Okay, I''m not trying to start an OLG vs. D3D war. For a research project in school I am trying to gather information about the advantages and disadvantages with both OGL and D3D. If anyone would like to submit some ACTUAL(no opinions unless stated as such) examples and info on this please do. It would help a lot.

Running_Wolf: please delete this post and go read some previous messages about this in the message archives. Im sure that you'll find more than enough information about such advantages/disadvantages using a well known search engine such as www.google.com.

Do you really actually believe that this message wont start a flame war? You're asking people to throw shit at each api. How pathetic.

-- Wav

Edited by - wAVaRiaN on February 10, 2001 9:59:54 PM

Well I''m not much of an expert on the two APIs but i know that D3D will definatly not work on any other operating system than windows, where as OpenGL can be used on several different operating systems...Hmmm what else...
I''m not sure if OpenGL is open source or not, you might want to check that out though.
D3D has some advantages in compatability issues with videocards, almost every 3D video card supports DirectX, and alot of the OpenGL drivers for cards are alittle buggy. On the otherhand, DX isnt near as compatable as GL for different OSs and as linux becomes more and more popular(which it will) the demand on GL compatable videodrivers will force the card makers to fix there problems, and most of the topnotch cards of today run opengl anyway. Actually you might want to check to see how many different chip makers are left...nvida absorbed alot of them so that might have an effect on compatability...hmmm what else...
I''ve heard that Directx has more features than GL, for example DirectX 8 theoretically has shaders built in and GL does not, and ive also heard that DX has a performance advantage over GL but not much of one...your going to want to look these up though and double check alot of things... hope i helped

Well, Warpexplorer, DirectX may be faster than OpenGL if your video card has better drivers for DirectX than it does for OpenGL. nVidia has better OpenGL drivers than it has DirectX drivers. So, if you have a nVidia video card, you may experience a very small (I mean very small) speed increase in OpenGL applications. Other than that, both API''s are virtually the same speed.

Both DirectX and OpenGL have shaders built in. It is just that DirectX has a standard form of pixel shaders, instead of just vertex shaders, which they both have. Although, OpenGL has extensions, which allow it to have the same access (or greater) to the video card''s technology as DirectX does. With extensions you no longer need to wait for the OpenGL ARB to adopt and standardize a feature, you can simply adopt it into your own code through the usage of extensions.

Also, while Windows NT is aging (since the release of Windows 2K at least), this may not be relevant, I still feel that I should bring it up. OpenGL is fully functional in WinNT as long as you have a video card that supports OpenGL with drivers for WinNT. DirectX versions above 3 are not fully compatible with WinNT, though Win2K is fully functional with DirectX. I have heard that you can get some pieces of DirectX 6 to work with WinNT however, with a little tweaking (Microsoft doesn''t support above DX3 with NT though).

I''d like to stress, neither API is completely better. Use the API that suits your needs or target audience.


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