Is there a programmatic way to see what graphics API a game is using?

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For games like DOTA 2 which can be run with different graphics API's such as DX9, DX11, Vulkan, I have not been able to come up with a viable solution to checking which of the API's its currently using. I want to do this to correctly inject a dll in order to display images over the game.

I have looked into manually checking what dll's the games have loaded,

this tool for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/listdlls

however, in the case of DOTA, it loads in both d3d9.dll and d3d11.dll libraries if none is specified in launch options on steam. Anyone have any other ideas as to how to determine the correct graphics API used?

directx-9 directx-11 steam vulkan directx
1 Answers

In Vulkan, a clean way would be to implement a Vulkan Layer doing the overlay. It is slightly cleaner than outright injecting dlls. And it could work on multiple platforms.

In DirectX, screencap software typically does this. Some software adds FPS counter and such overlays. There seems to be open source with similar goals e.g. here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Tools/OCAT. I believe conventionally the method is to intercept (i.e. "hook" in win32 api terminology) all the appropriate API calls.

As for simple detection, if it calls D3D12CreateDevice then it likely is Direct3D 12. But then again the app could create devices for all the APIs too and proceed not to use them. But I think the API detection is not particularly important for you if you only want to make an overlay; as long as you just intercept all the present calls and draw your stuff on top of it.

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