Question

I saw the articles that were going on about OpenGL being better than DirectX and that Microsoft are really just trying to get everyone to use DirectX even though it’s inferior so that gaming is almost exclusively for Windows and XBox, but since the article was written in 2006 is it still relevant today?

Also I know plenty of games are written in DirectX but does anyone have any examples of popular games written in OpenGL?

Answer 1

Look at the facts. For the last decade or so, nearly every PC game has used DirectX primarily. Early versions of DirectX (think DirectX 4.0) were pretty awful, but it’s been a long time since DirectX has been “inferior”. Do you think Microsoft bribes game developers to use their API? Or could it simply be that their API was a better choice?

In fact, you could make a good argument that the opposite is true, because DirectX improved. Until around two years ago, OpenGL didn’t. OpenGL was stuck with a ridiculously obsolete core feature set, and a million extensions that a developer has to navigate, some of which are available on one GPU, others are available on another, and sometimes they’re compatible, sometimes they’re not.

OpenGL has moved quickly to catch up since then, but that’s exactly it. OpenGL has been catching up, not speeding ahead.

Then there’s the tools argument. DirectX has amazing tools available for developers. PIX can do really impressive things for debugging, and it was available for free. And PIX was just one of the many tools made available for free by Microsoft.

OpenGL had, uh….. gDebugger. Which could inspect a few textures and the state of various gl objects, and it cost money.

I won’t say one API is, or was better than the other. But there are very valid reasons why so many PC developers have flocked to DirectX for the last decade or so.