In the latest issue of Game Developer Magazine (May 2001) Dave Aronson of MS Direct3D says this, "...the majority of the people who use OpenGL aren''t game people...I would guess 90% of the Direct3D customers are game companies versus 30% of OpenGL". What is your view on this? Is Direct3D really better feature wise and the API we should seriously look at at least on the Win platform?

I think what he means is that OpenGL is used much more in professional applications like CAD/CAM and data visualization. He''s probably right ... I bet there are a lot more non-game apps that use OpenGL. However, that doesn''t mean that D3D is better for games.

~~~~~~~~~~
Martee
http://www.csc.uvic.ca/~mdill

Right. Direct3D isn''t used anywhere else but Windows platforms, and most of those uses are for games. OpenGL, on the other hand, is used for a wide range of software on a wide range or hardware so the sheer number of OpenGL applications makes the percentage of OpenGL game applications small. But that doesn''t say that the total number of games done with OpenGL isn''t on par with those in Direct3D.

I agree . Look at SGI (the pseudo-creators of OpenGL), they specialize in making workstations (and servers) for professionals, and not in making gamer''s machines. Most of (or all of) the machines they make are using some *nix OS, and most of the applications (guess why) for these OS''s use OpenGL for graphics. Does that mean that OpenGL is bad to use for games? Not in the least.

"Finger to spiritual emptiness underlying everything." -- How a C manual referred to a "pointer to void." --Things People Said

http://druidgames.cjb.net/

In fact, you know, I''d claim that this is a testament of OpenGL''s incredible flexibility and power; it''s been used for every conceivable graphics application.

Of course, I''m one of the biggest OpenGL zealots around here.

Dave Aronson of MS Direct3D is a good person to ask about opengl vs d3d

http://members.xoom.com/myBollux

Well, wether OpenGL is better for games or not, the games I have that use opengl run faster than the games in d3d. I was curious about this, and decided to test it out on a few games. Halflife for example ran alot slower in d3d than in opengl. And know what ? It looks better in opengl, too. Maybe its just my graphics card (NVIDIA TNT) Maybe my system (PIII 666 mghz, 128 meg PC 133 sdram, Win 98 second edition) But I doubt it. I don''t doubt that d3d is a completely able 3D api, but I like opengl better.

The Kid



I don''''t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.

zedzeek: I don''t know if you read the article or not, but he actually responded to the questions in a truthful and unbiased way. What he said is true, only about 30% of the OpenGL users is for games, compared to about 90% in Direct3d.


"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams."
- Willy Wonka

Well, I heard a while back (when the D3D vs OGL issue started to come up) that the reason why so many games were written for D3D and not OGL was that very few graphics cards had OGL drivers built for them at first, yet most had some level of D3D support (M$ might have had a hand in that ). The way I see it is that they are both good packages, with lots of potential. Which one is better, well to that I''d say neither, and both of them are better. Depending on your implementation (in both API''s) it could be really slow, and it could be really fast.

Considering that D3D8 is pretty much a blatant ripoff of the OpenGL API, now, how can he really even say that?

- Impossible, badcontent.net

Edited by - impossible on April 13, 2001 1:20:15 AM