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Doom Creator Says Direct3D Is Now Better Than OpenGL
arcticstoat writes "First-person shooter godfather and OpenGL stickler John Carmack has revealed that he now prefers Direct3D to OpenGL, saying that 'inertia' is the main reason why id Software has stuck by the cross-platform 3D graphics API for years. In a recent interview, the co-founder of id Software said, 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He added, 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'"
Is Slashdot not for nerds anymore? I never thought I'd see the day when John Carmack was described on Slashdot as "Doom creator".
They work with the GPU manufacturers. Basically when new GPUs are in development, so is the new DirectX. So MS has a chat with nVidia and AMD. They tell the GPU makers the kind of things they want, the GPU makers tell them the kind of things there hardware is going to have, and they are able to come to a standard that everyone supports. That is why when new GPUs come out they support all the features of the new DX. It isn't some amazing coincidence. Also it is proper support, a single standard that works well with the abilities the cards have. You write your DX driver, and everything works.
OpenGL functions in much more of a lagging capacity. New video cards come out, and then it gets support for whatever it is they bring to the table sometime later. Khronos doesn't seem to go out and engage the vendors during development and try to have OpenGL ready to meet the next gen cards. Also their strategy often seems to be "just use extensions for it," which means that you can have differences between vendors for how things work.
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
And that is why Open Source doesn't win. Be nice and user friendly, and you are able to play better with others.
Carmack changed his mind some years ago. This report is quite late.
However, the title of the magazine is "Custom PC". It is worth keeping in mind that if the PC and Xbox are the only platforms you are targeting then DirectX is a valid choice for development technology.
Otherwise, you are better off developing in OpenGL, where you can target PCs, PS3, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, WebGL, industrial Unix (not all 3D apps are games, dontchaknow?). The only thing you can't do much with is the Xbox (technically possible, but deliberately closed by Microsoft).
Also, the pace of change in OpenGL has picked up tremendously with the stewardship of the Khronos group. So OpenGL is starting to have parity in features again after lagging for some time (plus, you can get those features on Windows XP for those still on it).
It's been true for almost 10 years. In fact Microsoft's support for DirectX has always been better than what OpenGL had. Microsoft made it easy to use with all their programming tools and languages and had a great documentation. The API was always cleaner too. There were tons of books written for DirectX. This is the area Microsoft handles extremely well - their Visual Studio development environment is the best IDE on the market and they create great tools for developers. Their mobile development tools kick Apple's and Google's (C#, Visual Studio and Silverlight against Java...).
It would be nice to see open source community wake up and start developing a competitor, as just now Microsoft is the driving force that innovates new technologies for PC and Xbox360 graphics and gaming. But for once it looks like the fact they're the only one doing so isn't slowing them down - they do a good job.
We know who you are!
We have you surrounded!
Step away from the chair and come out with your hands up.
Say what you will about the confusing configuration dialogs and lack of build config options. Visual Studio + Visual Assist is (so far) untouched in terms of features and stability.
(And I'm saying this as a full time developer of Gnome apps...)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So back in the Doom days, there was no such thing as DirectX. OpenGL was all their was. Of course it was high end cards only, no consumer stuff.
So move on up to 1996 and the 3dfx Voodoo comes out. It couldn't support full OpenGL, but Glide was based on OpenGL and it brought real 3D to consumers. DirectX was at 3.0 at this point and had no 3D. Glide, or a subset of OpenGL with a wrapper (how Quake did it) was it.
DirectX 5 came out in mid 1997 and did have 3D, but it was somewhat basic. I mean it could support what consumer cards could do, but lacked a lot that OpenGL had. Still no real comparison.
However by 2001, DirectX 8 was out and DX was showing some real competition to OpenGL. nVidia had been doing DX and OGL as native APIs for their cards for some time, and both ran just as fast. Also now the cards had programmable vertex and pixel stages, just like the high end pro card, and in fact nVidia was selling their consumer hardware in the pro market as Quadros.
From there, DX just started pulling further and further ahead. DX10 was a major update and brought some cool new GPU features, like fully unified shaders. Support for it was not a lot on the software side since it required Vista and games have to deal with older computers, but the GPU makers loved it. OpenGL was not fast in terms of catching up.
DX11 pushes things forward again, and again OpenGL is playing catchup and doing it in a poor fashion with extensions. Not just new graphics features either, but things like support for real multi-threaded and multi-tasking rendering. The ability to treat a GPU much like a CPU and task switch on it and so on.
