OpenGL vs Direct3D

[RANT]

bah… dont you mean “considerably gayer”???

I really can’t understand the fuss about D3D? I can’t find one single reason to use it over OpenGL. If someone can give me some good reasons to learn it… I might just do that…

M$ have already buggered up the OS market with their flimsyware/bloatware crap OS’s… and even worse products… (though in defence I do like Visual C++) And it seems they want to dominate the 3D market with their lame plagurised API.

I’ll be smiling ear to ear the day M$ go bankrupt…

[/RANT]

Nutty.

any compiler on a unix system that is called “rmc” is just screaming for trouble

Do what I do, and just rename it “cc” for “cobol compiler” :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

>I really can’t understand the fuss about
>D3D? I can’t find one single reason to use
>it over OpenGL. If someone can give me some
>good reasons to learn it… I might just do
>that…

Umm, I know this is a OpenGL forum…
but, it’s something called fragmenting.

like ati has “there extension” to do dot3lighting in OpenGL,
where nvidia has there “own way” to do this
as well…

but in D3D, it’s unified and there is only 1 way/interface to do it…

Well i’ve been “learning” D3D out of curiosity lately… Well out of mistake d3d rm (retained mode or something)… First you have to battle your way through about 10’000 com objects, and then you still cant do what your really want to (you can load files directly, but specifying verticles directly well forget it). I guess d3d im (immediate mode) is somewhat better in that way (i don’t really know though).

And a little note to the xbox stuff: They froze Halo (the bungie game) until theyr going to release the xbox… just because that i hate m$… and that they support d3dmore that ogl makes that just worse

It’s nothing more than trivial to write a wrapper for several extensions of the same functionality… Thats basically all D3D does…

Though with OpenGL, you might get access to more features (ala pixel shaders) as you’re not limited to D3D’s implementation.

Nutty

>>like ati has “there extension” to do dot3lighting in OpenGL,
where nvidia has there “own way” to do this
as well…<<

i just noticed a few more extension specs have been posted including http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/texture_env_dot3.txt

(wtf is there a clear fields button for, he saiz after pushing that instead of send)

I don’t know about in America, but here in England, seeing Bill Gates announce the XBox in his knitted sweater accompanied by some annonymous WWF wrestler did nothing for its’ potential appeal to 18-30 year olds…he doesn’t seem to realise that the average console buyer does not know or care what pixel/vertex shaders are, or that it’s fill rate is double/treble that of the PS2 or whatever whatever whatever…they’re interested in innovative, exciting and most probably Japenese games.
They’ll continue to buy PS2’s, and the XBox will go the same way as the MSX…straight into the classified ads in local newspapers. Shame…but I hope to god that NVidia have not invested too much in this doomed project - I think they deserve better…

Not sure I agree with that. Being in the games industry myself, I reckon it’s gonna totally stomp all over PS2. It’s basically a fixed spec highly optimized PC… and there are loads of developers out there that would love to get their hands on this thing…

PS2 aint really that hot… it’s really useless at textures… only 4 meg of VRAM, and no hardware texture compression.

Another good thing about XBox, is that it’s really easy to develop for… Basically just get a geforce 3 pc… with dx 8, and you’re 90% there… Very easy to port existing Pc games too… especially if they were already written using D3D…

Nutty

ive written a paper entitled “why the xbox wont suceed”
as nutty saiz, its gonna be a hit with developers unfortunately the developers DONT buy the games.
kieranatwork is far closer to the money

Few people despise M$ more than I do, but in the PC software industry, they’re the 800-pound gorilla that can bully everyone else, and they usually get what they want. Why else could an inferior API like the early versions of D3D survive? M$'s often successful strategy is to put out an inferior first version (like Windows, IE, D3D, etc.), let the industry insiders laugh at it, keep chipping away at market share with iteratively better versions, until they completely dominate the market with a product that is “good enough.” I doubt XBox will be any different.

As far as the original topic (D3D vs GL), it’s a matter of personal preference and intended use. If you like pure, clean, “academic” API’s, OpenGL is for you. (It’s clearly not just academic, as John Carmack as proven.) If you don’t mind, or even enjoy, getting your hands dirty with often needless complexity and you care only about supporting the latest 3D features on Windows, then D3D is worth a look. I personally like to experiment with somewhat academic 3D stuff on Mac OS X, so OpenGL is the obvious way to go. BTW, OpenGL support on Mac OS X is far superior to the second-class support that M$ provides (you can write an OS X OpenGL-based screensaver in about 50 lines of extremely simple code; try that on Windows), but that’s another topic…

Yeah… Mac OpenGL seems to be getting even more support. Didn’t I read somwhere that apple have dropped their own api, to push OpenGL more on the Macs

If only M$ would do that too…

Dont you think it would be better if MS dropped D3D, and pushed for better OpenGL support under windows, then all major platforms and OS’s would have a common top of the range 3D api… it would rock… but no… instead they have to be stubborn gits, and force their ****e on us as always.

oooops… having trouble accessing forum boards… laggy… and unresponsive. hence double post… wont let me delete it though…

odd.

Apple realized that they didn’t have the market share or momentum to push their own 3D API (QuickDraw 3D), so they wisely adopted OpenGL for Mac OS 9, and inherited it from NeXTStep/OpenStep for Mac OS X. (BTW, there’s a Q3D-compatible API implemented with GL called Quesa, for those interested in yet another retained-mode layer over GL.) M$, on the other hand, does have the market share and momentum to successfully push their own API. Smaller platforms (like Mac and Linux) can only survive by adopting standards, whereas larger platforms (M$) will survive by driving a stake into the heart of any standard that would level the playing field with the small guys. They’ve done it with client-side Java, and I sure as hell hope they don’t do it with GL. I don’t like it, but that’s how business works.

M$ hates OpenGL because they can’t control it (no company to buy in order to own OGL). Besides that, they hate it even more because OGL specifications are not made by marketing guys (which it would be very wrong).

P.S. I’m a marketing guy at a software company.

And that’s why we love it

I personally dislike DX because of its platform dependancy and the M$ evil plans
to ‘take over the world’ behind it

I used to think Mac was a waste of money, but with their frenetic support of OpenGL and impressive good judgement, I have been starting to think about buying one and start developing on it.
( money issue only here. )

I think JC have something to do with it to

Been talking with some of my mates from work… and we still dont seem to be able to percieve why Xbox might fail. Maybe you’re under the impression, that it will cost loads, seeing as the gfx behind is gonna be a superset of Geforce 3. It wont. Apparently it will take M$ 5 years to get into profit due to the loss they will make selling the machine at such low cost.

If I saw a console out there with a better than geforce 3 spec’d graphics system in it… for say 200 quid… BARGAIN! I’d jump at the chance to get one.

I still reckon Xbox will totally stomp over PS2… Probably gamecube too… but that looks like a much nicer system than ps2 as well… I really think that sony have misjudged with ps2…

just my tuppance worth.

Nutty