Why You Should Use OpenGL and Not DirectX

stickyboot writes "The independent games developer Wolfire describes why they decided to use OpenGL instead of DirectX. The article mainly discusses the marketing strategies behind DirectX and how the API became so popular. It also goes over why a developer would choose OpenGL over DirectX and what this decision means for the gamer. 'Back in 1997, the situation was similar to how it is now. Microsoft was running a massive marketing campaign for Direct3D, and soon everyone "just knew" that it was faster and better than OpenGL. This started to change when Chris Hecker published his open letter denouncing DirectX. Soon after that, John Carmack posted his famous OpenGL rant, and put his money where his mouth was by implementing all of Id Software's games in OpenGL, proving once and for all that DirectX was unnecessary for high-end 3D gaming. This lesson appears to have been forgotten over the last few years. Most game developers have fallen under the spell of DirectX marketing, or into the whirlpool of vicious cycles and network advantages.'"

Comments

OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

I am still kind of surprised that even after so many years, the open source communitys answer to marketing is only ranting about it.

Providing libraries, API's or platforms is NOT only about technical platform. *Nothing* in the world works like that. You must "market" it to companies, create a community around it with the right people and actually provide support and good tools to the developers. You can rant all you want about the technical sides of things, but if you do not understand this and completely ignore it you're only hurting yourself.

I have worked with both DirectX and OpenGL. In my opinion, OpenGL is loosing because:
1) DirectX has a comprehensive, well-documented references and documentation
2) DirectX provides a lot more than just 3D drawing - sounds, networking, fonts, input processing, and it used to have an API for 2D graphics before (relevant because the story is about why DirectX gained marketshare)
3) The DirectX libraries had more support in whatever coding language you wanted to use. You can argue this with the point that of course they had because Microsoft is a company so they can do it, but that doesn't change it. In fact, it would show that propretiery formats and libraries are better than open
4) Later it was possible to easily develop XBOX 360 games with DirectX and the tools were made good and easy to pick up. You may say it's irrelevant, that MS is using another market to improve their position, but it is not irrelevant. And unless OpenGL supporters start to work at it too, they're going to lose. Give more support and more value for the work!
5) DirectX was easy to pick up, and everyone supported it. If it's easy to pick up for beginners, they'll learn it and continue using it later as a professional (the same thing as why Adobe doesn't really care about home users Photoshop piracy)

It is NOT only about providing the technical platform. It is also about providing all the things that company it - some may call that "marketing", but it's mostly about giving support to those who use the platform, and giving more value for their time, work and money.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Alcimedes]

So if they tighten things up they'll be better able to compete?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Sir_Lewk]

1) I'm suprized anyone would want to use something as old as DirectX....
2) I use mutt you insenitive clod!

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point is good and it is the same with open source programs. OSS developers give too little detail on user experience and interface and only think about technical details. It just isn't the whole package.

Ubuntu and Fedora have understood this and more developers should too.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[HermMunster]

If Windows didn't have these technologies used to prop it up we'd have far less Windows in the world, which, in many ways would be the greatest thing for the consumer and the industry (as far as innovation and progress goes). Without DirectX propping up the monopoly we'd have other technologies and far more companies that would provide innovative competition, thus providing more, and often better, products.

We know that when you have a large number of competitors you get better products. The eReaders are a perfect example. First the Kindle and now about 10 competitors all showing that the competition has created a much greater choice for consumers as well as better features. Further netbooks and tablet PCs as well as touch capabilities in phones and the tablets are perfect examples of what happens when there's no technology to lock you in thus propping up the monopoly.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Blakey Rat]

Without DirectX propping up the monopoly we'd have other technologies and far more companies that would provide innovative competition, thus providing more, and often better, products.

Then instead of ranting about DirectX, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and make a competitor for DirectX?

I'm sick of open source buck-passing. Sure, it's terrible that Microsoft has such a commanding monopoly in so many areas, but on the other hand, why are you complaining about it instead of actually working to make it go away?

For every one of those bulletpoints the parent mentioned, there's nothing, nothing stopping you from providing a similar level of support for OpenGL.

DirectX has networking/input/graphics drivers? Then write those and attach them to OpenGL. DirectX has better documentation/examples? Then create them for your OpenGL solution! DirectX can be ported to Xbox? Fine; then get off your bony butt and go talk to Sony and Nintendo about enabling trivial porting of OpenGL apps.

Sorry, I just get sick of the whining by anti-Microsoft goons who don't have the cojones to actually compete with Microsoft-- stop passing the buck and do it already.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

I don't think it would create that much more competition. 3D API's and libraries and things like these take a lot of work, and require support from graphics cards manufacturers (which there are basically only two, ATI and NVIDIA). It would be out of the question they would implement 10+ different codebases on their cards.

DirectX is actually up for competition, even if it's not in PC space. DirectX is the supporter of PC gaming and it competes against Playstation and Wii, and PS3 is definitely up to par in competition. 360 is backing up DirectX some in that space, but there definitely is competition.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

1) completely bogus: OpenGL has an both a good documentation and extremely good literature
2) completely bogus: These days M$ is advocating *not* using anything Like DirectInput, etc. In fact, DirectSound doesn't even work on Windows7
3) completely bogus: If you're not doing C#/C++ on Visual Studio using Com+, you're not getting DirectX. OpenGL can be coded in anything, Delphi, Python, C (gcc), C++, perl, Ruby, etc.
4) The only thing you got right, remotely
5) completely bogus: Before version 9 or 10, DirectX was the most hard and retarded thing to pick up, then it slowly, very slowly, got better.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an even better story for Slashdot. It's called "Why You Should Fuck Off and Let People Use What They Want".

Fuck, seriously. First it's the obnoxious Linux pushers and now this?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[HermMunster]

The rant is no more of a rant than you find closed source rant about regarding open source.

And, the updated spec for OpenGL had glorious ideas but somehow they fell through. Then Microsoft decided they'd cancel support for OpenGL in Vista/Win7 (yay, way to compete -- try to kill a solid viable product used by so many).

OpenGL still has a bright future as soon as they can complete what they promised.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[digitalunity]

As long as OpenGL continues to support the newest features first through extensions, there will always be a place for it.

For a long time, OpenGL was used in industrial and visualization applications. It wasn't designed specifically for games, hence why it was never developed into a fully featured multimedia library. This article very well articulates the fact that OpenGL is available on quite a lot more devices than DirectX and for any cross platform developers, this is extremely important.

I don't see OpenGL vendor support dying off any time soon either. Most vendors have a line of super high-end cards aimed at corporate users for CAD and large set visualization. They wouldn't sacrifice those users to save a buck because those types of cards are the most profitable.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

Don't feed the trolls, but here we go. DirectX is at least as old as OpenGL, but it's also chronically outdated on modern features that you can already use in OpenGL (that's thanks to opengl extensions as opposed to willy nilly snapshotting of features by M$uck)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[jfbilodeau]

Corrections/clarifications

1) So does OpenGL
2) True -- Let's talk Direct3D vs OpenGL
3) False -- Name me one language that doesn't have OpenGL bindings
4) The 360 has a DirectX-like API. OpenGL-like interfaces is used on Wii and PS3
5) OpenGL is easy(er?) to pick up

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

All of Rages/IDs software runs on OpenGL... that not quick enough for you?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[CannonballHead]

which, in many ways would be the greatest thing for the consumer and the industry (as far as innovation and progress goes).

What industry? If you mean the 3D "market," I disagree. Having a large number of very different systems (e.g., let's just take Linux for example, drivers that work in one distro don't always work in another) does not necessarily help innovation and progress. Having a stable/typical setup helps, as you can focus in more on your product than worrying about whether or not it will work on all these different platforms/drivers/whatever. Unless we're talking about different industries, here.

As it is, I would rather have a lot of developers being able to easily produce quality stuff using DirectX than having developers squabbling about different 3D drivers, and then having to make sure my card supported all those kinds of drivers so I could play all those kinds of games, etc...

To me, that sounds bad. Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too. Being "open-source" does not mean you are inherently a better individual and less susceptible to the same squabbles that companies that are closed-source/proprietary get into.

I don't like all of what Microsoft does. But Microsoft does appear to do DirectX fairly decently... and they have realized it's to their advantage to let others easily access it and learn it (documentation, etc). I fail to see how that's a bad thing. Being good in an area, even if you're a monopoly, is not a bad way to squash competition. To think that a product should be worse so that competition could be better is ... a very strange way of looking at things, IMO. :)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[WilyCoder]

I would mod you up, but I've already posted. I agree with everything you have said.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

3) DirectX works just fine with C/C++/Delphi. I have used it with all of those, from version 6.
5) Not really. I'm not even a game developer myself, and I was a teen at that age, but version 6 of DirectX was really easy to pick up. And I used it with Visual Basic and Delphi, because frankly C/C++ was pain in the ass to quickly create something fun as a 12 year old. And so did games too - only games supporting OpenGL was those based on Quake engine, and even they had DirectX engine too (HL did at least)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mikael]

Over the years (from 1996 to present), DirectX was marketed as having an advantage over OpenGL because DirectX would have all the latest features before OpenGL would have them added
as extensions. Microsoft's official policy was that OpenGL was for supporting the CAD market, while DirectX was for everyone else.

The ARB was always blamed for causing the delay in having a single agreed standard across all the vendors (Cg vs. GLSL vs. DirectX HLSL). The only other advantage that I see is that DirectX offers higher level data structures for rendering (triangle, quad, and general meshes).

There are open source equivalents to the audio such as OpenAL, and there are plenty of books and demos to teach programming techniques.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not have heard about all the complaining the OpenGL community does and the pressure the Khronos group gets then have you? Or maybe you've just selectively stopped listening.

OpenGL is actually behind the times. And nVidia vs. ATI extensions makes things a complete mess.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Nadaka]

I would also point out that there are open standards for networking, input and sound. They just are not all bundled up under a single name.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[msclrhd]

OpenGL is a graphics-specific API (like Direct3D). If you want sound, network, etc. support, try SDL or Qt.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[CannonballHead]

Exactly. It's somehow not fair that Microsoft is able to create a competitive product using money they get from elsewhere. "Leveling" the "playing field" of competiiton for DirectX and OpenGL should not be telling Microsoft that they aren't allowed to spend money on DirectX if they didn't make that money from DirectX; that may allow for more competition, sure, but only because you're forcing Microsoft to produce a worse product. Not exactly "progress," IMO.

(Ignore the fact that Ubuntu was started by a millionaire who made his money from elsewhere.)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[digitalunity]

Not even close. If you read the article, you'd know that. OpenGL is roughly a decade older than Direct3D.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[shutdown -p now]

If you're not doing C#/C++ on Visual Studio using Com+, you're not getting DirectX. OpenGL can be coded in anything, Delphi, Python, C (gcc), C++, perl, Ruby, etc.

First of all, if a language can call C APIs (and, in particular, can deal with C function pointers returned by those APIs), it can call COM APIs as well. DX isn't even "COM", it just uses COM conventions (vtable layout, refcounting etc) - but it's not a set of proper registered COM objects. In particular, this means that you absolutely can write DX applications using gcc (e.g. Mingw, on Windows), and even g++, since its vtable layout is (by design) COM-compatible.

Furthermore, there are plenty of high-level DX wrappers for various other languages: Delphi and Python from your list have them for sure, and there are many more (just google for "directx language").

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

That mess you talk of, it's what happens when people get together, each with his own idea, and try to collaborate. It's not perfect, but it sure the hell beats a dictatorship...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

make a competitor for DirectX?

DirectX is a combination of several not-entirely-related technologies. The graphics component is Direct3D, and the stupidly obvious competitor is OpenGL.

why are you complaining about it instead of actually working to make it go away?

Because OpenGL is already better, as TFA explains. The problem is purely a marketing one, and requires a marketing response. The marketing response sounds like "complaining", but is actually encouraging people to think and explore their options.

DirectX has networking/input/graphics drivers? Then write those and attach them to OpenGL.

The result is called SDL. Again, these have already been done, they just aren't part of one giant marketing package, largely because they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. For example, OpenGL powers my compositing window manager at the moment, but it really doesn't need to make any sound.

DirectX has better documentation/examples? Then create them for your OpenGL solution!

Fair enough.

DirectX can be ported to Xbox? Fine; then get off your bony butt and go talk to Sony and Nintendo about enabling trivial porting of OpenGL apps.

What makes you think the author of TFA hasn't done so? Indeed, what makes you think they would listen to the GP at all?

But FYI, PS3 and Wii both include a form of OpenGL, though there are differences.

Sorry, I just get sick of the whining by anti-Microsoft goons who don't have the cojones to actually compete with Microsoft-- stop passing the buck and do it already.

I understand what you're saying, but if it was that easy, we'd have done it already.

Whining is not mutually exclusive with doing something about it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[trifish]

DirectSound doesn't even work on Windows7

Where did you hear that? Because, that's nonsense (or, as you say, complete bogus).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

Not to insult the 12 year old programmer target market, but it's well documented (by Carmack for example) that back then, Direct3D was a complete mess...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[shutdown -p now]

False -- Name me one language that doesn't have OpenGL bindings

Well, we couldn't find any for INTERCAL (we also use Brainfuck for low-level optimization of critical code sections). Meanwhile, D3D APIs literally blend right in! ~

OpenGL is easy(er?) to pick up

On a serious note, this one is arguable. I will concede that it's much easier to write a simple 3D application in something like SDL+OpenGL, because of many sane defaults. However, if you try to get it even to the level of a hobbyist but not horribly outdated game engine, the amount of complexity quickly increases for OpenGL as well. I'm not an expert in either, but from comments of people who are, it seems that D3D APIs got mostly sane in D3D9, and most of the flak it gets for being overcomplicated is an artifact of older versions (where it held true).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[starbugs]

sorry for yelling

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[timmarhy]

instead of whining about MS's success, why don't you all go out and beat directX at it's own game - an easy to use 3d gaming API. openGL is NOT as easy and thus more expensive to write games in.

if all these people wrote code instead of rants you'd be a little closer by now.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[HAKdragon]

And so did games too - only games supporting OpenGL was those based on Quake engine, and even they had DirectX engine too (HL did at least)

Unreal and Unreal 2 engines supported OGL as well.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[lot3k]

Thank you, I was torqued up after reading that post, thankful to see a counter arguement was already made. Dx V9 was what turned that ship around. However, I do agree with the point on marketing. When you have a vested interest in something you will do what it takes to insure it's survival. Including synergizing your seperate markets for interoperability, pigeon holding developers into that line of work.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[zn0k]

Not quite. Iris GL is from 1982 and turned into OpenGL in 1992. DirectX was first released in 1995. So OpenGL is older than DirectX but not by a decade.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[InsaneProcessor]

Yea, I've played them. They lack the realism that current games have. I don't play them anymore.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Synchis]

The interesting part of your whole argument is that you completely ignore the fact that both Wolfire and ID Software do more than just rant about it.

They develop games that support OpenGL. What they want, is *other* big developers to stop supporting the inferior libraries and open their eyes.

Plan and simple: There is nothing bad about Open standards.

- If they are broken, you can fix them.
- if they lack features, you can add them.
- If the performance is poor, you can improve it.

Can you say this about Direct3D? The only entity that can fix, add to, or improve Direct3D is Microsoft. Period.

- If its broken, you have to wait for a patch.
- If it lacks features, you have to wait for the next version, and pray that it supports your operating system.
- If the performance sucks, you have to deal with it.

Whats good about that? And thats talking a strictly Windows audience.

From a cross platform point of view, there really is just one choice. And its not Direct3D.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

Not to insult the 12 year old programmer target market

You're forgetting here that the people learning these will be the people that will be professionals soon.

Like I said in the original comment too, Adobe doesn't really care about teens pirating their Photoshop for home use. Over their amateur use they learn it and later go work at some place, and they will use Photoshop in work environment too.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[InsaneProcessor]

There isn't enough of a game market on a Mac to justify the expense. You have to pick the largest base when it is over 50% to be profitable. Unless you don't mind loosing to money.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[TheRaven64]

To further complicate things, DirectX 1 didn't come with Direct3D. This was not introduced until 1996, but was based on a third-party product that was shipping back in 1992.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Tirhakah]

As noted in TFA, Blizzard releases all their games simultaneously for Windows & Mac. It doesn't appear to have hurt them yet...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[logjon]

I think his problem is the same as mine, that being that this is neither 'news' nor 'stuff that matters'

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure about 7, but the Vista driver model disabled the hardware acceleration path in DirectSound. If you want hardware accelerated sound then you need to use OpenAL on Vista, not DirectSound. This irritated Creative Labs a lot, but considering the fact that they insist on putting buggy crap in ring 0 on any platform that they provide drivers for, they probably deserved it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Midnight Thunder]

Just to get you started: http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

let's just take Linux for example, drivers that work in one distro don't always work in another

If done right, they absolutely do. If you're talking about the 3D market, nVidia has one download per OS per CPU architecture. So the same 64-bit (or 32-bit) driver will work across all distros.

Having a stable/typical setup helps, as you can focus in more on your product than worrying about whether or not it will work on all these different platforms/drivers/whatever.

Yeah, it's great, until you want to do something that stable/typical setup won't support.

Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.

That "someone" is a group of people from many companies, not just one. And while it's "controlled", it is much more freely licensed -- contrast to DirectX. How likely is Microsoft to license the DirectX APIs for Linux or OS X -- or worse yet, PS3 or Wii? How much would they charge for it?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[TheRaven64]

5) OpenGL is easy(er?) to pick up

It used to be, with the fixed-function pipeline. Unfortunately all of the easy bits were deprecated with 3.0 and removed with 3.1 (fortunately people like nVidia then re-introduced them all as extensions). OpenGL 3.1 is incredibly powerful, but I wouldn't describe it as easy.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[RightSaidFred99]

What rubbish. The simple fact is that on the highest end hardware DirectX supports more features. OpenGL is well behind now. The original somehow turns Direct3D's deficiencies a decade ago into a reason for modern game developers not to use it. Yeah - that makes sense.

OpenGL is a better choice for cross-platform development. It's not a better choice for high end game development on Windows. In fact it's a worse choice. Period.

It's just more false choice syndrome. Use OpenGL where it makes sense, and use DirectX where it makes sense.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anpheus]

Hasn't Carmack all but reversed his position on DirectX, saying that OpenGL is failing to keep up?

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/08/24/0059218/Linux-Port-For-ids-Tech-5-Graphics-Engine-Unlikely?from=rss

Oh yeah.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[RAMMS EIN]

``1) completely bogus: OpenGL has an both a good documentation and extremely good literature''

Have links? I had a hard time finding good documentation on OpenGL. A lot of what I did find either uses lots of Windows-specific things, or introduced a lot of code with little explanation. Eventually, I did learn, but I wouldn't say the documentation I used was great. The opengl.org website, in particular, could be more navigable... Also, I've found virtually no introduction to programming OpenGL ES, especially version 2.0.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

Sure, it's all about MONEY, like when your Dictator of choice tells you that 50% of your customer base are left in the cold (as in Windows XP isn't running DX11). You keep chasing that M$ pipedreams of vendor enslavement, you keep screwing your customers every 3-4 turnkey years when M$ decides it's time for some strategic jostling.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[moderatorrater]

1) completely bogus: OpenGL has an both a good documentation and extremely good literature

It's nice that you think so, but I've seen the documentation for both, and I much prefer the directx documentation. You are, in fact, helping to prove the GP's point: when Microsoft hears from a developer that their documentation sucks, they'll work on it and improve it. When open source people hear that something sucks, they insult the user and stick their heads back in their asses.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because OpenGL is already better, as TFA explains.

