Does new GF3 OpenGL SDK really surpass directX 8.0

Hi,

was wondering does GF3 OpenGL sdk really has all or more of the features directX 8.0 has. Still, most of them are extensions which are not supported by most of the other cards. While most other cards do support most of directx 8.0 functionality… Any comments welcome.

No other than GeForce3 supports DirectX in Hardware yet.
The extension in the GeForce3 opengl drivers beat DirectX 8(well, they say that).

Well, it says “meets or beats”. Right off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of that is in the “beats” category is per-fragment texture shaders, which are a bit more flexible/powerfaul than DX8’s per-pixel shaders.

Like Michael says… true, most cards may not support NVidia’s extensions, but then again most cards don’t support the analoguous bits of the DX8 API (in hardware).

Yes, the GF3 OpenGL sdk really has all or more of the features directX 8.0 has for the card. DX8 has of course a lot of other stuff but OpenGL gives you acess to more of the hardware than Direct3D 8. The difference should be better texture shaders and the support for shadows map is OpenGL only.

If you look at the main page here at www.opengl.org do you see the new ATI release so probably is that true also for the most advanced ATI cards. The ATI document says that several of the extensions will be EXT or ARB extensions supported by other vendors. Setting a standard could be a problem with OpenGL but if they fail will the vendors lose money.

I really recommend the ATI pdf file about vertex shaders it was excellent with new ideas!