Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

by intull • 13 years ago

408 175 13 years ago

blog.wolfire.com

taspeotis• 13 years ago

    API use was shifted in favor of DirectX
    by Microsoft's two-pronged DirectX
    campaign around the launch of XBox
    360 and Windows Vista, including the
    spread of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)
    about the future of OpenGL, and wild
    exaggeration of the merits of DirectX.

I thought it was because that, at the time, the OpenGL API was shit [1].

    By the time of OpenGL 2.1, OpenGL was
    running into a problem. It had a lot of
    legacy cruft. The API wasn't easy to
    use anymore. There were 5 ways to do
    things, and no idea which was the fastest.

And really, the author of the blog post should have known this when the blog post was written...

    By David Rosen on January 8th, 2010

OpenGL 2.1 came out in 2006 [2].

[1] http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055/7067

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#OpenGL_2.1

ekianjo2• 13 years ago

It's also a legacy issue: once developers start using DirectX, it's harder for them to go back, and traditionally PC development has been Windows-only (more or less) for many years. Now that the market is becoming fragmented again between different platforms, there is more incentive to go for a cross-platform API than before - and that's where standards matter.

MaulingMonkey3• 13 years ago

Not really 'legacy' per se either... good luck running OpenGL on Microsoft's consoles or as a ModernUI application! DirectX being a broader and, in my opinion, better designed API certainly doesn't hurt it's adoption either.

yuhong• 13 years ago

And to continue the story started from the stackexchange post, again the depreciation turned out to be a good decision. Guess what OpenGL ES that is used today on mobile devices and WebGL in browsers basically is?

kbenson• 13 years ago

That stackexchange post is very, very good. Points just for bring that out.

guiambros• 13 years ago

It was a great read, indeed.

And yet, it was locked by SE mods as out of topic. While I love Stack Exchange and I'm thankful for the value it brought in so many ways, this policy of locking reasonable and valid questions is just upsetting.

noselasd• 13 years ago

OpenGL was not in any way shit when DirectX started overtaking OpenGL.

It became so around the time GPUs started being programmed by shaders - prior to that era OpenGL was quite pleasant compared to DirectX, yet DirectX mostly overtook OpenGL

Narishma2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with your last point. With the exception of Direct3D, pretty much everything from DirectX has been deprecated at one point or another and replaced with external libraries that usually originate from Xbox development.

fritz_vd• 13 years ago

thank you.. this is awesome.

treeform• 13 years ago

It feels like a lot and nothing has changed since that 3.9 year old blog post. On one had webGL, steamOS, Mac games, iOS games, and Android Games. On the other hand gaming PC is still a windows PC. What are your thoughts?

goldenkey• 13 years ago

DirectX has a way better API which might be why. DirectX has been COM oriented, OOP design, for years. While OpenGL was handle-based, purely procedural.

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

Yes, many that bash DirectX never experienced how the whole ecosystem works and the existing offers in terms of tooling for performance analysis.

marvin3• 13 years ago

This is a bit off topic - Do you know a good source (preferably in book form) on development with Direct3D and HLSL? I have been looking, and I'm not really sure where to start. The focus is on low-level shader programming, not drawing 3D models but manipulating 3D primitives. Preferably if it is possible to do using some C# wrapper.

acgourley• 13 years ago

Most importantly tools like Unreal / Unity3D are so good you almost stop caring if you're running onOpenGL or Direct3D. And this of course is very bad news for windows as the only PC gaming option.

EpicEng11• 13 years ago

I don't write games, but I certainly do play games. Cross platform titles always run better on my Windows install. Always. So, yeah, Windows for games, I don't really care about the politics.

girvo5• 13 years ago

That's beginning to change, thankfully. I look forward to the day where games are all cross platform without loss of quality.

b0rsuk• 13 years ago

By David Rosen on January 8th, 2010

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

Again that post. Spreading the lie that all game consoles support OpenGL.