Except that OpenGL is NOT better. It may have support for vendor's random GPU features, but technical features alone do not make for a better product.

From the Article:

On Windows, it's a fact that the DirectX graphics drivers are better maintained than the OpenGL graphics drivers.

Similarly, it's a fact that more gaming graphics programmers know how to use DirectX than OpenGL, so it's cheaper (less training required) to make a game using DirectX than OpenGL.

Microsoft has worked hard on DirectX 10 and 11, and they're now about as fast as OpenGL, and support almost as many features.

I prefer DirectX because it has better development support, a better development environment, an integrated complete game package, and provides nearly the same speed and functionality as OpenGL. Yes, I've experimented with SDL and did not like it.

The Article also gets one thing wrong:

However, there's one big problem: they don't work on Windows XP!

This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Blakey Rat]

Well, and beyond that, the fact is that it doesn't work.

What started up IE development again? Was it 3 years of whining and whining on Slashdot about how Microsoft had a browser monopoly? Or was it another browser stepping up to the plate and actually *competing* for the first time since IE6 came out?

Microsoft doesn't care about products with no real competition-- Powerpoint has no real competition on Windows, look how shitty it is. It's by far the worst of the Office apps, and Microsoft simply does not care. Now if someone came and blew Powerpoint away, sold the software for less-- you bet your ass Microsoft would start moving again.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mcvos]

I am surprised that someone would want to use something as old as opengl. I bet those people still read their mail with elm, pine and mail.

You have no idea. My computer still uses TCP/IP!

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[GreatBunzinni]

That being said I've yet to see a game using OpenGL that can render anything as well/as quickly as DX10.

That's cute and all but It's just a shame that it's blatantly and fundamentally wrong. Taken from TFA:

It's common knowledge that OpenGL has faster draw calls than DirectX (see NVIDIA presentations like this one if you don't want to take my word for it), and it has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions.

The link to NVidia's presentation is here and the wikipedia article on the subject also states that OpenGL is faster than DirectX.

So, where exactly do you base your "OMG OpenGL is tHe sLowZz" claims?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ET3D]

[Slashdot ate my post, so I'll try again.]

It's more than this. The article is a serious bit of FUD. OpenGL lagged behind in implementing DX10 features, such as geometry shaders, and the people who were disappointed with OpenGL 3 and decided to try DX10 weren't Microsoft lackeys. The article links to a 3-4 year old NVIDIA article mentioning that Direct3D call overhead is higher than OpenGL's, and that's true for DX9. A large part of the work on DX10 was to remove overheads. The tesselation available in OpenGL is ATI's previous simpler installation, which was also available for Direct3D (as a proprietary extension from ATI), and my guess is that the latest tesselation hardware isn't yet available in OpenGL (correct me if I'm wrong). Catalyst 9.12 added support for GL_ARB_geometry_shader4 and cube map arrays (see the release notes), features available in Direct3D for quite a while.

I agree that OpenGL is the best for cross platform, the rest of the article is IMO bad advice for developers who want to develop cutting edge games. It's not terrible advice, and it actually makes some sense for indies, but still... I do want to see Microsoft continue to dominate for the simple fact that it's the only one actively trying to advance the hardware and keep both major players supplying the same features. OpenGL is neat in providing a way to add unique features, but these are developer hell. Using different extensions on different hardware makes things a lot harder, and it takes quite a bit of time for the ARB to standardise on an extension.

Regarding WebGL, I think it's the future for indies, the only important thing I see missing there is a way to protect your code. That could be a real issue. My prediction for the future is that the PC as we know if will decline, as the web browser will become an application platform that's decoupled from the OS. OpenGL (ES) has an important place as the backbone of the OS, but I don't know how much it will be used directly. So I do think that OpenGL will win in the long run (unless microsoft decouples Direct3D from Windows).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[thetoadwarrior]

The PC/Mac version will be OpenGL. Of course they will be working with DirectX. They have to for the 360 port.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Victor Liu]

This is not entirely true for a framework like OpenGL. You surely can add your own features or improve performance on your end, but these changes must be incorporated into graphics card drivers by vendors in order to have a wide audience. This is where it helps to have the industry clout that Microsoft does (not that this is necessarily a good thing, but they have the power to push through changes into hardware using their DirectX specs).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[pyalot]

You're completely delusional right? http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man/

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[jpmorgan]

OpenGL? Better? Sure, it was once. And it was going to be better than DirectX again, with the release of OpenGL 3.0. But then the Khronos group scrapped the Long Peaks draft to appease the CAD companies. Yes, there are extensions and with vendor specific extensions, OpenGL can do everything Direct3D can today. But after how many GL_NV_* extensions does OpenGL stop being a cohesive API?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[realityimpaired]

If done right, they absolutely do. If you're talking about the 3D market, nVidia has one download per OS per CPU architecture. [nvidia.com] So the same 64-bit (or 32-bit) driver will work across all distros.

The nVidia driver compiles and installs a new kernel module on the fly when you install the driver. It is a distribution of the necessary source, using a proprietary license, but the .so that gets made for my laptop will almost certainly not work on your computer, even if you've got the same video card as I do.

That's also why you need to reinstall the nVidia driver whenever you install a new kernel.

The only drivers that *do* work reliably and consistently from distro-to-distro and system-to-system are the ones that have been mature and in the kernel for a long time, like the Tulip driver, or the old Soundblaster drivers. Modern sound cards have different quirks depending on the original vendor (so a Dell-branded Sigmatel 9205 sound chipset usually requires different flags from an HP-branded Sigmatel 9205), as do most wireless cards and even video cards. The only wireless cards that I've had consistently working well are Intel wireless cards, and that's because the people making the driver have been actively developping the driver and getting it into the kernel... even so, most Intel wireless cards still require a binary blob you have to get from Intel to work properly.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[n8_f]

Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.

No, that is why it is an open standard. Once it is out there, anyone can implement it and conform to the standard. Maybe someone maintains it and maybe someone is working on the next version, but no one controls it. To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern? And what platforms does OpenGL run on? All of those plus dozens or even hundreds more. If you want to port your app to the iPhone or the Palm Pre or an Android phone, who is going to have to do more work, the person with the app programmed in DirectX or the person with the app programmed in OpenGL? That is the advantage of an open standard.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[AmiMoJo]

But FYI, PS3 and Wii both include a form of OpenGL

And that is why this argument is largely irrelevant. Games cost so much to produce now that it's almost mandatory for them to come out on at least PS3, 360 and Windows. Wii tends to get left out due to it's relatively low graphics performance. The point is that any game dev is probably going to have to support both DirectX and OpenGL/PS3 libraries.

Most game engines do that by abstracting the rendering stuff in such a way that it can use Direct 3D or OpenGL. Sometimes this does result in some dodgy ports where one system's version is considerably slower than it's rival's, and the PS3 having an unusual architecture which requires doing things somewhat differently to get good performance doesn't really help, but it works.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

So to summary all of your text, you're saying it's impossible to compete against a proprietary format like DirectX with open source alternative, because proprietary developers have the money to innovate, develop and finish their product? So basically you're saying that open source method doesn't work?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[jpmorgan]

Windows Vista fully supports hardware accelerated OpenGL.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[chentiangemalc]

Not that the age really makes a difference but OpenGL is older, released in 1992, DirectX in 1995. The most recent version of DirectX was released in Oct 2009.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[chentiangemalc]

keep in mind Microsoft had very clear support times for Windows XP, Windows XP is so old now, and has passed is now in extended support period. It is now two OS versions behind the current.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[neokushan]

I find it hard to believe that DirectX is soley responsible for keeping Windows a monopoly. The vast, vast majority of PCs running windows out there are not used for gaming. What other "technologies" are keeping windows a monopoly? Program compatibility is the only other thing keeping people "tied" to windows, other than them simply being used to it and happy enough. If you want to blame anyone, blame the companies that can't be bothered to port their apps to another platform, not Microsoft for being the platform of choice.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[hrimhari]

That must explain why some boxes insist in coding their "products" in VB... Good thing that's not the rule and they're not usually the leaders.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[hairyfeet]

And how many have put out DX10 or DX11 exclusive games? Not any that I know about. And while I haven't been looking at DX11 (I have Windows 7 so I already have it) I was running DX10 on XP just fine. There was a hack released soon after Vista stank up the place that allowed DX10 on XP.

So you can rant all you want, but DX9 is here to stay. Hell most of the games released now are "multiplatform" (shudder) in that they are for x360 first, and then a lousy port is done later. Which is why you have ATI pushing Eyefinity and Nvidia pushing GPGPUs, because everyone is releasing for the consoles which the $65 GPUs can beat easily so the GPU manufacturers have to come up with other ways to push cards.

But from the royal shitfits I read Khronos really screwed the pooch when it came to OpenGL V3, basically saying they only care about CAD. So why would a game developer want to work with a bunch that only cares about CAD, and where they have to have extensions hacked on for both Nvidia and ATI? If anything the only thing MSFT screwed the pooch with regards to DX was making 10 and 11 Windows Vista and 7 only, thus insuring that game developers will only target DX9 for the majority of games. But I don't see DX9 going anywhere anytime soon.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[chentiangemalc]

Microsoft is not stopping any one from creating competitors to DirectX. Just nobody has created something of the same caliber - you're free to create something with more power, better documentation, more flexibility then directX. OpenGL has failed to so far, that's not Microsoft's fault. Use DirectX in your development and with less effort realism is added into games, less effort for sounds etc, and there are plenty of examples and very high quality documentation. (openGL documentation doesn't come close) It's not Microsoft's fault nobody else has created something better ...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[parlancex]

The main difference here is that the DirectX API has actually been updated in a significant way over many revisions. The ARB is terrified of breaking backwards compatibility and as such the base API has been incredibly slow at bringing new features into the core API or revising and cleaning up the core API.

I remember chuckling to myself when OpenGL 2.0 was finalized that point sprites in the core API was a major selling feature; this in spite of point sprites had been around for years and dozens of more important new features had become mainstream since then. Are other features available through extensions? Yes, but many of them are vendor specific, and the ARB extensions aren't guaranteed to deliver full functionality in certain cases nor will they deliver optimal performance. John Carmack wrote nearly 4 completely different rendering engines for Doom 3 because of differences between vendor specific extensions that were important at the time the game was released.

The bottom line is that DirectX is used more often than OpenGL for a lot more reasons than just marketing. The core OpenGL API still designed around the assumption that texture and vertex resources reside in system memory! If the ARB knew what they were doing they would make clean breaks in the API at important junctures in graphics hardware evolution and use those breaks to provide a fully featured, organized and well documented API. Just a thought.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Spiked_Three]

Not bogus at. I am working on a project at this very moment that started in DirectX. Sat on the shelf for a number of years, and when I decided to start it up again, made the switch to openGL. I wished I had not.
1) openGL documentation sucks at best. Examples are all of the same beginner draw a triangle type.
2) Not only does directX provide more than just graphics, even within the graphics space it provides a lot more grunt code I have to do myself in openGL.
3) I use managed languages. I am not developing a game, I am developing business software (CAD/CAM related). Both openGL and DirectX currently suck in this respect. At least directX has XNA for games. OpenGL has no native (managed) Windows forms or WPF implementations. If I was developing a game, XNA is the easy choice. But since I am developing a business app, I live with stale dead third party libraries (TAO in this case).
4) Very relevant - for whatever reason, mind share is currently on DirectX - and from a community support perspective that is huge.
5) I was able to be productive in directX 8 (where I started) enormously faster than openGL. Even now, I end up converting directX code to openGL most of the time, as opposed to finding openGL code that shows what I am trying to accomplish.

Like I said, I wished I would have stayed with DirectX. If and when this project gets completed I will never use openGL again unless they provide better managed language support , better documentation and better built in functionality. I get tired of passing in integer values to set parameters. When I want to set a light color I want to call SetLightColor(Color), not setSomeParamater(12, 15); It makes for unreadable and unmaintainable code. I know, there are those who still think C is great, and they write some of the ugliest code on the planet, let them collect in the a little tiny small group for all I care.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[hairyfeet]

Oh, and for those that would like to try it here is a link for DX10 for WinXP. I have moved on to Windows 7 HP X64 (it really is what Vista should have been) but I have run DX10 for XP in the past and it does work, it is just as the parent poster said not officially supported.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ceoyoyo]

One big advantage of an open standard is that you can implement it on whatever system you wish. OpenGL is available pretty much everywhere that's even close to reasonable. DirectX is ONLY available where Microsoft has written an implementation - on MS platforms.

It's starting to bite them now. All the smart phones (except the Windows Mobile ones I guess) are running OpenGL ES.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[englishknnigits]

I do agree that competition usually results in consumers getting better products (duh) but do you really want to develop a game for 10% of the market share or alternatively, develop the same game for 10 different platforms? It makes a lot of sense from a consumer standpoint about quality, but it doesn't make as much sense from a developers standpoint. Yes, more competition will also breed better APIs, more efficient libraries, etc. but I think I would rather code with a semi-crappy API then code with 10 beautiful APIs.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[geekoid]

The whole point of getting a package is so you don't have to dick around with it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[HeckRuler]

Your post intrigues me. Others have torn apart your argument and spread it to the winds and yet you still have a +5 insightful mod. Exactly where do I sign up with microsoft to convert mod points into cash?

Also, 4) Xbox support is indeed relevant and I imagine that MS will always give DX and edge there. But the point is that MS is abusing it's power to give DX that edge. MS is influencing the market on the whole (beyond consoles) to choose it's crappy alternative to an open and free and SUPERIOR option. And how could they not do this you may ask? They could support openGL on their consoles better. Yes, it doesn't generate them profit, but it's the right thing to do.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Narishma]

Those tutorials I think do more harm than good, especially to beginners. They encourage copy-pasting and don't explain a lot of things. Not to mention the sloppy and deprecated coding styles (both C++ and OpenGL). Somebody started redoing them in modern C++ but stopped at the 3rd lesson...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Ronin Developer]

We know that when you have a large number of competitors you get better products. The eReaders are a perfect example. First the Kindle and now about 10 competitors all showing that the competition has created a much greater choice for consumers as well as better features. Further netbooks and tablet PCs as well as touch capabilities in phones and the tablets are perfect examples of what happens when there's no technology to lock you in thus propping up the monopoly.

The problem with this argument is that with the Kindle there are now 10 competitors with 10 different document specifications. Netbooks and tablet PCs are based on a few operating systems - Windows being the primary OS. The manufacturers of those devices, while diverse, are based on a common hardware architecture.

The argument of superiority, while it may be true, won't matter if there isn't a significant adoption. Look at Betamax vs VHS. Betamax was clearly the superior technology, yet it lost out to the sheer marketing power put behind VHS. Borland had superior development tools to Microsoft in every way DESPITE Microsoft owning the technology. Yet, Borland blew it.

OpenGL will survive in niche circles and won't make it make stream unless a concerted effort is made to promote it and it gains a foothold in established development houses. This article did nothing to make me want to jump on the bandwagon (I am not a game developer...but, the argument wasn't persuasive enough for me).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ceoyoyo]

Even though they didn't go all the way, OpenGL is considerably better now than it used to be. You don't actually have to touch the legacy pipeline if you don't want to. It's being still there gives the CAD companies etc. a bit of breathing room, but it is clearly on the chopping block.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[bill_mcgonigle]

5) DirectX was easy to pick up

So, I've written a few small apps that use OpenGL, but I must say they're quite bad and I don't really get OpenGL.

Does anybody have a good/favorite reference? I've got the official book and downloaded several online tutorials, but I'd prefer something along the lines of "Thinking in Java"(etc.) that doesn't focus on the API as much as the concepts.

I can look at code all day to see 'how' but often 'why' is much more instructive.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[TheRaven64]

In that case, it works in the same way that OpenGL works on Linux when you don't have any drivers for your GPU.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[tepples]

Games cost so much to produce now that it's almost mandatory for them to come out on at least PS3, 360 and Windows.

But for most games that let the players look at the same monitor, Windows gets left out. Exceptions are mostly Left 4 Dead and EA Sports games.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[shutdown -p now]

Never the less COM adds a layer of complexity that I don't find when using OpenGL. I'm not sure what the situation is now with DirectX, I understand its better since 9, but still, I have nightmares about COM activation across network domains and permissions issues and the list really went on and on

I repeat: DirectX is not really COM. Yes, MSDN refers to it as COM for the sake of simplicity - because it's similar enough on the surface, and because, by some definitions, DX objects are COM objects. However:

There are no COM coclasses there, no marshaling, no proxies, nothing. All that it has from COM is that it uses a bunch of classes which has strictly defined vtable layout and method calling conventions, same as specified in COM (or, if you prefer, defined by a bunch of C struct declarations with function pointers); it uses IUnknown for the first three vtable slots, with its refcounting semantics, and rules for who should AddRef and who should Release when passing pointers around; and it uses the standard COM convention of returning HRESULT to report errors. That is all. There are, by definition, no activation or networking or permission issues, because there is no networking, no activation, and no permission checks.

It's not any more COM than Mozilla's XPCOM is COM.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ceoyoyo]

DirectX supports more features because it is now so dominant that Microsoft dictates what the features are going to be and the hardware companies implement them.

OpenGL isn't a better choice for cross-platform development. If OpenGL and DirectX are the pool we're choosing from, there is no choice. DirectX only works where MS decides it will work. It's not really a surprise that DirectX works better on Windows than OpenGL. OpenGL works infinitely better (literally) on everything else.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[gmueckl]

As part of my work, I do some very advanced things in OpenGL and I have yet to find a hardware feature that is available in DirectX, but not OpenGL. Can you please point me to a particular feature that is missing in OpenGL?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Prune]

SDL has a number of problems and we've dropped it from our projects. It is definitely not performance oriented; for example, calls to WaitForSingleObject in the Windows port even when it can be determined that no blocking is necessary, and thus wasting 4000 cycles on a kernel call instead of 200 on an interlocked instruction. That's just one random example that came up when we were troubleshooting performance. Note that I'm not at all ranting against using other libraries, and I'm generally sour to DirectX. It's just that SDL is a mediocre example for anything other than input handling. For threading, pthreads works great for both Linux and Windows (the Windows port is much better optimized than SDL threads), or even better yet from a software engineering perspective, boost threads can be used. In a high performance optimized to a given engine architecture, a custom thread library with custom task scheduling etc. is the real choice, and would written at a lower level than these libraries, with OS primitives and interlocked instructions. With networking, there is a huge amount of libraries out there that are optimized for various tasks better than SDL Net, and for sound OpenAL is the obvious choice (using libavcodec/ffmpeg for decoding).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Svartalf]

Considering that they're no longer doing NVidia vs AMD extensions- only really ARB ones...

The obkect model's a bit clunky (Giving the ARB a nasty look over failing to give us the "real" OpenGL 3.0...), but if you're talking D3D, you can only expect to target Windows, X-Box, and Windows Mobile. If you want to find the sticking point in that line of thought, look long and hard at the last item. That's the also-ran there in the lineup. If you want to target the smart phone platforms that're actually dominant right at the moment (for titles that can go there...and there's quite a few...) you're NOT going to be using D3D as your sole one. If you're going to pick a sole target, you're better off with OpenGL/OpenGL ES as it'll pretty much hit everything out of box. If you want peak on Windows, you do a dual backend.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Prune]

OpenGL 3.x with the omitted deprecated functionality IS quite easy to use, as the pruning the committee has done is significant, and things are much better organized and appear more orthogonal, while retaining the flexibility of what you do.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Prune]

The standard has evolved significantly since Carmack posted this, and the state of OpenGL is much further along than it was then, as the committee has adopted an accelerated roadmap (to a large extent due to the championing of NVIDIA).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[gmueckl]

You are missing much, much more important points here:

1. There is an SDK with literally hundreds of really, *really* cool top-notch high-end/highest-end demos for DirectX. Some of these come straight out of Microsoft Research. Nothing says "Use me! I'm cool!" like that set of demos. The closest thing on the OpenGL side of things that I know of is the demo gallery that nVidia has, but it's not as cool IMO.

