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Will the Lack of DX10 on XP Spur OpenGL Dev?
Sparr0 asks: "Microsoft has announcement that DirectX 10 will not be released for Windows XP (which means no Shader Model 4.0 and no Geometry Shaders). I have since been waiting for news of game developers switching to OpenGL, in order to get the best graphics on the best hardware on the most popular gaming OS, however there is nary a whisper of such. Will such a shift occur, even if only in small amounts? When? Why not? It is probably safe to say that Unreal Tournament 3 (AKA UT2007) will have OpenGL as an option in Windows, but that is both unsurprising and also a long way off. Ditto for Quake Wars, and most other games that are planning a native Linux clients. Where are all of the other big names with Windows-only offerings? Why haven't we heard from Valve, Blizzard, Sony, or EA, to name a few?"
DirectX has a LOT more functionality than OpenGL.
Now mayhap the OP is writing about Direct3D... in that case, even DirectX 9.x's version of Direct3d features a LOT more functionality than OpenGL's most recent revision contains.
Since they are owned by MS, they will follow company policy, which means DX10, which also means Vista only. How else is MS going to get all the hardcore gamers out there to upgrade to Vista? I mean, think about it, 10-15% performance hit is not something these people will accept. They tweak and tune and spend hundreds of dollars to get even that last 5fps out of a game. Going to Vista is not on their top of the list of things to do to make their games run faster.
So MS decided that since this was going to be the case (and they knew it early on in the Vista development cycle that there was going to be a large performance decrease), they made DX10 Vista only to force these people to upgrade to a product that they did not want.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Or- we could optimize our game for the dominant platforms (360, Windows), and then have a smaller, less expensive, less profitable studio under the same publisher handle all the shoulder-work of porting the game to any alternate platforms, such as the less prevalent PS3. We have PS3's but we don't bother with coding them internally.
The ps3's first party toolchain is all linux, or so I hear- although there are third party tools for windows. It's expensive, inefficient, and a major pain compared to 360.
It's better to have an entire linux-based studio handle only ps3 than for us to handle both.
And yes, we're major enough that I don't want to be considered a spokesperson.