DxDiag Guide

Part 1 - The Basics

Operating System
Is a part of the system requirements, and is also relevant to find the latest drivers available for a given graphics card.
This also tells you whether the latest service pack has been installed.

If it is not and you are experiencing an issue updating your Windows to it, please get in touch with Microsoft. It is a
paramount to have the latest service pack, as the lack of it may cause a variety of issues, on the forefront the system will
likely be unsecured and hence much more susceptible to malware. The latest Service Pack by operating system would be:
Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, SP 2 for Vista, SP1 for Windows 7 and "Update 8.1" for Windows 8.

System Model
This is useful if the computer is a bought out of the box, like a laptop model or a workstation. This can help find
information about settings, especially graphic cards on laptops where the DXDiag will detect the onboard chipset instead
of the dedicated GPU.
Another way to do this would be scrolling to the system devices much further down in the Dxdiag. Graphic cards will
also be listed there in case you suspect the detected onboard chip under Display Devices is not the only one.

Bios
This can be helpful in combination with the system model.

It will let you look up the mainboard on the vendor site, check whether any major updates for the bios were released that
might tackle a critical issue such as the one the player is reporting. This kind of firmware update is usually beyond our
support, but it might be useful to prompt the player to look into it.

Processor and Memory

These are part of the system requirements for the games.

If you’re unsure whether a given processor is enough to run a game, you can always check PCBenchamark and type in
the OS, processor, RAM and GPU.

Page File
This is useful to check especially for systems with low memory barely scratching the minimum requirements to play a
game. While we won’t touch on this during troubleshoothing, the following Microsoft article is a great read to help
understand a few issues: Determining appropriate page file size.

Windows Dir
Look here to see if Windows is on another hard drive/partition, e.g. not C:\
While this might now show up a lot, it might help you customize your troubleshooting steps and help the player with a
command prompt or install dir.

DirectX Version
Is also part of the requirements for some games.

Note that this can be very misleading: It only lists what the installed software is capable of and has no relation to what
the hardware can do. Operating system Vista Service Pack 2 and Win 7 / 8 will hence always show 11 here.  Instead,
you will want to look at the hardware capability which you can see under Display Devices in the DDI Version entry.

DPI settings
A variety of issues can be caused be using non standard DPI settings. Dots per Inch is a measure of resolution, and
upscaling might cause so blurriness.

Fonts could look out of place or some games might just not start at all. When in doubt set to 100%, no scaling.

DxDiag Notes
Right after System Information, this section is valuable in that you can see whether any uncertified drivers are being
used.
This is usually an indicator either for Beta drivers or for corrupt driver installations. Either way its usually worth pointing
out to revert to the latest updated retail drivers from the appropriate vendor. The player might do that manually or by
using one the of the many free tools available on the internet, like Driver Booster for example.
 Part 2 - Display Devices

Card name
This will let you know which GPU the computer is currently utilizing.

In the case of a laptop, it'll often be the graphic chipset up there instead of the laptop's discrete GPU if there's one. If
that’s case, refer to System Devices later in the DxDiag to see whether any other discrete cards are available.

Note - Multiple Cards: If there are multiple cards in SLI/Crossfire the System Devices is the place to look as the cards
will appear as separate devices even when using dual monitors.

Display memory
It’s important to figure out how much memory the card has itself for the system requirement. Good indicator for
graphical issues.
Monitor Information
You can find the monitor name and model here, as well as if they player is using multiple monitors.

Note - Multi-monitor: If a user has 2 or more screens it will cause 2 or more entries in Display Devices, like in the
above example, but if there is only a single card then only one entry will appear in System Devices.

Current Mode / Native Mode

Current mode is being set by the GPU; native mode is what the monitor handles well.
Do these match? If not, check whether at least the aspect ratio does. Also helps to see the Windows color depth (e.g.
32bit) that might cause issues with older games. Same applies for refresh rates (the number in Hz in brackets), something
that was mostly important with older CRT style displays. Should be less of an issue these days with flat screen monitors.

Output Type
This can be an indicator for graphical issues / games not starting (e.g. if the game is being run on a TV instead of
standard monitor).

Driver Information
Lets you know which driver version a card uses.

Googling the string listed under "Driver Version" (in the blue box) should display the driver it corresponds with.

DDI Version
This shows you which Direct X version the hardware actually supports. Also check out these great links to see what cards
are capable of.

If a card should support something higher according to the list but does not according to the listed DDI version, the
installed driver might be corrupted or just simple not the suited one.

Driver Attributes
Here you can find if the driver is a stable version or some cutting edge beta version. If using beta drivers players should
always revert to the latest stable (retail) version.
Here you can also get the age of the drivers used. In this case these are more than six months old!
Finally, WHQL Logo also tells you if the drivers are beta drivers or approved drivers.
 Part 3 - Devices

Sound Devices
Here you can find what sound devices are being used, including multiple tvs, speakers and headsets, as well as the driver
information being used, which might be useful to know if the driver needs updating.

In this section you can also find which device is currently set as the default one. Occasionally when using multiple sound
devices a game’s sound issue might be related to the game sound being sent to a wrong or faulty device that happens to
be set as default.

Also note that Sound Playback and Voice Playback are two separate things; which might be important for ingame voice
chats and software like Discord.
Input Devices
These probably won’t matter for us, but here you can find what input devices are being used (most of the time a keyboard
and mouse combination. Who would’ve guessed!)

Disk Info
Very occasionally one might have issues installing and won't really understand why there isn't enough disk space
available to complete a game or expansion install.
 
The Disk & DVD/CD-ROM Drives section gives a cheap and easy breakdown of drives and the remaining space. It also
includes file system, which could hypothetically be indicative of an issue, but in reality rarely is for gaming purposes
(most of the time the problem would be for the whole OS install).

System Devices
And last but not least, here you can find a list of the computer’s devices.

This is the same list one could find by accessing windows’ Device Manager (devmgmt.msc), so beware that the list might
get pretty long.

Everything else
The rest of the dxdiag file includes registry information that is not really pertinent to us, so you can safely ignore it!
Whew!
Source: https://answers.ea.com/t5/AHQ-Community-Resources/How-to-read-a-DXDiag/td-p/3325775