2. There are debugging tools like PIX available for free. This thing has its restrictions, but seeing my colleagues analyzing textures, vertex buffers and draw calls graphically to figure out what they're doing wrong sometimes makes me envy them. And it turns out to be a real time saver. On the OpenGL side I find myself writing lots of this stuff from scratch just for my app. Sure, there are tools like bugle, but they are far inferior to what MS has to offer.

Having said that, I still feel more comfortable with OpenGL on Linux. This is what I'm used to and it works for me - not that this will ever make a difference, though.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[hkz]

Instead of passing the buck and bitching about others, why don't YOU make a direct competitor for DirectX? I'm fed up with asshats like you trying to push others around. GP's post was fair enough, but your post is just being reactionary. In fact you're the problem here.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Svartalf]

The main reason that people say the "it's slower" is that you can easily cut your own throat on some things if you don't know the proper way to read standards documents on things. For example...

VBO's, Vertex Buffer Objects, are a good, very fast way to store vertex data on the display adapter. Being on the adapter, though, with earlier cards, meant that you might be limited in just how much space you might have had (32-64Mb cards were the average at the time the game was written...), so what the developers typically did was recycle some of the VBO's allocated spaces for dynamic vertex content.

If you read the spec on the mapping call to get a host-side pointer to the memory that was safe to use, the act of mapping the VBO into host space was said that it "may" stall the pipeline. In truth, unless you know precisely what that "may" means for all instances of the drivers, it really, really should read " shall " and you should act accordingly.

If you do the mapping call in the inter-frame gap, you don't really see much worse than a 1-2 fps hit on things.

If you do the mapping call intra-frame, evil things happen. With one vendor's parts, the game worked fine, no problems.

With another vendor's parts, the driver, before it got fixed, would be drug right down to slide-show frame rates, even with their top of the line card (which should have blasted it's way through anything...). Why? Because the vendor opted to do the easy way out and read it as a "shall" and stalled the pipeline and the game was recycling ONE VBO for about a half dozen to a dozen dynamic renderings. It was enough to crater the engine's rendering pass as it waited to pick up the smoking pieces. The vendor couldn't understand WHY someone would do that sort of thing because the "sensible" thing was to allocate, push the data, use the VBO, and then discard it, using the memory manager routines to reap the VBO's allocation. The problem is, there wasn't enough host memory on the low end to allow the manager to give the pool back fast enough and you ended up with failed allocations on the low end while you were rendering scenes.

Keep in mind, though, while there's sharp edges in OpenGL- there's at least a few in D3D like this as well.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Svartalf]

Heh... Normally, I'd just tell you google for "opengl api documentation" but I'll just be nice and hand you the first link from the aforementioned search...

Why don't you look here, hm?

At this page, there's an amazing array of documents, including the specification (which explains what's going on underneath the hood amongst other things...), API references for 2.1, 3.0, the OGL Shader Language, and other things.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Buck passing is done when said. Everything else is easier said than done.

Being Microsoft helps. Many of Microsoft's achievements have been by just being a mammoth Goliath monopoly. But that is them just doing their job. If you can't innovate, then gather an army and go to war. Only lawyers can tell you what you can and can't do.

Innovation at Microsoft is a plus, but not a requirement. The substance of their products is only part of the very large picture.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mrchaotica]

you can only expect to target Windows, X-Box, and Windows Mobile. If you want to find the sticking point in that line of thought, look long and hard at the last item. That's the also-ran there in the lineup.

X-Box is an "also-ran" too, compared to the Wii (and especially compared to the Wii and PS3 combined).

If you want to target the smart phone platforms that're actually dominant right at the moment (for titles that can go there...and there's quite a few...) you're NOT going to be using D3D as your sole one. If you're going to pick a sole target, you're better off with OpenGL/OpenGL ES as it'll pretty much hit everything out of box.

Are there that many games targeting mobile and non-mobile platforms with the same codebase anyway? There are so many differences between mobile and non-mobile (screen size & resolution, controls, amount of time the player has per sitting, etc.) that, realistically, if you want to target both things then you want to make two entirely different games to begin with.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[dgatwood]

Yes, I've seen the man pages. I've personally passed on several dozen bug reports in the OpenGL and GLUT man pages. Having reference documentation is well and good, but reference docs don't paint a complete picture by themselves. That's like trying to learn the English language by reading a dictionary.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[scot4875]

- If its broken, you have to wait for a patch.
- If it lacks features, you have to wait for the next version, and pray that it supports your operating system.
- If the performance sucks, you have to deal with it.

None of this has to do with an open vs. closed standard. You, as a random programmer, may be able to fix a bug in whatever OpenGL implementation you're using, and that's fine. But the complaints that people have (including John Carmack) are not with the implementations -- they're with the OpenGL standard itself; and no, you cannot, as a random programmer, do a single thing about shortcomings of the standard.

--Jeremy

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[binarylarry]

What the parent meant was releasing shitty, worthless shovel wear that some retards on the PC might like doesn't have a business case on other platforms.

And I tend to agree.

Gods and Generals anyone?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[binarylarry]

wear = ware ;)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mdwh2]

I use both, and find them as easy overall. Each is better than the other in different areas.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[swillden]

TFA says that OpenGL not only does everything Direct3D does today, but things that Direct3D doesn't yet do. Is the author lying?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[RightSaidFred99]

Advanced things like this, right? I'm sure that would be cake in OpenGL.

But let's not be disingenuous. At a basic level you can access the hardware and do whatever the hell you want. By that reasoning, I guess Java is just a good a language to write a Linux device driver in because theoretically you could use JNI and some limited Java VM in-module to handle the work, right?

Direct3D, as an API, supports more hardware features at the API level than OpenGL does without reverting to basically bypassing OpenGL and going straight to the hardware.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[jensend]

Interesting. Did you send bug reports to the sdl list? Is there any chance these problems are fixed with the 1.3/2.0 series?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mdwh2]

Was the poster you replied to an OpenGL developer?

Comparing random people to a company makes no sense. There are just as many people who flame in favour of DirectX against OpenGL too. Yourself, for example:

they insult the user and stick their heads back in their asses.

You are, in fact, helping to prove the GP's point: when OpenGL developers hear that their documentation sucks, they'll work on it an improve it. When Microsoft people hear that something sucks, they insult the user and stick their heads back in their asses...

(FWIW: I use DirectX and OpenGL, and these days prefer the former - but these childish flamewars from Microsoft fans give us all a bad name. Give it a rest, please.)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[cptnapalm]

"Betamax was clearly the superior technology"

Not really. I remember having to swap cassettes to watch some movies on Beta that I didn't on VHS. Beta had shorter record times per tape too. Visually, they were not too different, but the length of tape difference was significant.

With regards to your mention of Borland, I think that if Microsoft seriously blew a release (Vista, for example) it doesn't matter as they own the platform: people will use the crap version anyway. If a third party blows it, they are quite likely dead in the water no matter what they do afterward (Borland in your example).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[that this is not und]

Borland had superior development tools to Microsoft in every way DESPITE Microsoft owning the technology. Yet, Borland blew it.

Now, that's a history that has yet to be fully investigated and written. And probably it can't be written because slimes in expensive offices at Microsoft will never tell. But it's safe to say that Borland was slimed by Microsoft. They didn't 'blow it' unless sliming is considered a legitimate business practice.

History will come out eventually. Schoolchildren 100 years from now will be told the truth, and nothing that Bill Gates can do in his lifetime will be able to change that. Carnegie spent a lot of money on libraries and still wasn't able to clear his record either.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[gmueckl]

What I see in this video is "just" a state of the art game engine renderer. The current generation of games only expoits a subset of the features of current generation hardware. Were it not for the strict realtime requirements that are present in games, which push the available CPU time for rendering in the range of 3 to 6ms for 60FPS (the rest of the time is taken up by other parts of the game), the visuals could be immensely more impressive. And none of that is something that can be done in DirectX exclusively.

Hardware tesselation is demoed in the video you mentioned, but this is only available on highest end ATI hardware at the moment and AMD published extension specifications for that as early as March 2009 (see for example http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/AMD/vertex_shader_tessellator.txt)! When did Windows 7 hit the market? October?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[anton_kg]

I played in lugaru game and it just works on my old Linux thinkpad t42.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[that this is not und]

What rubbish. The simple fact is that on the highest end hardware DirectX supports more features. OpenGL is well behind now.

"We're winning the war" said Rommel, in a telegram to Berlin.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[that this is not und]

Direct3D, as an API, supports more hardware features at the API level than OpenGL does without reverting to basically bypassing OpenGL and going straight to the hardware.

Unfortunately, it can only do so through a rather formidable and opaque hardware abstraction layer called Windows.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[that this is not und]

Yes, we know all about Microsoft's planned obsolescence. It's shocking to see it presented as a virtue. But, then, you're probably used to talking mostly to people who make a lot of money selling stuff.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Khyber]

"Then instead of ranting about DirectX, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and make a competitor for DirectX?"

Sure, as soon as you teach me how to program such a thing!

Hey, you asked.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[icebraining]

That's because developers often do OSS projects for themselves, and since many times they don't need GUIs, working on them is boring.

It's not a matter of not realizing GUIs are important for the average user. It's a matter of doing what they want and need, and if others want pretty GUIs, they can do it themselves. The "average users" (aka non-programmers) have the tendency to think OSS devs owe them something, and contribute very little.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

There is - its called Keynote, however its on the wrong platform to actually challenge Powerpoint.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[chentiangemalc]

this is just not limited to MS, pretty much every vendor (including open source projects such as Linux) limit the amount of time support is provided for a product, if every single product ever produced by Microsoft continued to be supported FOREVER that would just be a waste of time and money. I much prefer some investment in current and future development then stuck in the past.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Razalhague]

And I bet that's IPv4.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ldj]

To make an analogy:

Commentator 1: I think it's too much to expect that an individual, without assistance, design, build, and launch an earth-orbiting satellite.

You: So basically you're saying that the Law of Gravity is completely wrong?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[zifferent]

Bad documentation is not an excuse for bad implementation. Testing and QA is the only way to find bugs like this and it should have been obvious that Direct X had such problems shortly after the first developer stumbled upon it. Unfortunately, it was closed source and such shortcomings were not disclosed. Hmm, I wonder where the blame lies?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[siloko]

The "average users" (aka non-programmers) have the tendency to think OSS devs owe them something, and contribute very little.

You what? The average user wants to do something on his computer and your chastising them for not breaking out the IDE and improving the code? I think you just proved the GP's point . . . it's all very well having a technically competent product with below average user experience but you can't then moan about lack of general acceptance. The simple fact is if you want blanket coverage you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator and imploring your users to improve the product for you is just not going to wash in the majority of cases.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Bungie]

I also first learned DirectX through Visual Basic.

The SDK provided a set of type libraries which made it much easier to work with the DirectX API under the VB IDE. (There is an OpenGL TypeLib for VB now). The documentation was also really good and even included Visual Basic specific examples.

As much as all the posters here complain about DirectX 6 (and Visual Basic) being inferior, it made it quite easy to jump in and start using DirectX as a novice programmer. That's the kind of thing that probably helped DirectX overtake OpenGL in popularity.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Timothee Besset of Id says:

"As far as idTech 5 (the Rage engine), it runs on PS3 and Mac already. Setting up idTech 5 to run on those platforms early on in our development cycle was a direct result of carrying Linux/Mac support in idTech 4 beforehand. It is likely i will be involved with idTech 5 in the near future, I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done."

http://ttimo.vox.com/

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[kriston]

DirectSound was dropped from Microsoft.NET applications. This was a serious problem for my needs. I'm not sure this is still true, but I don't get why Microsoft drops these important APIs from .NET applications.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ratboy666]

It's not a race. If software is written to a standard, there is an expectation that it can be moved to other platforms by simply recompiling.

The platform can then be chosen to meet the customers needs.

To give an example: A large company was using workstations made by ***, but were afraid that *** was going out of business. They then rebuilt the application to work on desktop systems made by **** utilizing graphics cards from ***** and ******. Since the applications used OpenGL for rendering, the move was simple. Unfortunately, neither of the implementations supported Z-cued lines, which was important for the application. The customer then tried workstations from vendor *** whose OpenGL implementation did support Z-cued lines.

Of course, wire-frame drawing with Z-cued lines isn't important in the gaming space, but using OpenGL as the lingua fraca allowed the software to be moved.

Does Direct3D support Z-cued lines? I don't know, and, frankly, don't care. The application cannot be moved to anything other than an Intel box, utilizing nVidia or ATI anyway.

Military applications, phones, embedded, are then not reachable.

So, sure, go ahead and use the graphics support that is appropriate. But, since there are only two platforms (Windows and XBox) that can use Direct3D, I have never even bothered to learn about it. It may be the "cat's meow", but it is easier to simply recommend the use of OpenGL on Windows (and I could not, honestly, care less about XBox), and guarantee at least a path for portability.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Zephiris]

It's not officially supported, because it's a hacked implementation from the "Alky Project", and I doubt even the final source code they released after going under and not being able to stay funded.

It's not real DirectX 10. No hardware acceleration, just an API wrapper from an incomplete project that couldn't get funding, which noone has continued (despite source being out there). It doesn't work with most games, and can cause severe stability problems.

DirectX 10/11 for XP will not be possible unless Microsoft releases a service pack enabling WDDM drivers, which they've stated repeatedly they will not, will never do.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Zephiris]

That's why generally the extensions get approved after proving themselves stable/useful/coherent to the spec by the OpenGL ARB...and then still aren't supported by ATI.

ATI's OpenGL support has infamously been bad since the beginning, when I was getting backported support for OpenGL 1.5 on my Geforce 256, and it beat the Radeon 32DDR in support, stability, and driver support.

If Nvidia is the only one really putting backing force behind OpenGL (due to XGI's acquisition and S3's backing out of desktop graphics), that isn't the fault of the Khronous group, the ARB, the specification, or Nvidia. People always blame the predominant company if its competitors have simply made business decisions that made business analysts turn purple in confusion.

OpenGL 3.0 might have watered itself down to appease CAD, but all of the hooplah is largely years old, and irrelevant. It's also apparently largely ignored that 3.1 and 3.2 have been out for quite a while, and largely improved against 3.0 (and that Nvidia supported it rather quickly).

If you're still bitching about OpenGL 3.0 as an excuse, you're obviously in the DirectX-banner-waving-camp to begin with.

When it comes down to -my- personal opinion, for clarity, I think OpenGL is less obfuscated, and better focused (on graphics). The perk that you get software updates per-version, and don't require an entirely new revision of hardware in general to fully support new minor versions and major updates to functionality, API, and performance, is also something that rarely (if ever) happens with DirectX.
Basically everything you need 'for OpenGL' is also supplied with the driver directly. How many people always complain in forums and troubleshooting tickets that "OMG, I haven't updated DirectX on this fresh install, how come it's not the latest version of special hack-on DLL that this game from 4 years ago needs, but is largely the same as all others??".

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[wmac]

US does things that Angola (just an example) does and for sure Angola does things that US does not!

OpenGL does not do everything Direct3D does, unless you mean drawing graphics. Author does not lie but covers up weaknesses of OpenGL and mislead. besides who says TFA or any other group/company cannot lie.

BTW I only use OpenGL (and that's because I develop for scientific purpose and some people in my field prefer *nix).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[cbhacking]

To be slightly pedantic, you're missing some DirectX platforms (Zunes, particularly ZuneHDs since the original one lacks 3D capability) and OpenGL does *NOT* run on the Xbox (I suppose if you use a custom firmware for the original it does, but you really can't count that - it's not the same platform anymore then).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Toksyuryel]

You're missing the point which was that developers of open source don't generally CARE if their project sees wide use and acceptance- they are making it for themselves, and sharing it in case it happens to be useful for someone else too. The developers that DO care about wide use and acceptance, typically WILL try to design toward such a goal (Ubuntu being the go-to example). Most do not however, and it's very important to understand this.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[tyrione]

OpenGL? Better? Sure, it was once. And it was going to be better than DirectX again, with the release of OpenGL 3.0. But then the Khronos group scrapped the Long Peaks draft to appease the CAD companies. Yes, there are extensions and with vendor specific extensions, OpenGL can do everything Direct3D can today. But after how many GL_NV_* extensions does OpenGL stop being a cohesive API?

Hardware vendors are just now releasing OpenGL 3.2 compliant drivers. CAD vendors have had plenty of notice dealing with deprecated APIs that held back all those forward thinking features in Long Peaks. They either stick with early releases or see their tools break with 3.3 and beyond.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

technical features alone do not make for a better product.

That's true, and I'd suggest you read an article (by the same developer) about why you should support Mac, and even Linux. Lugaru arguably wouldn't be the success it is without its Linux fanbase.

So the only real answer there is to either use GL, or wrap it all in enough abstraction that you can actually port it. TFA makes that point, too -- that in any decent engine, you're already abstracting it to the point where it really doesn't matter what the low-level API looks like, any more than I care what ATA calls look like -- I hardly care how my filesystem works.

And if that's the case, technical superiority wins -- if it runs at a higher framerate on GL, without being significantly more difficult, that's a win.

This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.

I find it interesting you'd make this argument, after you were just talking about how great the community, development environment, etc is.

However, as I understand it, it's useless for a game -- in order to actually get dx10 in your game, you'd have to do some questionable registry hacks and such, and it's quite possibly illegal. So you're not going to ship a game that supports XP, nor will you put time, effort, or community resources into supporting XP.

According to Zephiris, there are actually significant technical problems, also.

Compare that to OpenGL, which will Just Work on XP, with all modern features, and any future ones a manufacturer cares to support.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, there are extensions and with vendor specific extensions, OpenGL can do everything Direct3D can today. But after how many GL_NV_* extensions does OpenGL stop being a cohesive API?

After enough that you can't also use GL_ATI_* extensions to accomplish roughly the same thing.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

And that is why this argument is largely irrelevant. Games cost so much to produce now

The author is a successful indie developer, who employs all of five people. Lugaru is cross-platform, very good, and relatively well-known, and he credits a lot of that to their Mac and Linux support.

The point is that any game dev is probably going to have to support both DirectX and OpenGL/PS3 libraries.

Yet the argument is still quite relevant, in that if your engine abstracts properly, you should be using OpenGL on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The only platform where DirectX makes any sense is the 360, and that's because it doesn't really have OpenGL.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

whoooosh!
talk about missing the point!!

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Gwala]

Misrepresenting the truth perhaps. Sure you have *vendor specific* extensions all over the place - but that means you have feature X implemented on card Y but not Z; and the same feature gets implemented twice by different vendors in different ways with different bugs.

Frankly OpenGL is a mess - and the fact they scrapped the planned overhaul to make it developer competitive again means its pretty much dead in my opinion as a reasonable competitor.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[dotwaffle]

Historically, OpenGL has always been *easier* to code for, faster code execution, and generally able to compete based on the fact it's a graphics library and *NOT* a 3D Gaming API. That's not what it's for at all, it's a Graphics Library.

DirectX, on the other hand, has been more interested in providing a one-size-fits-all solution, doing user-input, networking, sound etc, all of which is rapidly becoming deprecated in the eyes of Microsoft.