Then of course there's DirectCompute, part of DirectX. GPGPU integrated in to the API and the same for all vendors. Of course there is OpenCL, a similar idea, but it is not integrated as DC is in to DX.
So back when Carmack was an OpenGL fan, it was because it was the best. However it isn't anymore and as things have changed so has his opinions.
Richard M. Stahlman says vi is now better than emacs.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns.
*tweak*
Apple had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve OSX, while Windows has been held back by compatibility concerns.
:)
And how many games are made for Apple compared to Windows?
And it is far preferable to the alternative.
What lunacy...I guess Linux didn't go anywhere either cause it's open source...or Chrome.....or Firefox.....
"Commercial will always triumph over open, because open is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Or something like that.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
And that is why Open Source doesn't win.
I feel like the whole idea that we had to "win" in the first place was a fallacy...
Bow-ties are cool.
Geez, if I were an OpenGL developer and Carmack started talking about things that OpenGL should implement to make his game engines work better, I'd be like "Yes sir, Mr. Carmack!" Seriously, those game engines are what's keeping people using OpenGL in the first place. It's too bad that ID software doesn't have the resources to fork that shit and develop it to suit their needs. I'm sure that it would be better.
It's pretty obvious that the smartest Microsoft engineers are working on game-related projects, and it's smart. Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing. DirectX is a big part of that, and the Kinect has also really stirred the pot. Lots of comments here are to the effect that Carmack is stating what has been obvious to everyone else for years. Yes, Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just ... quixotic. It's not quite like RMS saying that he really should just start using Windows because it works better, but it's about 10% of the way there.
And this is modded insightful ?
Free Software is not a religion, it is a policy, and as strong political roots, altough these political roots are certainly not aligned to "bipartisan politics".
The issue with open souce and OpenGL is that a large part of the implementation of OpenGl (at least the efficient implementation) does not depend on any open source activist/developper but on the good will of video card developpers.
Now Microsoft has the "monopoly advantage" if they say now you need to cut off your left feet to implement Direct3D the videocard fabricant (Intel, Nvidia principally) will find somebody in charge of getting his or her feet cut off to keep the market.
OpenGL has to reach a concensus...
Pretty telling that you couldn't actually respond with an answer.
VS makes me want to code. It makes browsing code so much easier. Debugging is so nice that I will often fire up a debugger and step through code if I have a hard time figuring out what something is doing. I have been in several situations where my entire team couldn't find a multithreaded related crash using gdb, but I have never had a bug escape me when debugging through Visual Studio. You can actually control administer your machine a lot more efficiently through VS than you can by clicking through the control panel. Its easy on the eyes, though you don't get "hardcore" points w/ coworkers for a black background with neon text. In my opinion, coding is easier, bugs get found faster, code gets written faster. Compile error? click on the error, and it will take you to the offending line. Huge convenience. And note I am talking about raw C++ here- no managed code, .net, or any other stuff.
Clearly there are drawbacks- Intellisense just stops working sometimes, for no apparent reason. The build system is different than make, and can be annoying at times, but its way easier than fighting with autotools, though CMAKE is a little nicer (though fortunately CMAKE can generate vcproj files). Integration w/ source control other than VSS is a pain- usually I just avoid that altogether and leave them unintegrated.
I have tried alternatives- I used Emacs in college exclusively, until I got sick of a million meta commands and having to write programs just to configure my IDE the way I like it (a little exaggeration there, but not much). browsing between files on large projects was too cumbersome.
I have tried Eclipse and its god awful view system, where god forbid I click the wrong place or hit the wrong button my whole screen just gets deranged. I find the Eclipse model very awkward, the plugins are buggy, and intellisense works even less frequently than VS. For Java, Eclipse is good.
I tried QTCreator, which was alright, but seemed very focused around building QT apps. I just wanted to do general dev, and the UI was too Apple-ish for me- I don't need a shiny IDE, just one that is pleasant to look at and lets me get things done.
I have not tried net beans for C++, mostly because Eclipse CDT has lead me to believe that java IDE's shoe-horned to C++ IDE's don't seem to work that well. I could give Code::Blocks another shot as well.
So seriously, what do you recommend? And what specifically do you think your recommendation does better than Visual Studio?