Direct3D Retained Mode

Early versions of DirectX offered two different APIs for Direct3D graphics. Immediate Mode offered direct low-level access to features of the graphics hardware, while Retained Mode offered higher-level, scene-based abstractions. Only a handful of games ever made use of Retained Mode. The last version to update Direct3D Retained Mode was DirectX 3.0 in 1996. Since then, Immediate Mode has been the only surviving strain.

In 2007, Microsoft decided to remove support for Direct3D Retained Mode altogether for security reasons. Versions of DirectX designed for Windows Vista or later no longer support it. These versions of Windows are therefore no longer able to run games developed using Retained Mode. In some cases, if not all, it is sufficient to copy the respective runtime library, d3drm.dll, from an older version of DirectX into the game's directory to make it run on newer versions of Windows.