As a 30,000 foot view of the two projects would imply, OpenGL defines a series of methods of doing things, with common physical/mathematical operations being specified as functions to make it both easier and faster to do things, while DirectX focuses on defining a new specification and forcing the hardware manufacturers to "keep up".

DirectX is the monopoly, beating manufacturers with a stick and screaming at customers going "I'm better!" while OpenGL has just got on with the job. The fact is, these days, there isn't much between them, and it comes down to what your use case is. If you want something that is going to be used in a gaming environment, you tend to lean towards DirectX. If you want something that is going to be used for a simulation environment, you tend to lean towards OpenGL. YMMV.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ravyne]

1) Quality is good, perhaps better than what Direct3D has. Quantity and diversity (eg beginner-level material) is lacking.
2) Because they're advocating XInput and XACT Audio instead. The only former DirectX component that doesn't have a new, better equivalent is DirectPlay, but nobody used that anyways, opting for raw Sockets code.
3) Microsoft officially supports XNA now, over Managed DirectX before it. Its a different approach to the API, but its the same technology underneath. If you want something that's a more literal translation of DirectX to C# or any of the .net languages (including IronPython, or IronRuby) there's SlimDX, a high-quality third-party library that's being used in many amatuer and professional games.
4) Snide aren't we?
5) Things started turning around with 8.1, though 9.0 was the big revolution to support shader architectures. Version 9, by the way, is the version which led Carmack to admit liking Direct3D -- In fact, at the time, with Direct3D in a modern state, and OpenGL mired in an unresponsive standards body and a sea of extensions, he openly admitted to liking it *more* than OpenGL.

OpenGL is a fine API from a technical perspective, however its been held back in the face of recent hardware advances by a refusal to break backwards compatibility, having not seen a major (and even then not as major as was hoped) revision until 3.0. The other issue is that there's no strong API ecosystem around OpenGL providing the rest of the media equation -- no clear equivelent to DirectSound/XAudio, XInput, etc -- Sure there are many alternatives, but actual support on end-user machines is fragmented. Khronos has been doing a great job working at correcting this with OpenGL, OpenGL|ES, OpenSL, OpenVG and their other efforts, but its not there yet. Khronos is exactly the kind of clear direction and branding that a serious DirectX contender needs.

If you look at it from a purely technical perspective, the only serious point OpenGL has on its side is portability. Portability is great, but please do remember that portability is more an ideal than a necessity. When the competing API runs on 90% of PCs and the leading game console in the US, that's "portable enough" for all practical purposes -- the ones the bean-counters care about. Here's an exercise -- add up all the machines where DirectX is the preferred API (Windows PCs and Xboxen), now add up all the systems where OpenGL is the preferred API (*nix boxen, Macs), neither the Wii nor the PS3 have OpenGL in a meaningful way (in other words, that developers actually use) -- Now, how do you define portability? Does portability mean running on the most *types* of machines, or the *most machines* period? Do you make the philosophical choice, or the practical?

Don't take what I say as anti-OpenGL in any way. OpenGL is wonderful and necessary, and if nothing else serves to keep Direct3D on it's toes. But I say that no reasonable person, with a realistic view of what it's supposed "portability benefit" amounts to, can say, without compromise, that OpenGL is inarguably and irrevocably, the better API without bringing in the philosophical argument of portability and open standards. There's nothing wrong with making the choice a philosophical one -- just admit it for what it is, rather than twisting things into non-existent technical matters or disparaging remarks and insinuations towards your competitor.

The sooner everyone admits that Open software / Open standards is a largely philosophical choice and standard to uphold one's self too, I think we can get past a lot of the mud-slinging and move onto more productive matters.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sopssa]

And more to the point, almost 10 years is incredibly long time to support a consumer level OS/application. If you need something to compare, most linux distros and mac osx only support max 1-2 years and then you are required to update if you want to keep up to date.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[BikeHelmet]

Except that OpenGL is NOT better. It may have support for vendor's random GPU features, but technical features alone do not make for a better product.

It has its pros and its cons.

Up until 2007, these were the pros:

• Superior performance
• Superior image quality

These still are:

• Superior cross-platform support

I prefer DirectX because it has better development support, a better development environment, an integrated complete game package, and provides nearly the same speed and functionality as OpenGL.

Good reasons. Now, if you were developing a game for three consoles, Windows, OSX, Linux, and phones, then you'd probably want to go with OpenGL. Either that or face nasty dev time.

As soon as you pass 2 target platforms, OpenGL is the better solution.

This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.

And this is incorrect. The Alky project went down. It was never a complete implementation. Most of the features that worked could be enabled in DX9 mode anyway - they just weren't.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Ralish]

Conspicuously absent from the article is John Carmack's more recent praise of DirectX, instead opting for far older quotes from him that reference versions of DirectX that are now either obsolete or at the very least superceded; in particular:

In January 2007, John Carmack said that "DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."

I don't know if it is the best graphics API mind you, but few would dispute Carmack's graphics programming credentials, and the above quote paints a somewhat different picture of his (modern) views on the API than the linked article.

Source: Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Kjella]

To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern?

You forget WINE. Compared to how few people actually work on it, it's surprising how much of DirectX it implements. Of course all the graphics functions is mapped to OpenGL so if the OpenGL implementation sucks so will WINE, but it's a fairly full implementation of DirectX 9 state. The downside is of course that DirectX is patented, not just patent FUD but quite clearly like for example some of the texture compression algorithms. If anyone tried to make a more official version for Linux, they'd probably pull out a few other things as well.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Daengbo]

I may not be the brightest bulb in the room, but I would guess that writing a game to an unsupported library is a bad idea. I don't think you could write to DX10 and claim WinXP support on the game box.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[thejynxed]

If this is true, that they don't care, then maybe those developers should stop posting their crap all over Freshmeat, SourceForge, and similar sites for other people (READ: Normal Users) to download and use. Since you know, it's "something they made just for themselves."

Usability is part of software development, even if you are only sharing the program with your sibling or best friend. Maybe some "developers" need a kick in the ass to realize this fact.

And so many OSS developers wonder why their projects implode, or otherwise miserably fail compared to their commercial counterparts. THIS.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[sznupi]

What makes you think only Windows gets left out? Do you really think multiplatform engines end up exploiting the strengths of consoles optimally?

Those are hybrids. Not great at anything.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[DaVince21]

That's exactly a problem if you're a non-Windows user, though.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[hairyfeet]

Well considering the fact that nearly all are writing for the x360 FIRST, and we poor PC gamers only get the leftovers (multiplatform...shudder) then I really don't think in the long run DX10 and DX11 are really gonna amount to squat, not unless the x720 comes out with support for them.

So while I agree it is a hack and not the most stable of things I think ultimately MSFT shot themselves in the foot with DX 10 and 11 being Vista/7 only. When you consider that XP has 70% of users, to Windows Vista's 18% and Windows 7's 4%, it would be kinda nuts to write for an API that has less than 25% of the market.

Slightly OT, but you want to know the moment when I knew MSFT was going to shoot themselves in the foot again with windows 7? When they withdrew the Cheap upgrade option and family packs. I knew quite a lot of people that were willing to switch to Windows 7 HP for $50, and even more that would have plopped down the cash for the 3 pack like I did soon after trying it. But by raising the prices those people said "Why get screwed? XP is working just fine" and will probably keep XP until it runs out of support in 2014. Considering what an utter failure Vista was the LAST thing they needed was everyone avoiding Windows 7 like they did Vista, and there are a whole lot of folks out there with good PCs that could easily run Windows 7 HP and would have told their families it was okay to buy a PC with Win7.

To me it is just one more proof that without Bill at the helm MSFT is just flailing around in the dark. Ballmer is a classic "screw everything but the quarter" MBA type that lacks long term vision. By converting all those Windows XP users he could have wiped out the memory of Vista and have the numbers he needed to show Windows 7 as a runaway success and with it been able to push other tech like .NET, DX11, Silverlight, Live Messenger, etc. Instead all he thinks about is the quarterly report and pisses off many who would have adopted the latest OS and spread the word it was good. Stupid move Ballmer, stupid move.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

alleged superior cross platform support

Erm... It is superior. Direct3D exists on Windows and Xbox 360. OpenGL exists everywhere except Xbox 360, including newer web browsers.

ignoring the tons of games that are currently running on xbox 360 AND ps3

Well, it also "ignores" the games that actually have both a Direct3D and OpenGL renderer. Yes, you can make the game cross-platform beyond the library. But if you do it with OpenGL, you get a lot of platforms for free.

It's a bit like saying cross-platform C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Java, or cross-platform-but-native C++ apps disprove the effectiveness of Qt.

These things make it easier to port your game, because OpenGL is already a cross-platform graphics library. If you have to build an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL and Direct3D both, you're basically implementing a cross-platform library yourself -- much like, say, Qt. It's do-able, but you're reinventing the wheel.

I mean, to put it another way, does the fact that Quake 1 runs very well in software mode disprove the alleged superior rendering capabilities of modern graphics cards? Or maybe all it means is that people can do things the hard way?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Hurricane78]

Question is: Why exactly do we need the love of those companies? What’s in this for us? I mean we aren’t some needy losers who would do anything just to be “accepted” into a group that we don’t like anyway. This is not school. We’re grow ups with out own world.

1) DirectX has a comprehensive, well-documented references and documentation.

Uuum, the blue book, the red book and the orange book?? I mean they offer a nice to read book that is a specification and guide/tutorial in one. Can’t get better than that.

2) DirectX provides a lot more than just 3D drawing - sounds, networking, fonts, input processing, and it used to have an API for 2D graphics before (relevant because the story is about why DirectX gained marketshare)

SDL, Mesa, OpenAL, some open source lib, and you’re done. What’s the problem? Do you beg for lock-in?

3) The DirectX libraries had more support in whatever coding language you wanted to use. You mean like C AND C++?
And now slow .NET that is not useful for engine development anyway, and locks you in even more? Yeah.
I can do foreign function interfaces and Java development with OpenGL too. in fact I just write an OpenGL app for mobile phones in Haskell right now. Try that with DirectX.

4) Later it was possible to easily develop XBOX 360 games with DirectX and the tools were made good and easy to pick up. You may say it's irrelevant, that MS is using another market to improve their position, but it is not irrelevant.

You left out the basis of your argument. Why is it not relevant, that MS deliberatly created more lock in? Because you fell for it, and now backwards-rationalize it? ;)

5) DirectX was easy to pick up, and everyone supported it. If it's easy to pick up for beginners, they'll learn it and continue using it later as a professional.

On what planet would that be? I learned them both. And I found DirectX to be confusing and messy, while OpenGL had some clear underlying principles and structures. Nowadays I work professionally with OpenGL. Go figure... So obviously I an only call bullshit on that.

Conclusion:
Don’t get me wrong: If you think you are happy, so be it.
But when MS starts the ass-rape after you are locked in tight, or when they go down with the rise of mobile devices, or when some other shit happens, then don’t come crying to me.
It’s exactly the same thing as those DRM servers that got shut down. Your music was gone, and you deserved it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Hurricane78]

And how is that better than OpenGL?

Where you definitely never have to lock yourself in on Windows. If you present me with a way to have a single software project, written in Haskell, using DirectX, that can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, Symbian, iPhone, Android, Wii, DS, etc, then I might look into it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Hurricane78]

You mean: When a single obvious MS fanboy comes along, and thinks he can top all of us other users who think that the OpenGL documentation is great, the developers should change it all, so it looks more like the DirectX documentation?
I think we had this argument already, a couple of years ago. I think it was even with you and me.

when Microsoft hears from a developer that their documentation sucks, they'll work on it and improve it.

[proof needed]. Because if that is the case, then I have to go ride the flying pig tour to hell, to see if it froze over. ;)

Get me something real, because somehow I don’t take your “word” for it...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Hurricane78]

No it doesn’t, damnit!

That was some years ago, before OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL were out!

That argument is long dead. Which does not seem to stop the parrots...

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[icebraining]

First off:

1) Sourceforge is *NOT* a sftware downloading site: "SourceForge.net is the world's largest open source software development web site. We provide free services that help people build cool stuff and share it with a global audience."
These are places for developers. If users want to download stuff, it's their business, but being "average" friendly shouldn't be expected.

2) Usability is subjective: I find rtorrent's usability to be great, yet it doesn't have nothing more than a simple Curses interface. Just because "average" users expect things to be read to use by clicking randomly in buttons without glancing at it's MAN page, doesn't make the software bad.

3) "And so many OSS developers wonder why their projects implode, or otherwise miserably fail compared to their commercial counterparts"
Who are they? If the dev expected his project to be used by the "average", he will build fluffy GUIs. If he's doing it for himself and other "power users", why would he expect massive usage?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[RightSaidFred99]

Huh? By the logic in your first paragraph shit, anything can be rendered on the CPU that you can imagine by a program written in C given enough time. Therefore C is as good a 3D graphics language as OpenGL or Direct3D. The whole point is that Direct3D is a better choice for developing games on Windows. I don't really understand why people are arguing this point.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Rockoon]

But if you do it with OpenGL, you get a lot of platforms for free.

What dream world are you living in? Can I warp over?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Ant P.]

When I want to set a light color I want to call SetLightColor(Color), not setSomeParamater(12, 15); It makes for unreadable and unmaintainable code.

You're too lazy to even write a function to translate a colour name into a numerical value? Too lazy to do a google search for something as simple as an OpenGL abstraction layer?

No wonder that project of yours is not finished.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[TemporalBeing]

Interestingly the Qt developers recently had a really good post on why they use OpenGL, its performance, the OpenGL core, etc. They also briefly mentioned OpenCL and DirectX in passing - to note why they didn't use it.

OpenGL is a lot more advanced than you realize, and far more extensible too. So while they may not update the core very often, the core does contain some really nifty stuff and the extensions can easily make up the differences. Comparatively, as others have been saying, DirectX only gets updated at Microsoft's discretion, with little ability of 3rd parties to extend it.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

What dream world are you living in? Can I warp over?

Maybe, if I can visit the one where calling someone's opinion a "dream world" is a valid argument.

Show me why I'm wrong, not just that I'm wrong.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[cheftw]

3) False -- Name me one language that doesn't have OpenGL bindings

English.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[shutdown -p now]

And how is that better than OpenGL?

Not better at all. I was merely correcting the assertion that you can only use C++ (and Visual C++, at that) or C# with DirectX.

Where you definitely never have to lock yourself in on Windows.

Technically it's Windows, Windows CE (incl. Mobile), and Xbox.

Whether a lock-in is an issue or not depends on the requirements. As is obvious from many D3D games on the market, quote a lot of people are perfectly fine with it.

If you need portability, then OpenGL is the thing, absolutely.

f you present me with a way to have a single software project, written in Haskell, using DirectX

We could start with just seeing a single software project written in Haskell... ~

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[argorg]

RTFA, summary follows. Dear graphics programmers: Please use OpenGLX. Ignore the red text on black background on my plea! Its easily readable, please, PLEASE focus on my plea!

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[parlancex]

The API makes precious little difference for performance, the APIs provide a specification for vendor implementations based on an ideal reference device.

The main point I was making is that an object oriented robust and frequently updated API that breaks backwards compatibility is easier to use than a very old C-style API with a melange of disorganized extensions to achieve even basic functionality.

The evolution of DirectX is actually done as a joint group between ATI, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Microsoft may have the final say in the API, but they have generally made choices with heavy consultation from ATI and Nvidia and that has resulted in a very clean API.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[ZerdZerd]

Give me one example where OpenGL lags behind Direct3D?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[mhelander]

Then I guess the point seems to be that nobody really wants to do the work :-)

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Vahokif]

What features does it have exactly that OpenGL doesn't? It seems to me that OpenGL is generally a few years ahead in everything (tesselation, geometry shaders, etc).

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[BitZtream]

Whining is not mutually exclusive with doing something about it.

Contrary to popular belief, people can't multitask. Any time spent whining really is time you aren't spending working on solving the problem. They are in fact, mutually exclusive.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[SanityInAnarchy]

Contrary to popular belief, people can't multitask.

You might have a valid point that a person can't multitask. People certainly can -- for instance, I am not in a position to actually do very much, but I can certainly write about it.

Also, contrary to popular belief, talking about it is doing something about it. It's convincing other people to choose OpenGL, or at least do their own research, rather than choosing DirectX because they assume it's better. It's also bringing attention to the problem.

Finally, the guy who wrote TFA is doing something about it -- he develops an OpenGL game.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[Simetrical]

Hasn't Carmack all but reversed his position on DirectX, saying that OpenGL is failing to keep up?

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/08/24/0059218/Linux-Port-For-ids-Tech-5-Graphics-Engine-Unlikely?from=rss

From your own link:

The PC and Mac versions are still OpenGL 2.x.

Yes, it is. The codebase is much, much larger, and the graphics technology pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized. It probably wouldn't be all that bad to get it running on the nvidia binary drivers, but the chance of it working correctly and acceptably anywhere else would be small. If you are restricted to it only working on the closed source drivers, you might as well boot into windows and get the fully tested and tuned experience...

I.e., they're still using OpenGL; the problem is Linux graphics drivers, especially the open-source ones.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[_0rm_]

Oh. My. God. I want to smack the shit out of you. 1) Managed languages suck. 2) You're a dumbass if you can't use an unmanaged language. Learn memory management, you will be a better programmer for it. 3) You're a dumbass who has his head farther up his ass than most FOSS devs (including me. I know my heads stuck up my ass most of the time.). Just because something is easy to use does not make it better. You want OGL window management that daddy M$ provides with DX? Give GLFW or GLUI a try. Or fuck, give THE WINDOWS NATIVE API A TRY! Try doing shit from scratch with both OGL and DX and I guarantee you will be shitting bricks by the time you get your first "Hello World" test done. I have seen numerous Open Source projects that spend countless hours and even dedicate whole teams to improve the documentation of their project. Now go back to your Visual Basic and C# and let the big boys play, m'kay?

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[the_greywolf]

This is inccorect. DirectX 10 does work on Windows XP, it is just not officially supported by Microsoft.

And this is incorrect. The Alky project went down. It was never a complete implementation. Most of the features that worked could be enabled in DX9 mode anyway - they just weren't.

And the guy that wrote it said in no uncertain terms that he has zero interest in starting it back up.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[the_greywolf]

All of the .so files are distributed as binary files. That includes their libGL.so.

You're thinking of the .ko file, which is compiled against the specific Linux kernel you have installed (and incidentally linked against a precompiled object file), and which is non-portable except to systems running the same kernel version, with the same .config and built with the same version of GCC.

Everything else is binary.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[the_greywolf]

As far as I'm concerned, if it's not HTML that I can link to, it doesn't exist, ergo OpenGL is largely undocumented.

Really? It's been published as PDFs (and HTML references up to the current Red Book edition) for as long as I can remember.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[the_greywolf]

Get the OpenGL Superbible. It's quite good.

Also consider getting a book on "3D Graphics" that uses OpenGL for its examples, rather than a book on OpenGL. The difference is quite stark.

Re:OpenGL and the rant about marketing

[bill_mcgonigle]

Thanks for the recommendations - I somehow missed the SuperBible last time around. I believe I have a Borders gift card to burn on that one. :)

And the last Computer Graphics book I read pre-dated OpenGL, so _good_ idea!

Former OpenGL developer

[WilyCoder]

As a former OpenGL developer, I am not too fond of GL anymore.

Khronos really disappointed a lot of people when they announced the GL3 specs. They had promised SO much and delivered SO little. Khronos claimed that it didn't want to piss of the CAD community, which is heavily GL based. They basically chose to please the CAD community instead of the gaming community.