Yes, OpenGL is a great API if one cares about portability and FOSS.

Reality, the game industry cares about their IP and getting games released no matter what technology stack is used.

Many AAA studios don't even develop for all platforms, rather target a main one, leaving the port to subcontractors.

Back in the golden days of the arcades, many subcontractors were not even given source code. There are plenty of subcontractor stories about having to play through games while taking pictures or recording on tape.

When you have development processes like this in place, the gaming API doesn't matter that much.

exDM697• 13 years ago

Many AAA studios don't even develop for all platforms, rather target a main one, leaving the port to subcontractors.

AAAs are one thing and are mostly based on engine technology that has been in development for years. For them D3D vs. OpenGL is a non-issue that was solved a decade ago. Or they stick to being Windows only. And they have the budget to port (or hire a subcontractor to port) one way or another.

For indies, on the other hand, the most money these days is (probably, don't have any stats at hand) coming from Android and iOS, which both use OpenGL (ES). Using off the shelf game engines is a very popular option but a lot of developers roll their own tech.

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

Many studios use game engines that either abstract away the graphics API or at least greatly simplify it. Building your own AAA engine is quite expensive even if you have a lot of resources.

OpenGL ES 2+ is more like DX10 and less like Open GL.

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

Your statement that the most money comes from Android and iOS is not really supported by the facts for a typical indie. F2P requires a lot of investment/luck and non-F2P on mobile is a steadily shrinking market. Many of the big indie successes are PC titles sold on Steam or console titles.

I'm sure you can find some examples of mobile successes that brought in big money for a small indie studio, but I'd be shocked if you could find even half as many as you can if you look at PC and console.

It's worth pointing out that desktop GL and mobile GL ES are pretty significantly different (extension support, API, compressed textures, etc), too.

RobLach• 13 years ago

Most successful indies worry even less about multi-platform support, and very few indie developers roll their own tech. A surprising amount of indie games start as GameMaker games requiring porting for any sort of proper commercial release. The more technically proficient indie developers hopped onto the Unity3D wagon given how that engine is general purpose enough for any type of project and had great support for indies early on.

Subcontracting to a porting house is just as common if not more common for indies. If your game is successful on one platform a porting studio will be willing to work for a revenue percentage as indies are much more willing to give away significant percentages. Furthermore publishers are fairly willing to front the money for porting if you have a fully working game already designed and playable no matter what platform it was initially developed for. Indie games rarely push the computation and memory boundaries so porting isn't particularly difficult.

The general case for Indie developers is develop for whatever you're most comfortable and worry about that other stuff once you actually have something worth worrying about. The cost of porting a game is pretty trivial if it's worth porting.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

For indies, on the other hand, the most money these days is coming from Android and iOS

I hope Android & iOS are not eating up all the revenue. Some of my favorite indie games fall under Microsoft Studios. Those obviously don't run on Android, and I hope the developers are getting the marketshare they deserve (IMO)

jheriko4• 13 years ago

At the time this was accurate, that generation all supported OpenGL in some form...

hrydgard• 13 years ago

No, they really didn't.

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

No it wasn't. Only someone without console development experience can issue such a statement.

kayoone4• 13 years ago

As a sidenote, Wolfire is currently working on http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth which is quite impressive in terms of game mechanics. They also post development videos on Youtube regularly which i find highly interesting: http://www.youtube.com/WolfireGames

frik2• 13 years ago

Yes, but thanks to their HumbleBundle.com success, over the years Overgrowth looks more like a engine tech demo and vaporware.

Jach• 13 years ago

It's wrong to call it vaporware when after you preorder you can download alpha builds as they come and experience everything shown off in the videos... There's also a small modding community.

Erwin2• 13 years ago

They seem to be happy to let you pay $30 for the Alpha version though, despite it being in Alpha since at least 2009 (based on the date on the FAQ). I'm surprised PayPal will let you pre-order something that has been more than 4 years in development and has no release date.

