Settle an argument - D3D or OpenGL

[kalniel]

Yay thread pension!

Personally I prefer OpenGL from an idealistic point of view, but realistically for the windows gamer DirectX is better.

OpenGL does things right, but the time it takes for the right way for a new technique to be nailed down severely counts against it. DirectX is able to quickly provide an implementation so the turn around for new techniques to get into games is faster.

Of course, then you've got the arguement about what leads what, in terms of hardware and software and we seem to be stalled on DirectX9 for quite a while with not that many new features coming out on graphics cards. I think that's a good thing because changing hardware and software capabilities must be one of the biggest drawbacks to development for the PC compared to consoles.

I've only programmed for linux/unix, and there obviously openGL is a godsend. It's also IMO quite easy to use, and 'makes sense'. I suspect DirectX is better for plug and play type effects which can be built into game development tools, so it's possibly a quicker API to program for as well.

[Grey M@a]

I will dig out the dissertation for you, will pm you with details once I find it. Mind don't be ripping of my work for your own

[Butcher]

Personally I prefer D3D (and I'm a game dev). It's got better support for hardware features and is a lower level interface (NB: you can write an opengl wrapper in D3D, but not the other way round). Also D3D is a bit less of a "black box" than opengl.

In game terms, they are roughly equivalent in what you can get out of them. A D3D game and an opengl game will look virtually identical - hence some people being unable to tell which a game is written in.

I must admit, OpenGL walks over DirectX on many fronts, and to be perfectly honest D3D is a horrid broken, backwards API for graphics programming. I also find that OpenGL gives you a hell of a lot more freedom that DirectX does.

I'm not sure how you figure that since they give you (more or less) the same set of functionality (namely that supported by the graphics card). Out of interest, how many games do you have published to make such bold claims about games programming?

so....

who is open GL maintained by? is it being developed? is it going to be taken out by M$?

OpenGL is maintained by the OpenGL ARB (architectural review board). Opengl is currently being updated. The newest version is 2.0 which is about to become public. It has lots of nice new stuff like better vertex buffers, more support for shaders, etc.

doesnt it suck that microsoft make D3d exclusive to windows? im a noob on this but i wanna start using linux for games, but it seems really complicated, even just installing the ATi drivers.... oh im so confused

DX is a MS standard, of course they make it exclusive to windows. Then again, the linux game market is tiny so for game devs that's not a big deal.

[Grey M@a]

The claims as I state are personal experience, there are just things in D3D I just don't like. I can code both D3D and OpenGL, I just preferred OpenGL in the long run. The issue I really had at the time was the DX8 build, I will admit I have not really had many issue's with the DX9 sdk and development. OpenGL2 is out soon enough so no doubt I will be having a play around with that to. As I am not in the game development sector I have had no games uplished but I do code for fun.

I completely agree about the DirectX argument that it has far less black box testing than the OpenGL offering so its a bonus on that front. I guess everyone has their personal preference when it comes to their choice of API I always tended to vear to the OGL offering. At the time when I was trying to pull off what I was wanting the D3D copy of the OGL version took far more code to do the same thing, in total.

Out of interest, as you work in the industry how are things looking towards .net and games programming. I have done a fair bit of reading on it but no where near the amount of resources available for current methods. I have seen there is a bit of buzz around c#.net and DirectX/OGL projects, but am I better off sticking with current methods instead of jumping ship and trying my hand at the .net route?

[Butcher]

In terms of games .net is not something that's really happening. For one thing it doesn't really add anything game devs need. Also .net is very much a windows only solution - DirectX code at least has the bonus it'll also work on XBOX. Any developer that's doing PC and consoles is going to keep everything C/C++ to maximise the amount of code that can be shared between platforms.
Besides which, the main factor is that people already know C++ and know OGL/D3D with C++ - it takes a fairly large perceived benefit before people think about changing and it's just not there for .net.