That move totally killed GL for me.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[WilyCoder]

I know its taboo to respond to oneself, but I forgot to mention the recent release of the GL books (red and orange) adequately display the state that GL is in. They STILL do not have geometry shaders in the standard, and its freaking 2010! Yes, you can use those shaders via extensions, but anyone who recommends that path has not been personally burned by vendors supporting extensions to different levels. Writing code that uses extensions that only work on Nvidia and not ATi (or vice versa) is NOT what GL is about!
 

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not up to date then. OpenGL 3.2 has it in the standard.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[onefriedrice]

but anyone who recommends that path has not been personally burned by vendors supporting extensions to different levels. Writing code that uses extensions that only work on Nvidia and not ATi (or vice versa) is NOT what GL is about

It doesn't take long to figure out and know which extensions work reliably across all relevant cards. If you're writing any code before you know this stuff, you're doing it wrong. You'll end up spending a lot of time debugging nvidia's and/or ATI's drivers for them. Just stick with the extensions which are known to be reliable. It's not that difficult.

OpenGL is clearly behind DirectX, but it is still very capable if you know what you're doing. Besides, it is the API if you're targeting more than just Microsoft's platforms, so rest assured it's definitely not going away.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Anonymous Coward]

Pleasing the CAD community is a non-trivial thing, by the way. I'd MUCH rather they keep CAD in mind at the expense of the latest and greatest shiny in games - CAD systems do Real Work and Important Work. Games just aren't that important, and when creating something like the OpenGL spec I'd think the priority should be with the more important applications. If they want to create a Game Specific API (like DirectX) then no problem - but keep OpenGL around and have it focus on CAD - I can live with two APIs if the card folk can.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[ajs]

OpenGL is clearly behind DirectX ...

You're contradicting TFA without any evidence. TFA provided quite a lot of evidence to support its position such as:

It's common knowledge that OpenGL has faster draw calls than DirectX (see NVIDIA presentations like this one if you don't want to take my word for it), and it has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions. OpenGL gives you direct access to all new graphics features on all platforms, while DirectX only provides occasional snapshots of them on their newest versions of Windows. The tesselation technology that Microsoft is heavily promoting for DirectX 11 has been an OpenGL extension for three years. It has even been possible for years before that, using fast instancing and vertex-texture-fetch. I don't know what new technologies will be exposed in the next couple years, I know they will be available first in OpenGL.

So no, I don't think you can just drop such a comment and be taken seriously. You're going to have to back that up.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[lot3k]

I agree with you completely. My largest frustration was that I love GL and wanted so much for things to pan out. Especially considering the huge advantages it had out of the gate. However at this current point and time, and with the bomb that v3 was; it pains me to say it, but MS i the inovater at this point. I mean Dx11 isn't a HUGE leap,but it's certainly an imporvement and one game developers have no reason to abandon.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Sycraft-fu]

That's a problem that OpenGL seems to perpetually have, they are always playing catchup with cards. Graphics cards do something new, OpenGL takes a long time to get a proper implementation of it because they claim "Oh you can just use extensions!" Meanwhile, Direct3D is always on the cutting edge. Why? Well because MS works with the graphics card vendors. It is a two way process: MS tells the GPU vendors "These are the kind of things we want to put in the next generation of DX," graphics companies say "These are the capabilities our future cards are going to have," and so on. They work back and forth such that when the hardware comes out, MS is is at least very close to delivering an API for it, if they haven't already.

That sort of thing does matter. It hurts your API when you are behind the times continually, especially when it comes to games. If you are a company developing the next generation of your games engine, you want to be targeting the high end technology. If OpenGL is going to take a good deal more work because you have to use specific extensions, and then perhaps more work again when they get standard support, that makes it less attractive.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Anonymous Coward]

khronos announced the addition to the standard august last year
nvidia drivers officially supported september last year
ati drivers officially added it in december last year

so overall he's 3 months out of date
moreover, he's 1 month out of date

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[pyalot]

So... instead of using an up to date API which supports cutting edge hardware features, you're now going to target... DX9. That's sensible, carry on.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[VGPowerlord]

OpenGL is clearly behind DirectX ...

You're contradicting TFA without any evidence. TFA provided quite a lot of evidence to support its position such as:

Actually, you did his work for him. Emphasis added:

It's common knowledge that OpenGL... has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions.

Vendor extensions are not part of the standard, which makes this statement from TFA misleading at best, outright lying at worst. These extensions usually don't make it into the OpenGL standard until years after DirectX has added them, as was pointed out by another poster elsewhere in this thread.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[gmueckl]

Although I can see your point you should not forget that gaming is a huge market with a volume in the billions of dollars. I highly doublt that the market for CAD type software is even half as big. Any manufacturer caring solely for the later would be concentrating on a niche market only, which does not make any sense economically.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Bri3D]

DirectX is a forward-looking standard - Microsoft sits down (or stands up and yells) with developers and graphics manufacturers, and hammers out a spec which a "DirectX X.XX" card must support. Then vendors go and make a card and drivers that support those features. In this way every DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 card can be assumed to support the same things using the same APIs, and if they don't, it's the vendor's fault and they have recourse.

OpenGL, at this point, looks back - Graphics card manufacturers make a graphics card and then shoehorn its features into OpenGL. This way every single card has different supported OpenGL features implemented in different ways.

So sure, "OpenGL" gets some features first via extensions (it's debatable whether or not it's even OpenGL at that point, since the OpenGL standard doesn't even really play into it) - good luck using them, though.

The choice for game developers is pretty easy: support a lot of people (Windows and Xbox 360) using one consistent API, or support a few more people (Linux mostly, with some additional work required for PS3 or Wii) at a huge cost (debugging across vendors, platforms, and consoles).

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[Anonymous Coward]

"They STILL do not have geometry shaders in the standard, and its freaking 2010!"

Actually, OpenGL has geometry shaders starting in version 3.2. But they've been around as extensions before then.

Extensions are where OpenGL truly shines. Anyone developing new functionality in a DX driver basically has to wait until MS updates the DX spec before anyone can use it. OpenGL extensions allow HW vendors to release their own ideas first (AMD, APPLE, INTEL, NVIDIA, and anyone else), and then they can collaborate on what goes into the final core spec.

Prior to DX 9, OpenGL had always paved the way first with new functionality, but that changed. The OpenGL ARB has seen this and is trying to remedy this (which they will probably do within the next year).

I'm willing to bet that you start seeing new HW functionality beyond DX 11 exposed in OpenGL prior to DX 12 coming out.

My biggest problem with OpenGL is that they said they were actually going to remove things and then really didn't. Let's clean up the API already. If the workstation vendors want to stick with the older bits, perhaps they should collaborate on a shared software implementation that sits on top of the new lean-mean OpenGL?

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[drinkypoo]

You're complaining because you have first access to new features, but you have to think. Multitexture was an SGI extension for YEARS and yet it was successfully used by everyone and their mom. I'm sure the problem is real, but I'm equally sure it's not as big a deal as you make it out to be; things like that are the reason that games are built on engines.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[WilyCoder]

Interesting, the hardware had it YEARS ago.

Re:Former OpenGL developer

[ajs]

Emphasis added:

It's common knowledge that OpenGL... has first access to new GPU features via vendor extensions.

Vendor extensions are not part of the standard

That's simply incorrect. OpenGL is a living, breathing standard, and just as many features of HTML have been "extensions" for years, to say that they haven't been a standard part of HTML development for a large chunk of that time would be to ignore the practical reality.

OpenGL and DirectX are updated in bursts, but clearly OpenGL is where the leading edge work happens, while Microsoft incorporates only those features which are already widely supported by hardware their platforms have access to. This makes DirectX a poor technology choice unless you're only interested in supporting hardware that is heavily entrenched with Microsoft.

Look at the gaming market without preconceptions for a second. With the mobile gaming market in China alone projected to be in the double-digit billions in short order and with Apple making what appear to be moves to position the iMac as a gaming platform, the continued viability of developing games that only play ball with Windows-friendly hardware is bleak at best.

John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

In an article a couple years back during the Doom 3 release he(John Carmack) said in later articles that they would be moving away from the OpenGL platform and considering he was one of the biggest backers of it. He even said in the article that they liked DirectX and the new features they have added, also that it was a lot better to work with these days and supported more. I can only imagine after the last fiasco update that OpenGL put out and all the missing features they promised, it looks pretty dismal for that development team as they cannot deliver what they promise.

Really the last place OpenGL stands strong is in AutoCAD and even they have indicated that the platform will not last longer, so we may see AutoCAD be using DirectX in the next few 5-10 years.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

I have posted this citation by Carmack in a comment on recent article on DX11, but it seems to be very much relevant here as well, so I'll re-post it - especially as TFS mentions Carmack's opinion circa 1997 (which favorably matches with the point of the article), but conveniently omits the more recent comment. Here it is:

"DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[pyalot]

Well, AutoCAD, Softimage, Maya, 3ds max, Cinema 4d, Rhino, ZBrush, yeah, it's just a "few" standing in the way of DirectX right? It's not like THE ENTIRE FUCKING PRODUCTIVITY APP INDUSTRY is using OpenGL, right? Geeze, get a clue man.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Dark_Matter88]

Yea, thats all true. Sadly they were the guys that buggered up OGL3. Oh well!

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Xest]

This is really it, the summary almost sounds like a complete troll.

OpenGL didn't lose out because of Microsoft's marketing, it lost out because whilst OpenGL stagnated, DirectX grew and grew to become a completely unified games development framework. Carmack may have had a point 12 years ago, but whilst OpenGL development completely ignored criticisms, Microsoft took criticism from the likes of Carmack on board and improved performance of their API whilst adding new features, providing great documentation and tidying up the interface.

Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least.

OpenGL needed to become something more, it needed to become part of a unified game development library in itself- we had part of that with OpenAL but it needed everything, we simply need an Open Multimedia/Gaming framework that can do everything that DirectX can do.

The fact is, game development requires more code and more content than ever before, developers can simply no longer justify spending time on filling in the gaps when other libraries like DirectX already have those gaps filled.

I would love nothing more than a resurgence of a set of open libraries covering the various facets of game development like DirectX does because it'd mean near zero effort porting to Mac and Linux, but right now the extra effort required to use OpenGL and OpenAL and then fill in the other gaps yourself coupled with the additional support requirements just doesn't justify the relatively minimal extra userbase for many developers.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[GooberToo]

Really the last place OpenGL stands strong is in AutoCAD and even they have indicated that the platform will not last longer, so we may see AutoCAD be using DirectX in the next few 5-10 years.

I find that hard to believe. Right now there is a new renaissance in game development and game platforms. Mobile platforms are just now grabbing noteworthy market share and it looks like its only continuing to grow as more mobile devices increase in capability - especially 3d capabilities. Thus far that segment has clearly spoken. Thus far this segment is OpenGL and/or OpenGL ES. And that's entirely his point. You want to chase an emerging market plus cover all other platforms, you have exactly one option - OpenGL.

If you develop via OpenGL you can address XP+Vista, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android, plus all the major consoles. Its one stop shopping. With DX and comparable graphics with OpenGL, you can only target Vista. If you want Vista + XP + Consoles, you're looking at DX9 which is a subpar graphics experience compared to that which is provided by OpenGL. Simply put, OpenGL provides you more platforms more easily.

We most certainly have not reached any critical point which can not be reversed. As the author clearly points out, OpenGL vs MS is much the same today as it was in the past. At this point, its strictly about mind share and that needs to change.

Much is said that OpenGL is less than DX, and that's true. But people seem in a hurry to ignore the fact that there is a standardize solution which is OpenGL/OpenAL/OpenSL/SDL. When game developers talk about OpenGL as a solution, they really mean all four. OpenGL has a complete solution which addresses both CAD and gamers alike. The only questions is, are companies smart enough to realize this - far too often, its seems not because of the MS marketing. And as I've said many times before here, MS is not so much a technology company as they are a marketing company. Generally speaking their technology is second rate, but their marketing and business prowess is world renowned. All too often people confuse the facts.

Ultimately, the problem is that the PHB making the technology decision is simply unaware of the poor MS-centric decision they are making, which is then costing them additional dollars to later turn around and target the platforms they specifically excluded themselves from by picking DX in the first place. OpenGL needs to be championed by someone that understands how to speak PHB so that OpenGL can be fairly evaluated. Right now the only contender who is whispering into the PHB's ear is MS, and as a result, everyone is losing.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

whilst OpenGL development completely ignored criticisms, Microsoft took criticism from the likes of Carmack on board

That kind of feedback is actually formalized - there's a committee called Microsoft DirectX Advisory Board. I'm not sure whether Carmack is on it, but e.g. Tim Sweeney (the Unreal guy) is, judging by one of his interviews.

I don't know how much influence that board has over DX design, however ("advisory" in the name gives a hint, but there is still a wide range of possibilities). Would be interesting to know. Could it be that D3D9 was a significant leap that Carmack claims it to be precisely because of heavy participation in its design by people who actually use it?

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

[[citation needed]

It was an online transcript of an interview with Carmack at CES 2007. The original link is now dead, unfortunately, so Wayback Machine to the rescue!

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

Well, AutoCAD, Softimage, Maya, 3ds max, Cinema 4d, Rhino, ZBrush, yeah, it's just a "few" standing in the way of DirectX right? It's not like THE ENTIRE FUCKING PRODUCTIVITY APP INDUSTRY is using OpenGL, right?

We've arrived to the point where most productivity apps are OGL, but most games are D3D. It's hard to compare here because it really is apples-to-oranges - the requirements are very different.

That said, there are obviously still a few OGL games (e.g. older id Tech stuff), though the tendency even for those is to at least provide both OGL and D3D renderers. At the same time, there are also D3D productivity apps - e.g. recent versions of AutoCAD use D3D on Windows.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[lot3k]

I have posted this citation by Carmack in a comment on recent article on DX11, but it seems to be very much relevant here as well, so I'll re-post it - especially as TFS mentions Carmack's opinion circa 1997 (which favorably matches with the point of the article), but conveniently omits the more recent comment. Here it is:

"DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."

lol, he didn't DITCH the API. He just doesn't have an issue using either one.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[thegsusfreek]

Maybe that's Carmack's "more recent comment", but the article mentions even more recent comments (at least, I assume they're more recent, since they mention DX10 and Rage).
From the article, Carmack said:

"Personally, I wouldn’t jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there’s a really strong need for it."

And:

As John Carmack said when asked if Rage was a DirectX game, "It’s still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. It’s interesting how little of the technology cares what API you’re using and what generation of the technology you’re on. You’ve got a small handful of files that care about what API they’re on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they’re on."

Sounds to me like he's still favoring OpenGL.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[ajs]

Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least.

Clearly you've mis-read the summary, failed to read TFA or (more likely) both. TFA is a modern and up-to-date account of the standing between OpenGL and DX and why developers should favor OpenGL. The summary was citing the article and further relating it to the older debate had between the gaming industry and Microsoft so long ago.

Please at least read the summary for comprehension before replying. It really does help.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

"Personally, I wouldn’t jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there’s a really strong need for it."

This was in response to a question on whether the next engine (id Tech 5) would use D3D9 or D3D10. I.e. it is specifically a comment on D3D10. Back in 2007, this was the reasonable, pragmatic approach to this - Vista was just released, and its adoption just started (and the perspectives were already looking bleak). So Tech 5 had OGL and D3D9 renderers.

Sounds to me like he's still favoring OpenGL.

Again, I think it's just pragmaticism. All id engines are developed from the previous versions, and previous versions are built on OpenGL. Why throw away good working code and rewrite it?

As I understand from another interview, they've actually made an OpenGL-like wrapper on top of D3D, so that they may keep using that code on Xbox for ports of their existing games (Rage, specifically). Again, strikes me as a very reasonable thing to do.

By the way, here's another on-topic Carmack reference - a /. post by him, dating back to 2001 (so a tad older than the opinion that I've cited in my post above - it was about DX8, not DX9).

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Xest]

Your former quote is simply because DX10 is Vista/Windows 7 only, the reason he's not using it is not because he has a problem with it, but because DirectX 9 is adequate for his requirements and still allows him to support XP. It's completely wrong to assume that avoiding DX10 means using OpenGL- I'm not sure if that's your insinuation by quoting this, but what it means is that his preferred DirectX version is 9 as it is with most developers, because XP still has a big enough userbase to simply not ignore it by making the leap to DX10 and 11.

Your latter quote doesn't suggest a necessary preference of OpenGL, but all id's legacy code is GL based. Have a look through the code from Quake to Quake 3 and you'll see that much of the underlying codebase remains the same because it's pointless rewriting it when it's already there. In fact, even more modern games based on id tech have a lot of code that dates all the way back to Quake 1. You're reading something that simply isn't there, nothing about what he said in either quote suggests a preference of OpenGL nowadays.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

For comparison and reference, here is the oft-mentioned original (1997) Carmack's position on D3D vs OGL.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Xest]

Er, I think you need to check the summary again. It's quite clearly referencing a performance argument from 1997 and then saying, I quote "This lesson appears to have been forgotten over the last few years." inferring that arguments again DirectX from 1997 are somehow relevant today, when quite clearly they aren't as things have changed so drastically.

I quote also:

"Most game developers have fallen under the spell of DirectX marketing"

Which is again simply wrong, developers haven't fallen under a marketing spell, they've chosen DirectX for practical and sensible reasons such as those I stated.

The article talks about a network effect, but clearly there is no network effect in the way they suggest as OpenGL for a long time was the API of choice, and so by their logic would've remained on top because of this effect. People only started ditching OpenGL when DirectX started providing more and better than OpenGL was, not because of some marketing campaign unless they are suggesting that getting feedback on their API was somehow a marketing campaign when it clearly wasn't due to the fact it was a real and demonstrated way of simply producing a better product.

They also argue about training but again this is false- simply search for 3D programming tutorials and you'll find far more, far more helpful programming tutorials for OpenGL than you will for DirectX. Try simply searching for "3D programming tutorials" for example and see the likes of NeHe at the top.

It talks about the likes of vendor extensions but doesn't mention what an utter headache these are when you have to cater for the very fact they are vendor specific, the fact you have to implement on a per-graphics card basis. What's worse is they even contradict themselves, they state the reason that OpenGL is losing out is because of poorer support, then they reference an nVidia presentation that points out OpenGL has faster draw calls specifically because of nVidia's extensions and support for it.

The whole article was mostly full of shit. The only point I agree with is that it'd be nice if an open games development platform ruled the roost again, but you can't blame Microsoft for the fact it doesn't, only blame OpenGL and related groups for not putting the time and effort into keeping it relevant that Microsoft has into DirectX.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[andy55]

It doesn't sound like you've developed much in the way of commercial quality graphics-centric software for "middle tier" end-users.

Long story short is that if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible, modern OpenGL drivers tend to greatly lag or be unavailable on many Windows machines. Vista and especially Vista 64 really made this worse since maintaining and upgrading GL drivers for middle tier GPU hardware is generally at the bottom of the priority list for 3D driver development. Meanwhile, D3D support tends to be solid, speedy, and well maintained considering especially when you consider what hardware they have to work with.

I'm a senior engineer at a software company that manages a cross-platform codebase that puts OGL and D3D under the same roof (we ship products for OS X and Windows). One of our older products requires OpenGL on Windows due to not wanting to rewrite all its shaders for D3D, and the number of support tickets that we get from that TOWERS our the number of support tickets from our other D3D titles combined. It's downright pathetic how poor OpenGL hardware and driver support is on these middle tier Windows machines.

