Yes, it is how the physical hardware works, and how it has worked for several decades.

It does not need to be DirectX, but the days of the display being a block of CPU available memory ended back around 1987. EGA displays were the last to do it, VGA displays emulated it for compatability. It has been about giving instructions to the card over the bus ever since.

I still recall $B0000 and $B8000 as the old addresses, and on VGA using a hardware mapped address at $A0000, but it was an eternity ago in computer time, back in 16-bit systems and memory pages rather than fully addressable flat memory models. Those days are long gone for PC development, good riddance.

foxo said:

@DirectX9 direct X just to display a bitmap ….

I would use GDI just to display a bitmap, and Direct X for games.

BitBlt function can display a bitmap with good performance.

If you want to learn more about displaying/manipulating Bitmaps with GDI, here are some references I suggest:

• Programming Windows 5th Edition by Charles Petzold, Chapter 14 and 15. You can search for PDF of this book.
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/bitmaps​
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdi/bitmap-functions​

If you want something simpler to use, you can instead use GDI+ to display the Bitmap. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/gdiplus/-gdiplus-loading-and-displaying-bitmaps-use​

Note that GDI+ is a C++ (object oriented) API. It also has a flat C API. More info about the flat api in general is here and the flat API functions for Bitmap are found here​.

Here's a video on how to draw lines and such at the Win32 HWND API level.

This is a good way to get started. It's not a good base to build on for anything elaborate.

It's not