SquareWheel• 13 years ago

Humble Bundle spun off from Wolfire years ago. David is still working on the game full time, he was only involved in the very first Humble Bundle.

exDM697• 13 years ago

I really enjoyed http://www.wolfire.com/receiver . It was done as a part of a 7 day FPS game jam and was a minor hit when it was released.

If you ask me, these guys should have realized the opportunity and work more on Receiver at the time since it had the traction and enough sales to show up on Steam store charts. But there will always be guys who will insist on working their Magnum Opus, and consequentially, there will be vaporware.

kayoone4• 13 years ago

Isn't this more or less a problem of the past?

Today with tools like Unity3d, UDK, CryEngine, Shiva Engine, MonoGame etc, game developers are at a point where they can pretty much stop worrying about the OpenGL/DirectX layer beneath their engines. Those Engines have become so powerful and affordable that it hardly makes any sense to roll your own. In fact, imo you would need a very strong reason to build your own engine these days instead of focusing on your product.

Soon all of these will support WebGL/HTML5 as a target and even render most of the (still very basic) WebGL engines obsolete.

Now if you were in the business of creating your own tools or engine, you would need to support both of OpenGL and DirectX to be able to support all the major platforms anyway.

exDM697• 13 years ago

Isn't this more or less a problem of the past?

Yes and no.

If you want to be writing a typical 3d game like an FPS, and RTS or 3rd person platformer, you can and probably should use an off the shelf 3d engine and stay away from the lower level APIs, OpenGL and d3d.

However, if you want to do something more exotic, say processing your webcam input stream with your GPU, or write a space scale render of the solar system or do anything that diverges from the use cases you typically use 3d engines for, you might still be better off using D3D or OpenGL directly.

Then there are aspiring future game engine programmers and hobbyists who want to use OpenGL directly. It's arguably more interesting than paying for a 3d engine but it's more work of course.

So most people do not need to touch D3D and OpenGL, in the same way that most people do not need to write C. But some people must and some people want to.

kayoone4• 13 years ago

Sure, they are some edge cases where it might make sense, but even then i would analyze requirements very carefully. I have quite a bit of experience with Unity3D and besides being really simple to use you can basically extend it with any C#/C++ library that you see fit. Support for Webcam input streams is there out of the box and id argue theres hardly anything it cant do.

Of course, if you want to be (or are) an engine programmer, go for it and get your feet wet using OpenGL/DirectX, but for the broad mass of game developers, these aren't issues anymore.

Playing with it directly can be fun yes, but it can also be frustrating if all you want is so much easier with a game engine.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

Actually, RTS games are also a hard problem for engines because they require a lockstep shared-state for multiplayer. This means you need a very high level control of the language your game-logic is built in to make sure your floating-point calculations are identical across all devices and everything is perfectly deterministic. This is a problem for "complete-platform" cross-platform engines like Unity.

electrograv• 13 years ago

I thought I'd provide an anecdotal supporting example to show that there are valid exceptional use-cases that don't practically fit into a pre-existing 3D engine -- specifically, a 3D visualization of a space-scale procedurally generated universe with trillions of stars and planets.

Several times I tried expanding an existing modular 3D engine (OGRE) towards my goal of displaying a huge virtual universe of planets and stars. While I got it rendering 3D planets after some work (where I basically had to implement manual rendering code anyway, since the engine didn't support the odd use-case of spherical terrain), contorting it to support massive coordinate spaces, huge view ranges, dynamic loading/unloading etc. was just far too messy to even hope to attempt in that engine.

After several attempts to cleanly implement a space-scale engine as an extension of an existing engine, I started over from scratch using pure OpenGL (WebGL). And this time, I managed to keep the code reasonably tidy while supporting trillions of stars, planets etc. as I had originally planned [1].

Would I have been able to do the same thing in OGRE if I kept trying? Probably... but likely with far more ugly code, terrible hacks, bloated engine, and slower loading times.

To be fair, I'm not advocating always "rolling your own" 3D engine. It's usually a huge task, and using a pre-existing engine will in almost every case be the smarter choice. But with some people trying to argue "you can make it fit in [Unity/OGRE/etc]", I thought I'd provide at least one anecdotal counter-example.

1. Kosmos: A virtual 3D universe in your web browser (https://github.com/judnich/Kosmos)

dualogy• 13 years ago

Soon all of these will support WebGL/HTML5 as a target and even render most of the (still very basic) WebGL engines obsolete

Uh, most of those have their core runtime engine written in C++ and are probably not itching to port their CPU-side code to JavaScript.. Porting to WebGL is only trivial for the GLSL shaders, nothing else. If anything, these companies are waiting and holding out for either PNaCl/ASM.js/Emscripten to be able to generate fast fully-working web-compatible engine code.

And those engines aren't just loading 3D models and blit them to the screen, at least that's not their selling point. They have their occlusion culling system .. particle systems .. animations .. hardware audio .. fake wind simulation .. rudimentary pathfinding .. a reasonably fast terrain renderer .. some physics engine intimately integrated into the whole thing.

You wanna port all that to JS? Go right ahead!

kayoone4• 13 years ago

Well i was referring to ASM.JS/PNaCL ports as we have already seen possible with Unreal Engine. Its a matter of cross compiling today, not porting to JS.

Of course there will still be usecases for Three.js and the likes, for more lightweight WebGL integrations. But full blown HTML5 games will pretty soon be possible through these engines. Unity3D already had a pretty feature complete Flash export and i am very sure they are already working hard on a html5 target option.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

You wanna port all that to JS? Go right ahead!

It is already done. https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

fulafel• 13 years ago

It's going to be an interesting race between the Web-native engines and the emulated C++ ones. Some of the WebGL based platforms have come pretty far already, eg. Turbulenz.

The Emscripten based competition only have a few tech demos so far and the possible coming of PNaCl outside Chrome doesn't look that probable at this point.

hpcorona• 13 years ago

Isn't this more or less a problem of the past?

You are using Unity 3D, so NO, it's not a problem of the past. You have multiplatform because Unity developers decided to go with OpenGL.

frik2• 13 years ago

This articles is from 2010 and is really dated.

Even Microsoft supports WebGL (based OpenGL ES 2) in Internet Explorer 11.

Beside that the article doesn't mention that OpenGL 2 came late (and 1.x is way outdated). And to bootstrap OpenGL 2+ on Windows you still need a OpenGL 1.4 context to create an OpenGL 2+ context. So not so trivial at all :/

As the article is pre-smartphone era: the future for OpenGL/WebGL is very good now. You can run WebGL on every device/OS (beside Windows, OpenGL 2/3 but no ES driver).

gtirloni2• 13 years ago

It's funny how many old stuff (that is supposed to rely on current data) is posted on HN. I am still getting used to this.

I was reading the article and he mentions WinXP is half of all gamers.. I couldn't believe my eyes. These things should come with a disclaimer here like "really really old stuff, i just want to pick a few points from it which are this and this. ignore the rest".

jasin2• 13 years ago

Portability etc notwithstanding and purely from an API point of view, there's no question that DirectX is superior to OpenGL. There are lots of examples, but the mere fact that you need _another_ 3rd party API such as GLEW even to be able to use OpenGL's latest features in the first place should speak volumes.

vetinari2• 13 years ago

You don't _need_ GLEW, it is just convenience library.

jasin2• 13 years ago

Well, of course you don't _need_ it. You can always go and parse the extension string yourself, then call LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress() to manually setup pointers to the extension functions etc. The point is that you don't have to care about any of that crap when using DirectX. Bear in mind, this is just one example.

be5invis• 13 years ago

One of my friend, a game developer, said that, once you get familiar with the DirectX 11, you will not want to use any other APIs. They look outdated.