The last thing the guys and Intel and Nvidia that maintain the drivers for built-in chips that go on the typical Dell machine give a crap about are the state of their OpenGL support. I'm typically surprised to see them have support past 1.3.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[GooberToo]

It doesn't change the fact that if companies want to go after the largest market segments, they absolutely will have an OpenGL render; else they are saying one thing and doing another. Which brings us full circle, stop developing DX and put your energy into OpenGL. If people are experiencing compatibility issues, all that wasted energy developing DX support could have easily provided additional render configuration preferences to work around them. In the end, you're still way ahead.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[thetoadwarrior]

DirectX *is* improved. That goes without saying and Carmack will work with D3D. He has to if he wants be on the 360. But he's still using OpenGL when given a choice between the two. Rage will be OGL on PC/Mac.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[thetoadwarrior]

You should also point out that he's saying there's no real need to move to DX10 as well in that link. Which is probably why Rage will be OGL on the PC.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[shutdown -p now]

But he's still using OpenGL when given a choice between the two.

Because he likes it more, or because he just doesn't want to rewrite tons of existing code? A strong hint is that Rage still uses OpenGL 2.x, not OpenGL 3.

I mean, how much more clearer "it [D3D] is probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with" can be?

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[andy55]

The rub (and MS's leverage) is that D3D is so entrenched as well as far ahead that it'd be corporate suicide to cut D3D support.

Also, it doesn't seem like you registered what I was saying with regard to the fact that OGL driver support either greatly lags or is unavailable (in any real, non-emulated form) on middle-tier Windows machines. In other words, if we removed D3D support, our company's receipts would be down by over 2/3 overnight. You have to understand the gravity of that.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[thetoadwarrior]

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/e3_2008_the_john_carmack_interview_rage_id_tech_6_doom_4_details_and_more

MPC: So, you said Rage is a 60Hz game. Is it an OpenGL or DirectX game?

JC: It’s still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. It’s interesting how little of the technology cares what API you’re using and what generation of the technology you’re on. You’ve got a small handful of files that care about what API they’re on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they’re on.

Sounds like it's not that much of an issue. As I recall the reason for using OGL 2 rather than 3 is card support not how much work it would make for him.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[tepples]

If you develop via OpenGL you can address XP+Vista, Mac, Linux, iPhone, and Android, plus all the major consoles. Its one stop shopping. With DX and comparable graphics with OpenGL, you can only target Vista.

There are three major game consoles. Two (PS3, Wii) use something strongly resembling OpenGL or OpenGL ES; one (Xbox 360) uses DirectX. Two (PS3, Wii) require developers to be medium or large businesses; one (Xbox 360) has a public developer program that Apple copied for the iPhone. So this means that unless you have a dedicated office and a commercially successful PC title, you have to develop your first console title for DirectX.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[vikstar]

In the scientific community OpenGL reigns supreme. So AutoCAD really isn't the last place OpenGL stands strong.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Xest]

"Why would OpenGL need to incorporate game development?"

This question seems to ignore the context of the thread - to stay relevant is the answer.

Yes, there is lots you can do with OpenGL that's not game development but it's a driving force. Game development support doesn't prevent producing serious apps and such with it as demonstrated by Direct3D- there are plenty of non-game applications out there written using DirectX.

"Besides, most of the other game-related libraries (sound, networking) are available as separate F/OSS libraries such as SDL."

Indeed, but no one wants to fuck around finding out which ones are best, dealing with multiple different libraries and interfaces all with different coding styles and so forth, all with their own quirks, missing features, not when they can again just use DirectX which avoids this.

I agree that it's the only option for Mac/Linux and I agree the DirectX 10/11 thing is stupid. I'm not saying I like the situation, I don't, as I say I'd much rather see OpenGL be more useful and relevant for modern games and multi-media applications development precisely so we don't all just have to use DirectX or face a horrible mish-mash of code and unproductivity.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[Jesus_666]

The problem with D3d is that Microsoft only offers it for their own platform. Seeing that 3D-capable smartphones/media players are getting increasingly common (and many of them don't run Windows, Nokia's and Apple's devices being prominent examples), Microsoft only offering it for their own OS is a drawback.

If I want to write a game for mobile platforms, OpenGL ES allows me to target the iPhone/iPod touch, the N900, some or all Android devices, newer BlackBerry models and even portable consoles like the Pandora (NDS and PSP use OGL derivatives and require more porting work). D3D allows me to target the Zune HD and... well, I actually can't think of another high-profile 3D capable WinMo device right now.

Microsoft can try to release an XBox equivalent for the portable market - but their attempt with the Zune HD hasn't shaken up the market much and the hottest items are still based on either Linux or Mac OS. While D3D might be a no-brainer if you target X360 and/or Windows it's fairly useless if you want to target one ore more of the most important portable devices.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[GooberToo]

if you target the the wii, ps3, android, and iphone platforms with opengl it's not going to work because you have to target (afaik) opengl es

OpenGL ES is basically a subset of OpenGL. The distance between an OpenGL OpenGL is miniscule compared to OpenGL DX. Meaning, you can leverage large chunks of your render when supporting OpenGL/OpenGL ES.

and if you say they're the same thing then you can't say dx9 vs dx10/11 are different

That's not my argument. I'm saying with a tiny difference (relatively) on OpenGL you get every platform. With DX, you have those same differences on intra-platforms plus you must still write an entirely new OpenGL renderer. That's a big difference. Especially since in the DX case, the OpenGL renderer is likely to be the poor supported step child which is far more likely to provide a negative user experience.

in the desktop space at least, using a less developer friendly set of libraries to get pick 10% more market share, of which the uptake rate is less than 1% does not make good business practice

You're numbers are completely fictitious and should be regarded as such. If you can pick up 10% more market share, which provides for 15-20% more profit at 2-3% more support overhead, that's an easy win. And contrary to your silly hand having, pursuing emerging markets is one of the most common ways business grow.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[andy55]

I think you missed the part where I said, "if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible".

The median machine (e.g. a typical Dell or HP machine bought at Best Buy) has FAR less capable GPU -- they're typically integrated with the motherboard. The makers of these onboard GPUs (a) care little to nothing about OGL support and (b) typically don't maintain/update their drivers once they have a stable version.

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[_0rm_]

Long story short is that if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible, modern OpenGL drivers tend to greatly lag or be unavailable on many Windows machines.

I want to shoot you in the face. UNAVAILABLE!? What kind of heaping pile of bullshit is that!? Nearly every modern graphics card has at least support for OpenGL 2.0 and if your current graphics card doesn't support at least that, then get the fuck out of the stone age caveman!

Re:John Carmack ditched OpenGL

[ajs]

Er, I think you need to check the summary again.

Nope, I read it over a few times. You're making a very different argument, here, than the one I was responding to (which you also made).

The point I was responding to was, "Carmack may have had a point 12 years ago ... Citing an argument from over a decade ago is desperate to say the least."

Now, in response to your new post, I would say that you're probably being overly narrow in your reading of the summary. I read this as a more general statement than "the same exact thing is happening, here." Rather, this is a comparable situation.

Back to TFA: You've confuse cause and effect. The article claims that there is the cause (DirectX marketing) and the effect (disparity in hardware implementations and developer experience with OpenGL vs. DirectX). You're looking at these two as identical properties, which is why you're seeing such inconsistency.

Killer App

[decipher_saint]

There's nothing around it; OpenGL desperately needs a killer app.

Show people something amazing and tell them "OpenGL did This."

Re:Killer App

[RightSaidFred99]

Riiight. And this killer app will compare with "Look at these 10 games released in the last 3 months and the insane graphics they support" how?

OpenGL is, for the purposes of developing high end 3D content utilizing the latest GPUs from AMD/NVidia, inferior technically to Direct3D. It just can't keep up.

Does that mean it sucks? Absolutely not. It's just used for a different type of application - e.g. cross platform stuff, CAD stuff, etc...

Re:Killer App

[Victor Liu]

... and that killer app would probably be easier to write in DirectX.

Re:Killer App

[ceoyoyo]

Find someone with an iPhone or Android based phone.

There's your killer app.

Re:Killer App

[DaVince21]

Yo Frankie? No wait, that game fails as a game.

OGL V D3D

[Dark_Matter88]

OpenGL and not Direct3D. OpenGl is best in my view simply for cross platform. If OGL3 was what it was to be it would have been better. In the end legacy won that battle.

Re:OGL V D3D

[rjolley]

Blizzard would like to have a word with you.

Re:OGL V D3D

[The End Of Days]

The obvious answer: Successful enough to have a bunch of people whining about it here on Slashdot.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge difference between Pepsi and Coke, just for the record.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[Hatta]

I exclusively use Windows for PC gaming. I could give two flying F's whether my game is developed in OGL or DX.

If more games were developed in OGL, they would be easier to port to other operating systems (or run under Wine)so you wouldn't need to use Windows anymore. That would save you a hundred bucks or so on a Windows license, or at the very least the need to reboot to play a game. That's got to be worth at least one flying F.

Isn't it pretty obvious?

[bistromath007]

My understanding is that devs should use OpenGL because they want to do a whole bunch more work writing code for each individual graphics card.

Re:Isn't it pretty obvious?

[Dark_Matter88]

D3D abstracts as well though...

Re:Isn't it pretty obvious?

[ajs]

My understanding is that devs should use OpenGL because they want to do a whole bunch more work writing code for each individual graphics card.

Bad trolling.

It's true that there are some things to work around between cards when working with OpenGL (because of the positive feedback loop mentioned in TFA). However, you also have far more work to do with OpenGL to support the dozens of platforms it's available on... Sadly for DX developers, they only have to support two platforms.

Apples to Oranges

[Giltron]

OpenGL is about graphics. DirectX is alot more than that. Should be comparing Direct3D and OpenGL

Also, Direct3D is pushed by Microsoft (heavy PR and community support), unlike the openGL committee (no PR and fragmented community support) so the base spec is perceived to be slower/inferior.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[bakawolf]

My car doesn't come with tires, so hey, you can't compare it to other cars that do!

Re:Apples to Oranges

[JustNiz]

>>> My car doesn't come with tires,

Really? wow. It must have been a bitch to get it home from the dealership.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[tzot]

He also owns a really big truck.

I've used both

[shadowrat]

DirectX is made for games. You can use it for other kinds of applications, but if you want to do something that you do in a game, there is likely a function or construct specifically for what you need. It's docs assume you are making a game and when there are multiple ways to do something they often point out the faster way. heck it only works with triangulated mesh data.

Open GL is made for EVERYTHING. Sure, you can use it for games. There's nothing wrong with that, but i'm not John Carmack. That shit is hard for me. If i want to make a game, i'll take the platform that holds my hand.

Plus, like others said, direct x is a whole game api. it's not just graphics. it's input, it's networking, it's sound. the whole platform is very cohesive. I'd rather just keep up with one api, one download, etc than have to follow open gl, open al, etc.

anyway modern game development means licensing an engine. engine developers worry about supporting open gl or direct x.

Re:I've used both

[wayland]

Sounds like what we need is something built on top of OpenGL that does what DirectX does.  Lets call it OpenGP (Open Games Platform).  Games programmers can use that, CAD programmers and others can still use OpenGL. 

Re:I've used both

[oGMo]

DirectX is made for games. You can use it for other kinds of applications, but if you want to do something that you do in a game, there is likely a function or construct specifically for what you need. It's docs assume you are making a game and when there are multiple ways to do something they often point out the faster way. heck it only works with triangulated mesh data.

Please RTFA. Also, Chris Hecker's article, linked from TFA. Then give us specific, technical reasons that DX/D3D is somehow better for games than OpenGL. Your post is filled with assertions, but with nothing to back them up. It's pretty sad that got moderated "informative".

Open GL is made for EVERYTHING. Sure, you can use it for games. There's nothing wrong with that, but i'm not John Carmack. That shit is hard for me. If i want to make a game, i'll take the platform that holds my hand.

Again, RTFA. Give specific, technical reasons that OpenGL is "harder" than D3D. If you'd bothered to read Carmack's position, his favoring of GL was because GL is easier. Your inability to deal with OpenGL putting your claims in doubt aside, you could at least be specific about the reasons. As per Chris Hecker's article, the only one making these claims are Microsoft evangelists. You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft would you?

Plus, like others said, direct x is a whole game api. it's not just graphics. it's input, it's networking, it's sound. the whole platform is very cohesive. I'd rather just keep up with one api, one download, etc than have to follow open gl, open al, etc.

This is a bit disingenuous. All of the articles involved are addressing the 3D aspect of DX. The rest of the stuff is either trivial (use SDL or similar which is about the simplest API you could imagine, has a billion support libs, and runs on everything), or you'd be doing it by hand anyway (implement your own networking stack for performance, a la EVE). Your point is therefore irrelevant.

anyway modern game development means licensing an engine. engine developers worry about supporting open gl or direct x.

You seem to be a lazy-enough or low-end-enough developer that this article does not apply to you. However, it does matter to developers who make engines (either primarily or otherwise). Perhaps you should move along; these are not the articles you are looking for.

Re:I've used both

[RAMMS EIN]

``anyway modern game development means licensing an engine. engine developers worry about supporting open gl or direct x.''

Exactly. That makes me wonder why they actually bother supporting DirectX, though, seeing as DirectX really only works on Windows, which is also supported by the APIs that the other platforms use.

``Plus, like others said, direct x is a whole game api. it's not just graphics. it's input, it's networking, it's sound. the whole platform is very cohesive. I'd rather just keep up with one api, one download, etc than have to follow open gl, open al, etc.''

But you don't; you just use the engine and let the engine developers worry about platform specific APIs. You even said as much yourself.

Also, I don't know to what extent DirectX is "one api". The way I understand it, DirectX is, first of all, made up of several different APIs for different purposes, e.g. Direct3D, DirectSound, and DirectInput. So there isn't really just one API. As for keeping up with it, to what extent is DirectX actually backward and forward compatible? I have never coded for it, so I don't know, but I got the impression that compatibility is often broken between releases. OpenGL seems (again, this is just my uninformed impression) to be rather stable, favoring extensions over completely changing things. Given these things, I find your argument that, with DirectX, you have to only keep up with one API hard to follow. To reiterate, I don't think it's one API, and I don't think it's easier to keep up with than its competing APIs.

Re:I've used both

[gbjbaanb]

You want to look at SDL

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

Re:I've used both

[thetoadwarrior]

True DirectX offers a whole suite of tools but I suspect it's not best to use it for everything. Otherwise one of the biggest engines (Unreal) wouldn't be using OpenAL instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAL

It's also dishonest for the various people posting to claim that games are primarily done in D3D. That is true for a lot of PC games and all 360 games but no one uses D3D for Playstation. So any major engine has to support both as you will find one of the most popular (if not most popular at the moment) engine does indeed still support OpenGL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine

Granted, at the moment most non-mobile games are on Windows and the 360. If the 360 loses popularity then OpenGL would probably make a comeback for making things easier to port from the PS to the PC.

Re:I've used both

[Prune]

See my other post here about SDL.

Re:I've used both

[sjelkjd]

Your appeal to authority is based on references(Chris Hecker and John Carmack) who were commenting on the state of Direct3D over 10 years ago! Chris Hecker's article discusses execute buffers, a feature in Direct X version 3! John Carmack's .plan is from 1996. Comparing DirectX 3 and DX9 is just silly. The API has drastically changed. Right around DX9 it was doing a better job of exposing the underlying hardware than OGL. As of 2003(the last time I used OpenGL) OGL had all these vendor extensions, which meant you had to write different versions of your code(and your shaders!) to work on different hardware(e.g. NV_VERTEX_PROGRAM/NV_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM was nvidia only, and you needed different code for ATI). They finally came out with ARB extensions that worked on all hardware. Also both Nvidia and ATI had separate extensions for uploading geometry to the GPU for a while. It was a total pain.

Here's one random example where DirectX has more helper functions than OpenGL. DirectX has built in support for Quaternions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb281611(VS.85).aspx
OpenGL does not(you would need to use a custom library). Built in font rendering is another example. You have to load bitmap fonts in OpenGL.

Re:I've used both

[Blakey Rat]

Civilization: Call to Power came out in 1999. Plus it's not even a 3D game. Plus it's turn-based, and doesn't rely on tight response times. Is that the best they have? Hardly a glowing recommendation.

Re:I've used both

[Rycross]

The same Chris Hecker that currently recommends you use Direct3D for production code on his web page?

However, finally getting to the actual advice, if you want a better chance of getting your code to work using "mainstream cutting edge features" (say, lots of render-to-texture, deep render target pixel formats, etc.), and you don't want to fight a battle with your publisher, you're probably better off using Direct3D. If you only need to use a safe subset of features that lags the cutting edge by a year or so, and you want the nicer programming experience, or if you want to use the most bleeding edge stuff that's only available in vendor extensions, then you should use OpenGL.

Personally, I write all of my prototypes, tools, and indie games in OpenGL, because it's just more agile and toolkit-y. And fun. Don't underestimate the motivational power of having fun while you program. The games I work on for big companies are almost all written in Direct3D.

Sure, he's still recommending OpenGL for prototypes or experimental stuff, but its kinda damning praise, don't you think?

Re:I've used both

[tzot]

If you're bored to provide a direct link to your other post, why should everyone else bother searching for it?
See my general stance about life all over the internet.

More like Developers don't CARE.

[solios]

The ultimate monetary advantage of using OpenGL for games (imo and ime) is it makes Mac porting a hell of a lot easier.

The ultimate monetary downside of making Mac games is that only a small fraction of the install base can upgrade their video cards - the one constantly-moving PC gaming component.

You can build a useable gaming PC for under $700 - the buy-in for a Mac with an upgradeable video card is presently $2499. With the vast majority of PC gamers using wintendos, Windows/DirectX is the LCD. It's where most (or all) of the money is.

I think it's fantastic that iD uses OpenGL and makes all of their games cross platform. I also think it's unfortunate that iD is the exception to the rule... but I also vote with my wallet, and I use a $600 non-upgradeable (video, anyway) Mac Mini for all of my Mac-oriented needs, and a massively-upgradeable, equally-priced Shuttle PC for everything else. Which includes a long list of games that haven't been released on the Mac - and even if they had been, wouldn't be playable on the GMA-950 video chipset. It's shite for games, fine for Photoshop... and Windows is the reverse for me.

If I need a wintendo to play Orange Box or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., does it really matter if the game uses DirectX or OpenGL?

Not really. :-|

Re:More like Developers don't CARE.

[sznupi]

Majority of PCs sold are laptops though, so it makes smaller difference now.

Re:More like Developers don't CARE.

[Enderandrew]

I also thought that iD got bought by Bethesda, and that Bethesda has said iD won't be using OpenGL anymore, and won't be releasing source code anymore.

Re:More like Developers don't CARE.

[sznupi]

And one has to wonder when and how many publishers will come to conclusion that it's not beneficial to focus on that relatively small group.

Re:More like Developers don't CARE.

[VGPowerlord]

And one has to wonder when and how many publishers will come to conclusion that it's not beneficial to focus on that relatively small group.

I think you mean developer, not publisher. You'll see why I make this distinction in a moment.

Infinity Ward (publisher: Activision) seem to have realized that already. See Also: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Whereas Valve (publisher: EA) and Blizzard (publisher: Activision) care considerably more about their PC market than their console market. See Also: Team Fortress 2 (Valve) and any Blizzard property.

Re:More like Developers don't CARE.

[Narishma]

Incorrect on both points. id was bought by Zenimax, which is the parent company of Bethesda, so Bethesda doesn't have any say on what they use or don't use. In addition, Carmack already confirmed that they'll use OpenGL for their next game on Windows and Mac.

Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at people like you.

