Originally posted by MrShoe:
Just look at a game like UT, then run it in OGL and then in D3D, you decide.
UT (Unreal Tournament) was designed around the glide format of 3dfx. It was the ported to D3D and OpenGL. So this is a bad app to use as a comparison.
Perhaps you should look at something like Quake3 Arena. This was done in OpenGL and had better polygon capability than the Unreal engine ever did. Another major difference however was that the Unreal Engine was easier to mod than the Quake engine. Whether that was because of tools developed to do so within the app or the framework of the engine is not clear to me since I haven’t done any modding on them.
Now I’m not sure if the reason Quake had better polygon capability was because of the choice of API (OpenGL) or because Carmack is just a better programmer or what. But the fact remains that the Quake 3 engine does allow for more polygons on screen at one time with great framerates, so long as you ran it on an NVidia card which suported OpenGL properly unlike the ‘hack’ MiniGL drivers 3dfx supplied to their users in the beginning.
boy that was a long rant sorry.