And seriously, the GNMX API (a high level wrapper of GNM) of PS4 has more similarity to DirectX than OpenGL.

girvo5• 13 years ago

Game developer, or engine developer?

spikels• 13 years ago

And since this article was written Microsoft has pretty much admitted defeat by incorporating WebGL (a simplified version of OpenGL) in IE11.

ygra• 13 years ago

Has there ever been a competing option of WebDirectX they could have tried to push instead? Or is admitting defeat in this case the same as admitting defeat by implementing Flexbox?

hansjorg• 13 years ago

Silverlight?

kevingadd2• 13 years ago

There's no way they ever would have exposed DirectX to JavaScript. It's not really admitting defeat to implement a web platform feature that customers want when you have no alternative.

They used to be pushing Silverlight as a way to do 3D rendering (which made sense, because it had the DirectX bindings from XNA and .NET is a superior platform for rendering code when compared with JavaScript) but now that Silverlight and basically every other native plugin is on the way out, there's no way they can lean on that anymore.

rbanffy• 13 years ago

Exposing DirectX to JavaScript would be like allowing the browser to run VBScrpt code. They tried.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

However, there's one big problem: they don't work on Windows XP! Half of PC gamers still use XP, so using DirectX 10 or 11 is not really a viable option.

This problem does not exist anymore.

voltagex_• 13 years ago

I know what you mean but http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey still shows 14.63% on XP - not a huge amount but still hanging on.

shootinputin• 13 years ago

Windows XP 32 bit 6.17% -0.26 it says

jheriko4• 13 years ago

this is old, its also wrong in many ways. i keep hearing 'OpenGL' is cross platform.

This is a quantifiable lie. I have written cross platform rendering engines and worked with many, I can tell you right now that platform and vendor specific hacks for OpenGL are a necessary evil if you want your stuff to work properly.

If you are working in a cross platform environment you abstract away rendering then whether you are using DX or OpenGL (or anything else - RSX, or whatever...) is not really important.

The question I always wonder is why OpenGL isn't this... if I can make it so can anyone else, absolutely. Its not hard or especially time consuming and gives you the power of actually being cross platform.

This is a constantly improving situation though... for example I no longer need to tell a large number of Intel graphics cards that clockwise is infact counter-clockwise for face winding - because they are obsolete and the drivers have improved. There are still many problems of that nature though... you might not realise that the driver is processing your vertex shader on the CPU for instance which makes for a significantly different performance profile to similar hardware in that class...

girvo5• 13 years ago

I'm amazed at the comments here on this thread... Personally OpenGL is strictly superior to DirectX, solely due to being cross platform. With the release of the Steam Box and a push from Valve to look at Linux as a first class target for games, hopefully we'll see development proceed to create better tooling to rival that and exceed DX.

This is good for all of us consumers, as the lock in inherent to the technology choices made my game devs will be diminished. I can only see that as a good thing.

And besides, middleware is getting so good, how many of us really need to hack on an engine anyway. My games logic is done in Lua, not C/OpenGL :)

Narishma2• 13 years ago

I don't know of anyone who does game logic in OpenGL.

girvo5• 13 years ago

That was my point, I was being snarky. Man, text totally is the worst for that sort of thing...

remon• 13 years ago

"..on January 8th, 2010"

ewzimm• 13 years ago

For a 4-year-old post about the progress of Overgrowth, it doesn't really convince me to use OpenGL, considering that Overgrowth is still in alpha. It's a 4-person team and an ambitious game, so I'm sure it's not related to OpenGL use, but it's still kind of funny.

AshleysBrain• 13 years ago

Isn't mobile and the web the decider these days? Article is from 2010, but consider if you want to develop 3D on any of these platforms:

iOS - OpenGL ES

Android - OpenGL ES

Mac - OpenGL

Linux - OpenGL

HTML5 - WebGL (based on OpenGL ES) - even in IE!