Let's just sum up the platforms our company supports:

PS3
Wii
Linux
Mac
Windows
Android
iPhone
Various embedded custom ARM based hardware

Guess which API is the one we use for all of those platforms - except the two consoles?

OpenGL

Guess which API will be used for the next media hardware platform no one has heard about yet?

OpenGL

So, yeah, go right ahead and keep babbling about how somehow OpenGL needs to 'prove' itself. DirectX is a dead end API to anyone except the fading Windows gaming market and teenage Windows only coders.

OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[Airw0lf]

There's nothing around it; OpenGL desperately needs a killer app.

Show people something amazing and tell them "OpenGL did This."

What about all the stuff id put out? GLQuake (remember how much of a quantum leap that was over anything at the time with a 3dfx card?), Quake 3, Doom 3, etc...When you think about that, one does wonder if it's just MS and it's marketing droids that got Direct3D to where it is today.

Re:OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[decipher_saint]

You mentioned Quake 3 (which is just a little over a decade old) that got me thinking, what software DOES run OpenGL?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

The fact that I didn't know most of those titles (many of which I have or have played) had support for OpenGL is a testament to the lack of marketing and the push the OpenGL community needs to make to get people excited about it.

Re:OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[Airw0lf]

You mentioned Quake 3 (which is just a little over a decade old) that got me thinking, what software DOES run OpenGL?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

The fact that I didn't know most of those titles (many of which I have or have played) had support for OpenGL is a testament to the lack of marketing and the push the OpenGL community needs to make to get people excited about it.

Thanks for finding that list. A lot of good games and apps there. Like you, I was amazed that some games I played had an OpenGL renderer but defaulted to D3D (Deus Ex and Far Cry for example!) My argument is simply that there are enough good examples of OpenGL software. OpenGL just lost out to Microsoft's marketing.

Re:OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[ajs]

You mentioned Quake 3 (which is just a little over a decade old) that got me thinking, what software DOES run OpenGL?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs

The fact that I didn't know most of those titles (many of which I have or have played) had support for OpenGL is a testament to the lack of marketing and the push the OpenGL community needs to make to get people excited about it.

For the most part, these titles rely on underlying toolkits that smooth the management of OpenGL and DX interfaces. World of Warcraft does this, for example in order to ship on MacOS and Windows, so you can see how it would not be a great marketing win for OpenGL.

Still, it's an all too often overlooked fact that emerging gaming markets such a mobile and every console except XBox require something other than DX and in almost all of those cases, that's OpenGL. You pretty much have to start with OpenGL support and then decide if you want to support DX or not.

Re:OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[warrior]

There's one truly Killer App that's not on there - Mac OS X. The low-level APIs use OpenGL for hardware acceleration on supported GPUs (pretty much any discrete GPU in a late model Mac).

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image

Re:OpenGL has/had Killer Apps!

[Morth]

Another interesting thing about that list is that I could identify about half of them being released for Mac. A higher then usual average I would guess. Granted, there were some open source games on the list...

One language

[microbox]

3) False -- Name me one language that doesn't have OpenGL bindings

How about this

Re:One language

[drei0003019]

If you really wanna do that, knock yourself out: http://code.google.com/p/bfopengl/ :-)

Re:One language

[dvice_null]

"BFOpenGL is a variation of the Brainfuck programming language that allows you to make OpenGL and GLUT calls, thus enabling you to add GUIs to your Brainfuck programs"
http://code.google.com/p/bfopengl/

Re:One language

[gerddie]

Wrong, the svn is empty, yes, but you can download the interpreter code and some docu as zip. Apparently it supports some 18 glut/gl calls.

We'll conclude with a small sample program that displays a small window with a meaningless title: ...(*)

*removed because: Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Re:One language

[Hurricane78]

Yeah, because DirectX HAS bindings for it.

Now it’s my turn, sucker! I raise you...

MALBOLGE! ;)

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[MobyDisk]

Yeah, but if you want to port to the XBOX 360, you need to use DirectX. Sometimes I think that the XBOX 360 was designed solely to wrestle control from OpenGL. Windows supports OpenGL, so there's no reason they couldn't have supported it on the XBOX/360.

Very few game studios develop their own engines any longer - they let the engine developers take care of this problem. This is especially important because the world isn't just OGL -vs- DirectX. Every major console now has it's own form of parallel processing, and someone has to optimize the engine to work in that environment.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[Hatta]

What do Nintendo and Sony do? Do they use DirectX?

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[Servaas]

Doesn't mean you shouldn't care. I'm not a developer myself but i understand competition drives consumer delight.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[MobyDisk]

I know the Nintendo DS supports OpenGL, so does the PS2 and PS3. I don't know about the Gamecube or Wii. In general, neither Sony nor Nintendo port their games to other platforms. I don't know what engine they use, but I'm guessing they use OpenGL.

openGL 2.0 versus 3.0

[Enderandrew]

I'm not a game programmer, but back when 2.0 first launched, I did hear programmers say it had valid technical merits over DirectX at the time. Yet now all I hear is that the openGL 3.0 standard didn't evolve the way people wanted, and it isn't nearly as good as DirectX anymore. Is there any truth to this?

Re:openGL 2.0 versus 3.0

[Paradigm_Complex]

The disappointment over OGL3 that you're referring to was due to the fact it had quite a lot of promise and potential, which all fell short. It *would* have been far ahead of DirectX if Khronos kept their promises.

From a technical make-the-best-pretty-pictures standpoint, most of DirectX's technological superiority gets implemented on OpenGL soon afterward. nVidia and AMD don't want the two standards to spread to far apart, as it would make work much harder on the both of them.

With regards to everything else, they go back and forth depending on who you ask and where the priority is placed. OpenGL runs on more platforms (Win, Mac, Nix, Nintendo, Playstation, iPhone, Android, etc), but DirectX's platforms are huge for gaming (Win & Xbox). OpenGL completely owns the CAD market, but it's extensions aren't part of the standard and may change depending on which card vendor you're running on. Some say DX is easier to learn, others say OpenGL. It all depends on what exactly who you are and exactly what you want.

An Amateur's Perspective - OpenGL vs DirectX

[Philodoxx]

I've dabbled in 3D programming, I haven't done anything amazing, let alone made my own game, but I will say that D3D is much easier to write working code than OpenGL. With OpenGL I got about as far as a spinning triangle on the screen. With D3D I was able to get to the point where I was rendering a model on the screen and manipulating it with pixel and vertex shaders.

Somebody earlier hit the the nail on the head when they said that because it's easier it's what people will start and subsequently stick with. Not only that, but as a business if it takes your programmers 10 months to write a graphics engine in D3D and 12 months to write one in OpenGL, which one are you going to go for? There aren't many instances where I will go to bat for MS, but DirectX has a better graphics API compared to OpenGL.

Re:An Amateur's Perspective - OpenGL vs DirectX

[ceoyoyo]

When did you learn OpenGL? OpenGL took a long time to evolve from the fixed pipeline to the fixed-pipeline-free model, but it has. The fixed pipeline is still around for compatibility though, so you have to watch that the book/tutorial you're using is up to date.

These days if you get a spinning triangle on screen in OpenGL you've already got pixel and vertex shaders going just fine.

Re:An Amateur's Perspective - OpenGL vs DirectX

[Prune]

And here's another application of your argument pattern: Basic is much easier to write working code than C++.

Re:An Amateur's Perspective - OpenGL vs DirectX

[xtracto]

Although it has been a while since I last programmed did 3D programming, I remember when I was into that, OpenGL had only a very limited standard instruction set and the more advanced things had to be done via "extensions" which where implemented as an ugly hack.

In addition to that, if you wanted to make a complete multimedia application using OpenGL you needed to glue togheter several independent technologies (OpenGL+ sound lib + network lib + inputdev lib, etc) while DirectX provided everything under API (with standard programming conventions) and a *great* API documentation (MSDN is the best documentation for any library...).

I remember there were efforts to release a next version of OpenGL, but the consortium companies where fighting against each other without agreeing on anything.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[design1066]

Said the anonymous coward

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[shutdown -p now]

There is a huge difference between Pepsi and Coke, just for the record.

I'm color-blind, you insensitive clod!

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[sopssa]

Please tell me how many companies care about the niche market of 0.1% of Linux users? How many Linux games do you see? And don't even get me started how much bitching there would be if the "bad" companies wouldn't open source their games when releasing Linux versions.

Also, you need to develop the games differently to PS3, Wii, Android and iPhone anyways. Or do you think they run the same PC version?

Also, many games that work on Windows and use DirectX work on Mac also. While technically using CrossOver, they still do.

Actually, the more I read your comment its making me think you're being sarcastic with all the fading Windows gaming market and "teenage Windows only coders". Funny how you got modded up.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[TheKidWho]

Nope, not worth a single flying F.

Not for ATI cards

[Dwedit]

Too bad OpenGL royally sucks ass on ATI cards.

Re:Not for ATI cards

[Urkki]

Too bad OpenGL royally sucks ass on ATI cards.

Well, that's only (very roughly) half of gaming computer video adapters. So even if what you say is true, who cares? ;-)

Re:Not for ATI cards

[StoatBringer]

Don't you mean "Too bad ATI card royally suck ass at implementing OpenGL"?

Misrepresentation of Carmack's "rant"

[harlows_monkeys]

Carmack's problems were with one particular way of using Direct3D, which is what he would have had to use for games like Quake. He was pretty clear that he had no problem with it for games that did not need that particular mode.

Re:Misrepresentation of Carmack's "rant"

[Rockoon]

Yes, the mode was called Immediate Mode in older DirectX versions, and without question it was slower than OpenGL's method of doing the same thing.

OpenGL's problem back then was that it could *only* be programmed in this same way.

Modern graphics cards greatly benefit from queuing many rendering commands and re-ordering them to better exploit the specifics of the hardware, and in DirectX land this is done through Retained Mode.

Retained Mode ended up stomping all over OpenGL in performance because Retained Mode left many of these very high level optimizations up to the driver developer, instead of requiring that the game developer do that optimization work.

In theory that old OpenGL was just as good as DirectX Retained Mode, because the game author could simply wrap up OpenGL and provide his own Retained Mode simulation complete with all the same optimizations, but in actual practice it became too much effort to get there.
OpenGL started out great, but its stagnation left it behind in the dust on the Windows end. Its too late now. The best they can do is catch up, but they actually arent doing a very good job of it.

OpenGL is THE cross-platform 3d rendering API, but consumers just dont give a shit what API the developer used or how many other platforms the developer can market too. They only care about the platform that they have in front of them.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[sznupi]

DirectX representing 50-90% of gaming market? Hardly. X360 is the only console supporting it; and don't forget Nintendo DS, PSP, iPhoneOS, j2me games, PS2. Or Flash games for PC - you probably don't like to entertain the possibility, but that segment might be rivaling "true" PC gaming already.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[metamatic]

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but both windows and the Xbox/360 use DirectX, which represents something like 50-90% of the "gaming market".

Could you make those error bars a bit bigger? You almost said something.

use the best tool

[Lord Ender]

Don't care about history. Don't care about politics. Don't care about marketing. If I'm developing a commercial application, I'll use the best tool I can find so that I can make the most money possible.

They should focus their argument on the merits of their tool, not on the other crap.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[Hatta]

Well that kind of mitigates your earlier comment. If you write to OpenGL, you'll have to port to DirectX if you want your game on the Xbox 360. If you to DirectX, you'll have to port your game to OpenGL if you want your game on the PS3/Wii. Neither really has an advantage here.

Irrevelant

[Dunge]

I programmed on both, and DirectX is way better on every aspect (except that Microsoft own it). This article is stuck in time 5years ago.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[PmanAce]

Yea but are your games actually popular and fun or have zero market share? That is the real question...

Re:Agreed, 110%... apk

[shutdown -p now]

I also think sopssa made a mistake in what you quoted from he, & I also believe you too noted it in his stating that DirectX can only be used by Microsoft-based compilers

I believe it was actually correct at some point in the rather distant past, when g++ vtable order was different from the one used by VC++ (and COM), so you had to work on C level to get everything right. These days, it should be compatible - there is still a difference in that g++ will always have methods in vtable in order of declaration, including overloaded ones, while VC++ will reverse ordering within an overloaded method group for some mysterious reasons. But, as COM doesn't have overloaded methods in the first place, it doesn't affect it.

D3D backwards compatibility is A JOKE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I still love playing the old Thief games from around 2000. If you try to run them on modern cards, there are problems ranging from downscaled color depth to failing to initialize the 3D device entirely. Compare this to other favorite games of mine, like Sin and Quake. Sin and Quake just run immediately on even the newest video cars without issue.

Opengl seems to have much better backward compatibility.

What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[tlambert]

What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't ...provides sound and frame sync. I could moderate in this thread (I have points), but no one had mentioned this crucial issue. Sure, if you are doing scientific visualization, you're going to use OpenGL, either on a Mac or on incredibly budget Linux-running white box hardware because you don't have the $ for anything else. But if you want to d games, it's important to have both the sound and the image (and haptic feedback, and anything else) synchronized. Same for using it for video playback or video chat. Apple goes out of its way to provide Apple-specific APIs for this, just as Microsoft provides DirectX, and the code you write using them is no more portable to other platforms than DirectX code is.

For very high frame rates, which are used to allow speculative pre-calcualtion and discard (i.e. pre-computing "the road not taken" in a multipathed decision tree, and throwing it away if a different road is taken), it's even more important to have the ability to combine work lists for speculative rendering along with audio etc. for the work, should it be used.

OpenGL is a graphics language. It's good at what it does, but it's not good at what DirectX does on top of that.

Disclaimer: I work for Apple, and yes, I'm making more or less positive comments about "DirectX vs. OpenGL" when considered for a particular use related to what the article author proposes to use OpenGL for...

-- Terry

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[pyalot]

speculative rendering, frame matched sound, frankly, I have no idea what you talk about, and it sounds to me like technobabble. Of course, I might just be completely ignorant, on the other hand, when what you're saying is true, it has not prevented anybody yet from doing a good game with OpenGL/OpenAL, despite a perceived disability to do technobbabble buzzwordy things.

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[pyalot]

google for frame matched sound or speculative rendering and you'll draw lots of blanks, so even if it's not made up, it's entirely out of context or completely esoteric. It's just "blahblahblah see, OpenGL is worse". If you can link me to *any* article that shows clearly how and why this makes OpenGL bad somehow, and Direct3D great, I will stand corrected.

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[VGPowerlord]

I don't even have to look up one of those terms to tell you what it means.

Frame matched sound: Where sounds and video frames are synchronized, possibly also meaning that certain key frames are always played, with frame skips done as appropriate to get that frame to match up to when a certain part of a sound is playing.

Not a hard concept, particularly if you've ever edited a movie in flash (because key frames are an important concept in flash).

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[The End Of Days]

Aero sabotaged OpenGL? That makes about as much sense as saying IE sabotaged network sockets.

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[The End Of Days]

I develop anonymous stalkers on Slashdot. As you can see, I am quite successful.

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[pyalot]

And how exactly does the absence speculative rendering and frame matched sound influence a game negatively?

Re:What DirectX does that OpenGL/SDL don't

[nonos]

Images and sounds have to be played ASAP in a video game, when the real time event occurs. Draw images ASAP, play sounds ASAP, never try to synchronise (i.e. make drawing wait for sounds or make sounds wait for drawings) theim or your game will feel shitty. Images and sounds have to be synchronized only for movie playback, where lag doesn't matter.

Wine - Direct3D on OpenGL

[vinn]

Well, if you need any more proof of OpenGL's ability you can look at Wine's implementation of Direct3D all layered on top of Direct3D. Now, having said that, drivers are much more optimized for DirectX than for OpenGL and tend to render similar scenes quite a bit faster. Direct3D is also ahead of OpenGL in terms of technology.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[gbjbaanb]

if its on the iPhone its probably got more games sold than the Windows, Mac, Linux and XBox platforms put together.

Mobile (and web) is still the growth area for all development, if you target tired old Windows desktop apps, you're effectively working in a niche area that will see your skills obsolete over time. Microsoft is trying to defend that with C#/.NET but its still just a new way of doing the same old things.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[thetoadwarrior]

At a guess he would work for someone like PopCap which means they develop fun popular games.

OpenGL pride

[pyalot]

Irrefutable, feel welcome to try.

- OpenGL works on Mac, Linux, WindowsXP and Direct3D does not (or only partially as in no DX11 for XP)
- OpenGL compatible APIs are present on the PS3, Wii, iPhone and many other devices, wheras Direct3D works on none of those.
- Cutting edge features can be accessed in OpenGL as they come out, whereas in Direct3D you'll have to wait until M$uck decides to iterate++ DX.
- A wealth of good online and dead tree documentation can be had for OpenGL
- A host of "killer apps" has been done and is continuing to be done with OpenGL (such as Maya, 3ds max, softimage, all iPhone games, Mac Games etc.)

Re:OpenGL pride

[pyalot]

pedophobic much?

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[dunkelfalke]

More disposable pens are sold every day than premium cars in a decade. But guess which is more profitable.

games on phones and such - I see a lot of them now

[mrflash818]

I do notice, with my own family, that my kids like to play many games on my wife's phone.

It would be interesting to find an accurate market share study of the popular games on phones, number of games installed, and which APIs were used.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[raynet]

Yes, unlike Coke, Pepsi is actually drinkable.

The ugly truth

[YouDoNotWantToKnow]

Opengl is losing out to Directx because it suffers from the open mentality complex, where everyone gets to mess with everything and it results in much more difficult usage by the game studio guy who needs to sit down and write an engine in it.
Not.

Re:The ugly truth

[pyalot]

OpenGL is loosing because nobody pours billions into its marketing and because the vendor that happens to sell Direct3D also happens to sell 95% of Desktop operating systems and 30% of modern gaming consoles. They also happen (by this mechanism) to strong-arm hardware manufacturers to their will. Considering Direct3D is also from the company that's well known for Open talks/convention rigging, behind the scenes arm twisting and strategizing, committee stacking and standards sabotaging, you can begin to appreciate *why* is OpenGL is loosing.

Sony and Nintendo likely won't cooperate

[tepples]

DirectX has networking/input/graphics drivers? Then write those and attach them to OpenGL.

SDL and Allegro fit, but as others have pointed out, they need to be marketed better as designed specifically to work alongside OpenGL.

DirectX can be ported to Xbox? Fine; then get off your bony butt and go talk to Sony and Nintendo about enabling trivial porting of OpenGL apps.

First you'd have to convince Sony and Nintendo to make something like Microsoft's XNA Creators Club or Apple's iPhone developer program. Nintendo, for one, is vehemently opposed; its developer qualification page excludes businesses based out of homes and businesses working on their first title.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[sznupi]

You ignore how small portion of PC owners play on them, specifically play DirectX games. On PCs it's usually at most something...Flash-based, etc.

We are not typical PC users (I thought this was clear on /. ;p )

SDL 2.0?

[Zombie Ryushu]

The *nix Analogue for DirectX is SDL. Not OpenGL.

The thing is, for a few years now, there needed to be an SDL 2.0 that made it as easy to integrate things like Nintendo's Wiimotes, Playstation controllers, and other things. But After all these years, we seem to be stuck on SDL 1.2.x - I don't know why. GTK+ moved on. Qt Moved on, what happened to SDL?

Re:SDL 2.0?

[xtracto]

However, SDL does not provide a 3D graphics development API, for that you have amalgamate OpenGL code making it a bitch to maintain.

I am still suscribed to the SDL mailing list, IIRC SDL is a one or two man effort, I guess they moved on and nowadays they do not develop SDL full time.

What needs to happen is a company getting the SDL library and improving it... I won't hold my breath for that though.

