport driver, see the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) Reference.