Emerging platforms like Tizen, Firefox OS - OpenGL ES/WebGL

DirectX is just for Windows and Windows Phone. Isn't it getting to the point where the bother of having to write a DirectX port might cause developers to skip the Windows platforms, or stick to OpenGL on Windows desktop? Windows isn't as overwhelmingly important as it used to be, and couldn't the fact that DirectX is different start to work against MS? Imagine if Blackberry came out with their own custom 3D API - wouldn't that only serve to hurt them?

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

Game consoles - proprietary 3D APIs

OpenGL != OpenGL ES != WebGL, yes they are all based on the same concepts, but require separate code paths and different shader versions.

CodeWithCoffee• 13 years ago

OpenGL != OpenGL ES != WebGL

Whilst technically true, WebGL is designed to have API compatibility with OpenGL ES (2), which in turn is based off of OpenGL (2). OpenGL ES 3 and WebGL 2 are beginning to emerge and are based off of OpenGL 3. In my experience shaders that work with WebGL will also work with OpenGL ES 2 and OpenGL 2.1. Equivalent versions tend to use the same concepts. On the other hand, code written for desktop (v3+) won't work on mobile, because the desktop version is one version ahead of mobile (and I imagind that it will be for several more versions).

rpedela2• 13 years ago

On Linux (I assume Mac too but haven't tried), you can force yourself to OpenGL ES. In fact, I would recommend it. The nice thing about OpenGL ES is that there is only one main way to do things so it is a lot harder to use something slow like glBegin().

laumars2• 13 years ago

Game consoles - proprietary 3D APIs

Back in the day that was true, but I don't think that's the case these days. Xbox is obviously DirectX. Wii was OpenGL, and I think Sony used OpenGL as well.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

You can more-or-less program to the OpenGL ES API under full desktop OpenGL, since ES is a subset of the full API.

moep• 13 years ago

My hope is that the SteamOS/Steam Machines movement will finally tip the scales in favor of OpenGL. A "killer app" that is fully OpenGL optimised with a delayed or worse performing DirectX port would seal the deal. If only Valve had more franchis3s...

chadwickthebold• 13 years ago

I'd be willing to bet serious money that if Valve released HL Ep.3 with the Steam Box next holiday season, they could upgrade their mattress stuffing from $20s to $100s. Even if they released Windows and Linux versions simultaneously, they would absolutely kill it.

rpedela2• 13 years ago

Isn't PS4 OpenGL as well?

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

No. The PS3 had OpenGL ES 1.0 with Cg as shading language, but almost any developer worth his/her salt was using LibGCM.

With PhyreEngine being used as main prototype engine.

Lots of nice technical documents available at http://develop.scee.net/publications

PS4 API is called GNM, http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-cre...

EpicEng11• 13 years ago

Yeah, if all you care about is candy crush and the random pay to win adventure game. No one is playing "real" games on tablets or phones, nor will they be anytime in the foreseeable future.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

It might sound like a snide way to put it, but there is a clear dividing line;

OpenGL dominates casual platforms.

DirectX dominates "traditional gaming" platforms.

MBCook2• 13 years ago

No one is playing "real" games on tablets or phones, nor will they be anytime in the foreseeable future.

Could you explain that? I've played some pretty great games on my iPhone/iPad over the last few years. There certainly are games that could stand up to the average PC release (remember BattleField 7 and Call of Duty 18 are not average). Many are at least easily comparable to games of the 16 bit era.

A sample from my purchased apps list: Battleheart, Beat Sneak Bandit, Brainsss, Device 6, Fieldrunners, Edge, Game Dev Story, Girls Like Robots, One Tap Hero, Punch Quest, The Room, Slayin, Spider, Spy Mouse, Star Command, Supermagical, Tiny Heroes, Tiny Thief, Waking Marks, and Zenbound.

This doesn't include 'tiny' games, ports, digital version of boardgames, etc.

driverdan• 13 years ago

iOS XCOM is a great game, is far more expensive than most iOS games, and is has been very successful.

bcoates• 13 years ago

I installed TF2 on my work tablet yesterday, it worked just fine. Civ 5 and X-Com are great on it. Is that "real" enough?

nl3• 13 years ago

Like to put some money on that?