Re:SDL 2.0?

[HoppQ]

The *nix Analogue for DirectX is SDL. Not OpenGL.

The thing is, for a few years now, there needed to be an SDL 2.0 that made it as easy to integrate things like Nintendo's Wiimotes, Playstation controllers, and other things. But After all these years, we seem to be stuck on SDL 1.2.x - I don't know why. GTK+ moved on. Qt Moved on, what happened to SDL?

Loki died. Funding can make or break free software, too.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[tepples]

Nintendo DS, PSP, iPhoneOS, j2me games, PS2

As I understand it, Nintendo DS, PSP, and PS2 are unfriendly to small businesses. Unlike Sony's console and Nintendo's console, Microsoft's console has XNA, a publicly available devkit based on managed code.

PC != spare PC

[tepples]

Everyone and their dog own a Windows PC.

Which has a tiny (e.g 13" to 17") monitor. Not everybody has a spare PC to connect to the TV and game on.

Re:PC != spare PC

[dunkelfalke]

Why exactly do you have to connect to the tv to play games?
When you sit close to the display, the smaller size is enough. And I still remember playing many great games on a 14" display.

Re:PC != spare PC

[tepples]

Why exactly do you have to connect to the tv to play games?

It's a pain to fit four people around a 14" display, and it's also a pain to make players two through four wait until you're done before they get their turn. If you were considering handling all multiplayer through LAN, the same objection applies: Not everybody has three spare PCs, monitors, and copies of each game for players 2 through 4.

Re:PC != spare PC

[dunkelfalke]

Well, also not everyone plays multiplayer games. And even in the good old Doom 1 times people somehow managed to bring their pcs to their friends to play over a humble null modem cable. You are seeing obstacles where there aren't any.

Cross platform support

[Sigvatr]

It probably doesn't matter to the big game dev studios, but to the purists, OpenGL's cross-platform support is one of the biggest positives in my opinion.

Moving and all

[Estragib]

Now if someone came and blew Powerpoint away, sold the software for less-- you bet your ass Microsoft would start moving again.

The question is what move that would be. To judge by the past, they would, in order of feasibility: -

1. rely on ubiquity of the .ppt format,
2. spread FUD about security issues and TCO,
3. pay bloggers, consultants and analysts to badmouth it,
4. announce the next version of PPT, complete with mock-up screenshots, scaring off investors, then never release it,
5. suffocate it with patent litigation,
6. buy them out and
   1. kill it off,
   2. assimilate it (but not invest into further development, because, hey, no competition again),
7. change office to be incompatible,
8. change IE to be incompatible,
9. change windows to be incompatible.

(Not comprehensive.)

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
(aka: Are you absolutely positive you are not new here?)

Re:Moving and all

[that this is not und]

It would suffice to just kill off all the middle managers and their Powerpoint presentations.

Save a lot of money, too.

Re:Moving and all

[sillybilly]

Presentations are the most important "value" created in today's business world, as far as employment dollars spent go. Lower on the scale there are lots of workers, but their hourly wage is very low, and higher up there is not enough people, even if they earn a lot. The bulk of employment money goes to middle managers tweaking powerpoint slides to present at meetings that take up the bulk of the time. The purpose of presentattions is to dumb down and simplify concepts so they can be effectively conveyed to wide audiences who otherwise don't have a clue. Being an expert, and knowing the very fine details, as described in scientific papers that present the full set of actual measurement data is no longer important, as far as job success goes, but one has to be very good at giving succinct and summarizing presentations. No longer do you find ad hoc vivid conversations one on one between experts addicted to a topic caught up discussing the details for hours with a twinkle in their eyes, but you have a lot of time management software scheduled and accepted mandatory summons to meetings where people neither want to be there, nor are they interested, but it brings them a paycheck, so they have to do it. Self interest is amazing.

Re:Moving and all

[Geekbot]

I'm going to differ here. I get the tie in between Outlook and almost everything else, tie-ins between Word and whatever, Excel and Access, everything else and Sharepoint. But what is the tie in needed for PowerPoint. I use Powerpoint and I really don't find a need for integration anywhere. If someone came a long and offered a product that made it much easier to put together a presentation I'd pick it up in a second. And I don't even spend most of my time on it. Think of the mid-level managers spending hours each week.

I know, maybe you can't get it approved for work. What if the new program had a built in feature to save as video?

I'm just saying, there's less reason to hold onto Powerpoint as to hold onto the other MS Office products.

Re:Moving and all

[tehcyder]

So your response to the GP saying that he was fed up with people whining about MS and not doing anything about it is to whine about MS and decide there's no point in doing anything about it?

Re:Moving and all

[tehcyder]

No longer do you find ad hoc vivid conversations one on one between experts addicted to a topic caught up discussing the details for hours with a twinkle in their eyes

I really don't think you can blame powerpoint for everything that's wrong with work.

DirectX is winning, but not for those reasons

[mdwh2]

I agree that DirectX has lots of things going for it over OpenGL these days, but:

2) DirectX provides a lot more than just 3D drawing - sounds, networking, fonts, input processing, and it used to have an API for 2D graphics before (relevant because the story is about why DirectX gained marketshare)

That's a poor argument. OpenGL is only meant to be a rendering API. There are plenty of alternatives to do the other things, and moreover, there's nothing stopping using OpenGL with DirectX for the other aspects. You're comparing apples to oranges. If I want an API to do a specific job, it doesn't make sense to criticise it on other issues.

And doing 2D graphics via a separate API was a poor design decision that ultimately turned out to be the wrong way of doing things, and now they've had to go the 3D route, just like OpenGL did all along.

5) DirectX was easy to pick up, and everyone supported it. If it's easy to pick up for beginners, they'll learn it and continue using it later as a professional (the same thing as why Adobe doesn't really care about home users Photoshop piracy)

Was? Older versions of DirectX were a complete pain in the arse to pick up. Thankfully they've fixed it up so it's now as easy as OpenGL. But I'm not sure how it's easier?

The biggest reasons why DirectX is winning are not what you list:

* DirectX has a lot less legacy API lying around, due to the major changes that are made at each version. This means it's a lot easier for users to know what method they should be using to do things - it's a lot easier to hit the fast path.

* DirectX seems to generally have better driver support than OpenGL.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[mdwh2]

if its on the iPhone its probably got more games sold than the Windows, Mac, Linux and XBox platforms put together.

Citation needed, please?

Mobile (and web) is still the growth area for all development, if you target tired old Windows desktop apps, you're effectively working in a niche area that will see your skills obsolete over time.

There are plenty of Windows netbooks out there last time I looked. And if I was looking at mobile phones, I'd pick a platform that actually had market share, such as Java or Symbian.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[sznupi]

Nintendo DSi changes that; and doesn't Sony have some kind of support for indy devs nowadays in their online service? (so at least potentially available on PSP)

All this is beside the point though, when talking about "gaming market"

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[SplashMyBandit]

Yes, but the 'gaming market' is not nearly as big as the 3D graphics market now is it, Mr Moms Basement Dweller? The 3D graphics market covers avionics, scientific visualization, handheld/portable/embedded devices, medical systems. Guess what? they're not using DirectX/Direct3D. Direct3D is oriented for shrinkwrapped games on Windows, which is a smaller part of the pie than you'd imagine. Perhaps once you get to the workplace you might get to see this.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[that this is not und]

I couldn't find 'design1066' in the phone book. Googling didn't help, either.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[that this is not und]

Almost undoubtedly the disposable pen market. The premium car companies are all dying. Mostly they've been bought up by the big auto companies. They are truly a boutique industry.

I'm glad you made the case for the GP.

Please tell me...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Please tell me how many companies care about the niche market of 0.1% of Linux users? How many Linux games do you see? And don't even get me started how much bitching there would be if the "bad" companies wouldn't open source their games when releasing Linux versions.

It's not really about the 1% of desktop users that use Linux. What you are failing to note is that there is an awful lot of software written for mobile systems (read: mobile phones and iPod like devices that double as gaming platforms) and many of those systems run Unix like OS'es such as iPhone/iPod OS and Linux. Writing games for mobile devices is a growing market and portability is a key component if you want to make any kind of money since the world of Mobile operating systems isn't quite the Microsoft dominated monoculture that the world of Desktop OS'es is. If Android gains any kind of a foothold and iPhone OS keeps gaining market share (and there is no reason to believe they won't) I'd say OpenGL has a bright future, if only thanks to people developing for mobile devices. Also keep in mind that the most popular mobile phone OS is Symbian. Mind you I don't think Symbian owes much to Unix but it isn't made by Microsoft either. Symbian has an OpenGL port that is also the official Symbian 3D graphics API (according to Wikipedia). Now I'm sure people can bitch and moan about how mobile games aren't really as sophisticated as as PC games and I suppose that's true. Nevertheless it still cracks me up every time some bozo puts in a book review on a game development book on Amazon and goes on endlessly about how Direct3D is a "game development industry standard" and how "OpenGL is a dying technology". OpenGL is alive and well and likely to stay that way. The (mobile software developing) world is not Microsoft.

research, visualisation market, WebGL

[rexguo]

Let's not forget that OpenGL is still the choice of many university research projects and in the scientific visualisation markets. These projects tend to have a much longer shelf life than things like games. Also, Google's efforts in adding 3D to the web, WebGL, is an OpenGL binding to javascript.

Re:Only on Slashdot...

[selven]

How is it a troll? He's just pointing out that OpenGL makes it easier for people who don't use Windows as their default environment to play games.

Tempest in a Teapot

[Peter Amstutz]

I had higher hopes for the original article in discussing specific technical reasons for choose one API over the other aside from the issue of platform support.

From my perspective, the the controversy boils down to a handful of actual issues:
  * Quality of drivers. D3D drivers have historically been more solid than OpenGL drivers on Windows. This is less of an issue these days with Nvidia. Unfortunately ATI OpenGL drivers remain a bit flaky.

  * Market. I believe that the very high end graphics workstation market (think Hollywood CGI artists, CAD, etc) is still invested heavily Unix (Linux) based tools. Nvidia has a much bigger foothold in this market than ATI which explains why Nvidia has superior X.org drivers and better OpenGL support all around.

  * Bleeding edge technical features, if you are trying to achieve some advantage in rendering quality over your competitors. This makes sense in the graphical arms race of gaming, but most of the rest of the visual simulation industry (3D modeling, CAD, scientific computing, government/military, etc) don't care about the cutting edge as much.

  * What your 3D engine of choice supports. Writing a whole 3D engine from scratch is going to be silly most of the time with the many commercial and open source 3D engines now available, so you are not going to be writing a whole lot of bare D3D or OpenGL code.

Like a lot of other areas, Microsoft's development solutions work great if you stay in the Microsoft ecosystem. As a pure business decision sometimes it makes sense.

What irks people (including me) is when Microsoft deliberately or de factor freezes out the competition; this is where we end up with frustrating situations like the case of ATI having inferior support for OpenGL on Windows. There's no technical reason for it, just someone manager's decision on how to allocate developer resources. Longtime Linux users know this is a story that has played out with many devices; usually there is no technical reason a piece of hardware can't be used on Linux, it is simply a matter of the manufacture choosing whether or not to devote additional resources to supporting platforms other than the one with the biggest market share.

So ultimately it is about mindshare and putting pressure on Nvidia and ATI step up to the plate to have good OpenGL support, and encourage Microsoft it is not in their best interests to screw over Windows OpenGL users.

(did I mention enough times how much ATI OpenGL driver quirks annoy me?)

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[Anonymous Coward]

Presuming that the windows / xbox360 market will be the largest for longer than a decade from now is a dubious guess at best. With their business methods, it would not be surprising to see Windows fall drastically in market share in the near future, and at that point nobody will want to write software using this DirectX crap when they can write it in OpenGL and support the various OS's which span the majority of the market. That's all it takes, and Microsoft is slipping with every passing month. Windows 7 isn't good enough when you're still using anticompetitive actions to bully out competitors in any given market, until Linux is as viable as windows as a desktop platform for the "average user", Microsoft will enjoy the antitrust they've built and sustained in direct violation of multinational law. When that threshold is crossed, however, Windows is no longer the only thing most people will see as a viable thing to run on their PC, and being fucked time and time again by huge costs and inferior/buggy/exploitable microsoft-clone-of-X-software being forced upon you through packaging and windows updates, people won't give a second thought to moving, and the software companies will follow the consumers.

OpenX

[sixsixtysix]

why not combine opengl, sdl, qt,etc into one package?

Re:OpenX

[mangobrain]

I'm sorry, but... Qt? Yuck. Give me something with a plain C API and optional C++ wrapper, not a native C++ API. Give me something that doesn't have its own "make" variant to make building "easier". Give me something that doesn't rely on macros and a custom code pre-processor to implement signals & slots, when it's been fairly conclusively proven that these features can be implemented using plain old C/C++.

Please, if you're going to do something like this, don't take a reasonably well-written plain-old-C API like OpenGL and sully it by association with something which is, in comparison, broken by design.

For something which underpins so many open-source applications, and touts cross-platform compatibility as its major feature, Qt seems to make so many departures from library-writing best practices that I often wonder why it has been adopted as widely as it has. Thankfully I am currently succeeding in keeping Qt (and KDE) off my Linux installs - I run one closed-source Qt application for work purposes, and ironically, running the Windows version in WINE works better and provides more features than running the Linux-native version.

Re:OpenX

[sixsixtysix]

i shouldn't have used specifics. my bad. i was thinking more along the lines of things that could be packaged up and marketed as a competitor to directX. that is the only way it will happen.

Re:OpenX

[mangobrain]

My apologies, this wasn't meant to sound like a personal attack. :)

My dislike of Qt is real, but I shouldn't have got so carried away focusing on that specifically. The wider, more subtle point I was making is that in the open source world, people are used to having more freedom and alternatives than in the proprietary world. Having a single, all-encompassing, well-maintained, well-marketed solution definitely sounds attractive, but you'd never get everyone to agree on what it should look like - everyone would have different ideas on which components should be packaged into that solution, with some people no doubt thinking that certain parts of it should be written from scratch.

In reality, if I was writing a 3D engine, I probably wouldn't use GTK *or* Qt. Assuming we're talking an engine for traditional full-screen 3D games, I'd probably use some kind of toolkit capable of rendering its widgets using OpenGL, with SDL for input handling.

Re:OpenX

[sixsixtysix]

maybe the cores could be the same, but with many different distributions?

Re:OpenX

[_0rm_]

I have to wholeheartedly agree with this. C++ is an absolute failure for designing API's. Sure, there are design patterns we can use to ease API development (singleton being the best IMHO), but compared to C "just working" and providing a nice API, I'll take C. Disagree with the WINE comment.

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[tyrione]

How the hell are you insightful? The OpenGL market owns the Smartphone industry. It's well on it's way in owning the game console industry. It own the highend CAD industry and Engineering modeling industry. It accelerates all OS X variants, it's becoming the defacto on Linux distributions where it makes sense, it's moving into the Web via WebGL and with the steadily eroding world around Microsoft is obviously doing well with the recent 3.1/3.2 updates and it's lovely new pal, OpenCL 1.1 being worked on has convinced all the GPGPU vendors that OpenGL/OpenCL is the one two punch for all Graphics.

Re:That is FUD

[msclrhd]

OpenGL can even be used to implement all versions of Direct3D (wine).

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[dunkelfalke]

You don't know how wrong you are. Why do you think premium car companies were bought by the big auto companies in first place? Because this shit is insanely profitable when you do it right (means making premium cars from cheap mass produced components).

Look at VW, they've got five premium brands now (Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini).

Re:Reality Check From A Real Game/Graphics Develop

[DaVince21]

While you do make some good points, I think the Windows gaming market is far from fading.

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[ByteSlicer]

That would save you a hundred bucks or so on a Windows license

Seems like he already has one of those, so he wouldn't save a dime.

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[account_deleted]

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Carmack now uses DirectX too.

[Hurricane78]

The reason was, that OpenGL did lack modern features. Which was true back then.

BUT. OpenGL now has caught up. And it has one huge advantage: Extreme cross-platform capabilities.
You can even use OpenGL ES (a light version) on all modern mobile phones.
Runs on Linux and Mac without hassle. And on consoles. Mobile ones too.

With GLSL, there’s no excuse anymore.

I mean, come on! That all has got to be an advantage!
I see no reason to succumb to lock-in and learn the tricks of a whole new API, just for a (now) imaginary advantage.

E vs. M; cost of 4 PCs; the plague of GMA 950

[tepples]

not everyone plays multiplayer games.

I play multiplayer games, and I want to make multiplayer games. I'm just bitter that there isn't a demonstrated market for a multiplayer game that doesn't require a $2,400 machine (a LAN of four gaming PCs with four low-end LCDs) and isn't made by a large business (console developer qualification).

And even in the good old Doom 1 times people somehow managed to bring their pcs to their friends to play over a humble null modem cable.

ESRB.org says Doom and Doom II were rated M on all platforms other than GBA, and M-rated games are designed to be played by people who are old enough to afford their own PC. But a lot of people, especially people who are too young to have graduated from high school, don't have their own gaming PC.Nor can a mom afford $160 for four copies of a multiplayer PC game compared to $60 for one copy of a console game. This brings me to another point: because PC games from the Doom era used software rendering, minimum system requirements were easy to understand: "25 MHz i486SX, 4 MB of RAM, VGA, MS-DOS." Nowadays, even a new PC often won't run new games because they tend to come with a Voodoo3-class Intel GMA, which appears to use half the CPU for vertex shading.

Re:E vs. M; cost of 4 PCs; the plague of GMA 950

[dunkelfalke]

I was one of these guys who have played doom over a null modem cable with their friends. I was 15 at the time. So were my friends. By the way, you've described my system back then exactly right.

Who cares about game ratings, anyway?

Re:E vs. M; cost of 4 PCs; the plague of GMA 950

[tepples]

So if you have three gamers in your house but two PCs, what do you do?

Re:E vs. M; cost of 4 PCs; the plague of GMA 950

[dunkelfalke]

Schedule the computer time of course.

Re:Direct X and the Xbox

[tepples]

Nintendo DS, PSP, and PS2 are unfriendly to small businesses.

Nintendo DSi changes that

No it doesn't. Nintendo's qualfiication page hasn't changed much from the GameCube days: "The authorization for [the platform] will be based on your relevant game industry experience [...] Home offices are not considered secure locations." This rules out releasing a company's first title on a Nintendo platform, and it also rules out a company pulling itself up by its bootstraps by putting revenue from one title toward the lease for a dedicated office.

doesn't Sony have some kind of support for indy devs nowadays in their online service?

If Sony has made PSN nearly as open as XNA and Xbox Live Indie Games, I'd like to see a citation. But as of right now, Microsoft is the only console maker known to be willing to give micro-ISVs the time of day, and its console exclusively uses DirectX.

OpenGL 3.0 cock-up

[edxwelch]

I prefer open standards, but unfortunately OpenGL is proof that design by committee doesn't work. There was a lot of negative discussion when infamous OpenGL 3.0 API was released: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=504547

Also this video is quite a laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sddv3d-w5p4

Re:I'm sorry but I don't really care

[master_p]

It's not that you are not right, but you forgot some things:

1) Other operating systems can easily run in a virtual machine inside Windows. The user can run those O/Ses for productivity tasks and run games for Windows.

2) The cost for Windows is minimal compared to games.

Alternating multiplayer

[tepples]

So I guess your idea of multiplayer is competing to see who can get a higher score or earlier completion on the single-player portion. Is this view common?

Re:Alternating multiplayer

[dunkelfalke]

Well, I never was a spoiled brat.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion