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Im not quite sure, but i think i remember reading a post that D3D dosnt let your GFX card power as much as it should and Open GL is so much better or something like that, not to sure, and i run on D3D and wondering if im right in thinking this and that if so can i change to openGL.?? if im wrong or talking rubbish just tell me to shut up and delete the thread =]
???
The only thing I know is that certain games run OpenGL (the quake engine if Im not mistaken) and most utilise DirectX.
It just depends on the engine.
DX has more of a feature-set over OGL at the moment, but DX is windows only.
Quite a few games can use OGL but people just don't realise :)
If you're in windows, just use the games default. There is no reason why you should change it if you need to ask that question :)
Actually there's a few games out that use a dx/ogl hybrid system.
But most older games 1999-2005 use OpenGL so do quite a few 3d modeling and cad packages.
With DX9 and now DX10, DX is replaceing OpenGL as the developers choise for games engins
The last thing I remember asking me if I wanted to switch between the two was Google Earth, which can use either.
A couple of other game engines can use either path, like the unreal 3 engine, though generally developers will concentrate on one and not use the other.
DirectX has very good authoring tools, which make development of effects (both visual and sound) much quicker for studios, which is obviously very handy. The main drawback to DirectX is it's restricted to Microsoft systems. DirectX is also much more easily backwards compatible - you can find several really old games that run on things like directX5 that quite happily run on modern systems (Starcraft/Diablo?). OpenGL while being supported on more platforms has some questionable backwards compatability - mostly due to driver implementations. Try playing an older openGL game like NWN on a modern graphics driver and your chances of getting corruptions or worse, crashes, are quite high unless you turn off some of the effects.
Different drivers, and sometimes architectures, are optimised for the two systems differently - ATi used to have superior DirectX performance and nVidia OpenGL performance. Both companies professional workstation cards highly favour openGL still.
Well that's down to bad drivers and more often than not veraition in code sturcture, as more and more developers used it the bolted on there own code and it got rather messy. Anything that ran on eairly OpenGL or true OpenGL 2.0 or 2.1 will work on cards without problems.
It was as developers tried to push the limits of the shader system that things started going south (also not helped by the colapse of 3DLabs who created the basic structure for 2.0)
3DS Max 3 runs very happily (viewports) in OpenGL 2.0 on my 7900GS far better than in software or D3D mode.
I'm waiting to see if OpenGL 3.0 makes it off the ground as it should (in theory) sort out many of the problems while at the same time streamlineing it and expanding it.
Then we'll raelly see if DX10 survives :P
Will they be providing authoring tools though? Half the draw of DirectX is that you get really nice and quick tools to author effects. Not to mention pretty good support from MS.