I'd bet money that in two years time 2 out of the top 5 "real" games will be available on iOS and/or Android. (Not entirely sure how we are defining "real" games, though).

Tmmrn3• 13 years ago

Android != tablets or phones.

Thanks to android being open source people can take it and build ...stuff.. with it. I'm sure you have heard of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

And while it's very low-end, there is still stuff like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldwU96PGOyM which might not be a "real" game but it seems pretty close.

Now imagine the next generation of android consoles with OpenGL ES 3.0 and more powerful GPUs.

blahbl4hblahtoo• 13 years ago

Honestly, up until IOS and Android there wasn't a large "cross platform" gaming market. Now there is and OpenGL is starting to gain more use...the good thing there is that there are more people writing, buying, and playing games. (Not that OpenGL is being used.)

These vehement kinds of slashdotty style articles about MS's being this controlling conspiracy...you would almost think that...gasp...its a large corporation doing everything it can to make money for its shareholders. I mean, if the roles were somehow different and Apple were the market leader for the most popular gaming platform they would be all sweetness and light and no one would have any reason to complain. (Oh wait...)

It turns out that businesses in that position tend to make "lock in" plays. This post kind of glosses over SGI's history with OpenGL as if they were only ever kind and loving shepherds of an open standard that was created to help children.

Don't use directx cuz "evil" is stupid. If you were writing an application that needed to be cross platform...like a 3D authoring environment...you would probably want to look at opengl. (instead of writing your own...) If you were targeting the windows ecosystem directx has some platform integration features that are interesting. Tooling and developer experience also matter.

This kind of breathless nonsense is boring and silly.

csmuk2• 13 years ago

Even Microsoft ships WebGL with IE11...

Perhaps they're getting the point?

mistercow• 13 years ago

What choice do they have? The don't have the market share anymore to launch a proprietary alternative based on DirectX.

csmuk2• 13 years ago

Exactly! It's a good thing.

Tloewald• 13 years ago

The big problem for OpenGL was (a) Windows platform dominance, particularly in gaming, and (b) weak support for rapidly improving 3D hardware (but that was largely a case of already in progress network effects -- OpenGL drivers suck because very few people care, so even fewer people use OpenGL).

OpenGL was kept on life support in the aughts by high-end 3D products which are often cross-platform (e.g. Maya), and Apple (which switched to OpenGL from QuickDraw 3D after the spectacular failure of the latter -- incidentally OpenGL being "open" was SGI's proactive defense against QuickDraw 3D), and then rebuilt the entire Mac UI architecture on top of it.

OpenGL ES and iPhone have completely revived OpenGL's fortunes -- there's nothing much to worry about now unless Android and iOS both fail in the marketplace.

(It's entertaining that the Stackexchange post linked elsewhere was written more-or-less as a final "this is why OpenGL died" -- it's not dead yet... getting better...)

davexunit• 13 years ago

You should use OpenGL because DirectX is proprietary and only available on proprietary operating systems. Simple as that.

JimmaDaRustla• 13 years ago

Microsoft use to be on the OpenGL board (I believe in the 90s?). OpenGL was geared towards scientific development, and we know Bill Gates wanted PC to be gaming platform. OpenGL at the time wasn't good enough, nor were they willing to make the necessary changes to meet Microsoft's goals.

DirectX was born out of necessity, not proprietary greed.

Edit: Maybe its time to take another look at OpenGL - open is better than closed, especially for the multi-platform aspect. But does it have the same features as DirecX? Tesselation, shader programming, etc.

blaenk• 13 years ago

It does have tessellation support and a programmable pipeline.

seabrookmx• 13 years ago

shader programming

Of course it does. Even OpenGL ES 2.0 and WebGL (based on the same API as ES 2.0) do as well.

