[QUOTE="ohthemanatee"]
[QUOTE="HaloinventedFPS"]
PC gaming would be better off without Microsoft
OpenGL>Directx
John Carmack said so, you cant argue with the man
HaloinventedFPS
lol, open GL
the post above you said you give more credible answers, at least i said John Carmack said Open Gl is better, no one in the whole industry can argue with Carmack
so riddle me this, why is carmack basically the last dev to still use Open GL?
when was the last time Open GL was the same quality as Direct X? Direct X 8?
go check games from 2001-2002 and notice the difference betweenthe number of Direct X games and Open GL games, (hint: Direct X wins by a landslide), there's a reason why Direct X is more popular and that's because it's tools are considered to be better, apart from a few Quake 3 engine games basically everything else uses Direct X
you say that John Carmack´s opinion is indisputable, but then you proceed to say that gamespt reviews are just opinions and therefore don't matter (hypocrite much?)
The difference is dramatic today, but it's always been significant. There has never been an OpenGL SDK, while Microsoft has been providing the DX SDK for a long time, filled with samples and documentation. Khronos said they can't cover the costs for hosting such a SDK on their website, which I find laughable. There's no PIX for OpenGL. There's no PerfHUD. dDebugger is expensive and limited compared to the D3D tools. There's no D3DX for OpenGL.
Even if you could ignore the tools problem (which you can't), the APIs are not equivalent. That stuff about extensions being the holy grail of fast-paced development was true in the 90s, but it's no longer relevant. Currently, OpenGL is lagging behind D3D, extensions included. Whoever mentions extensions as a good thing has never tried to get single-component floating point textures to work in OpenGL. Yes, I know OpenGL 3 finally has that, but that's a young and immature API. Before that, you had to wrestle with 3 or 4 separate and incompatible extensions to get something that's in D3D's core.
Same thing with render-to-texture a while back. How can you tell if the hardware can filter floating-point textures? How do you reuse the depth buffer of the window with another render target? How do you precompile GLSL, so that your game doesn't take a million years to load, or stall when you need a new shader variant? How do you include files in GLSL? (Yes, I know you can in OpenGL 3, but it's still pathetic). How do you like it when that software fallback nightmare kicks in just because it feels like it? (Yes, I know why it seemed like a good idea in 1990, but times have changed and games aren't CAD applications).
OpenGL loses in a strict API-to-API comparison. It's got fewer (useful) features and it's harder to program: compare vertex declarations with glVertexAttribPointer(), SetVertexShaderConstantF() with the glGetUniformLocation() + glUniformXY() debacle, or CreateVertexShader() with glShaderSource() + glCompileShader() + glAttachObject() + glLinkProgram() + GL_OBJECT_COMPILE_STATUS + GL_OBJECT_LINK_STATUS + GL_OBJECT_VALIDATE_STATUS.
OpenGL loses when comparing tools by simply not having any. OpenGL loses when comparing samples and documentation. OpenGL's utility library has quadrics and a tessellator, D3D's utility library has vertex cache optimization, PRT, vector math, image loading and a bunch of other things; guess which one is more useful. Aside from Windows, OpenGL works on a million other platforms, all of which are irrelevant for games; D3D's other platform is Xbox 360, which is very relevant. Yes, the PS3 runs an OpenGL ES flavor, but that doesn't mean you can take your Quake3 or NeHe-inspired code and run it on the PS3. It doesn't even mean that you can take your modern PC rendering code and run it there.
Still, despite OpenGL being provably inferior on all fronts, we should all switch to it, because Microsoft is teh ev1l. In fact, we should all make games with open source tools, because that's The Right Thing To Do. It doesn't matter that it would take 500 years to make UE3 with tools from the 80s, at least we'll keep our karma clean.
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