The fixed function pipeline of old has been deprecated in recent versions, so you don't have a choice but to use GLSL.

Tmmrn3• 13 years ago

...

http://www.opengl.org/wiki_132/images/RenderingPipeline.png (blue = programmable)

laveur• 13 years ago

When was the last time MSFT updated DirectX? I think they killed it off not to long ago with the release of X and its just part of the OS now.

jamra• 13 years ago

Could anyone recommend a book on programming shaders for OpenGL? I know the shader language is not OpenGL, but I never knew where a good point to start was.

emddudley• 13 years ago

I think any recent book on OpenGL worth its salt would cover shaders in detail. I've just picked up the OpenGL SuperBible (6th ed.) and it's got several hundred pages dedicated to shaders.

GnarfGnarf• 13 years ago

Why does Unity use DirectX on Windows, and OpenGL elsewhere?

You'd think once they went to the expense of porting to OpenGL, they'd re-use that code on Windows? Or is it because they get better performance with DirectX on Windows?

pjmlp12• 13 years ago

They get better performance and more stable drivers.

Many cheap computers have GPUs with shitty or non-existent OpenGL drivers.

dsugarman• 13 years ago

Please cite that this was from 2010 in the title. [1] There is a reason why openGL is the primary library used in research, it is awesome.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DavidRosen/20100108/86330/Why...

Shish2k• 13 years ago

A series of relevant tweets from https://twitter.com/wolfire :

My old OpenGL vs Direct3D post is #1 on hacker news! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6852961 Maybe time for a 2013 update -- a lot has changed since then.

1. D3D 11.1+ only supports Windows 8, which only 20% of Steam users have. OpenGL 4.4 works on all versions of Windows.

2. NVIDIA and ATI both now have good profiling and debugging tools for OpenGL that were formerly only available for DirectX

3. OpenGL Core is now lean and mean, making it easier for hardware vendors to create efficient and correct drivers.

4. Valve now strongly supports OpenGL with their own games and with SteamOS -- helps ensure the future of OpenGL itself, and vendor support.

5. Humble Indie Bundle creates an extra commercial incentive for indies to support Mac and Linux, which is much easier if you use OpenGL.

6. All the old points still stand -- OpenGL works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Web, iOS and Android. Direct3D only works on Windows and XBox.

info128• 13 years ago

These are all good points, however, another very important point is driver quality / vendor support. For non-hardcore gamers, it is not uncommon to run Windows default drivers, which often have very poor OpenGL support and/or performance. I would love to see the Steam hardware survey list vendor provided vs driver support for OpenGL.

I think developers may be driven away from using OpenGL at least partially based on worry about driver support. Using Windows this is a non-issue if you stay within DX10 and Windows 7/8. According to Steam Survey, this accounts for 81.61% of users. This drops down to 56.2% for DX11.

In short, until vendor OpenGL driver support is a given, many developers will stick with Windows and Direct3D.

Another note, this one on cross platform compatibility - the limitations of OpenGL ES2.0 are problematic for anything beyond rudimentary shaders. The primary limitation right now in my mind is a shortage of uniform vectors, and the wide variance in size for different android hardware. For instance, a smooth skinning (matrix pallet) shader for skeleton-based deformation will be limited to 5 or 6 joints per mesh on most android/OpenGL ES devices, whereas most x86/OpenGL systems allow for hundreds of joints. Similar limitations apply to pixel shaders as well - post processing such as blur, bloom, dof, and SSAO are not feasible on current generations of android devices for production use.

Of course android device GPUs are getting much more powerful with each iteration, and eventually will provide a good hardware base for advanced graphics engines.

For now, though, the idea of porting a full OpenGL graphics engine with advanced shaders to OpenGL ES2.0 is pretty much a re-write of the engine. This, combined with limited CPU and memory performance, is the primary reason we don't see AAA titles showing up on Android devices yet.

A lot is coming down the pipe in terms of hardware advances, though - I'm excited to see OpenGL support grow in parallel.

Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX

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