I'll continue using OpenGL due to portability... but also all the other graphical APIs ( Direct3D, libgcm, Cg, software rendering, Renderman, etc )... just because I like to know all the APIs.... but, if you want to know it, I prefer DX10 over all the others.
I'm sticking with OpenGL for only one reason - the ancient pixel_data_range extension.
If there was a way in Direct3D to guarantee that locking a resource would always return the same pointer then I'd switch in a flash.
Wow!!! Very interesting to look back on this thread after 2 years or so! Hahaha.
As it turns out, 2.5 years later, OpenGL is kicking butt! Well, let's just say "holding its own" to avoid D3D flame wars. :-)
D3D became my default API-of-choice on Windows roundabout the same time this thread was running; it got to the stage where I had to be realistic and accept that the quality of Windows OpenGL drivers was a battle that I was just no longer interested in fighting. Getting stuff done is more important than taking an ideological standpoint (or even pandering to my own personal preferences), after all.
For cross-platform work, OpenGL is still the choice, but I'm starting to wonder if OpenGL's much-vaunted portability advantage is really all that it's cracked up to be. I'm finding that other platform-specific code - sound, input, windowing system, event loop, etc - tends to dominate the rendering code to quite a large extent, and that the rendering code is an increasingly smaller and smaller proportion of the overall code. There's also hardware portability to be concerned about, and OpenGL remains too weak for comfort there.
I haven't yet gone down the route of abstracting a renderer to support both APIs, but suspect that I will be doing so soon.
if you do so, could you give some details of the abstraction. i am always interested in such details.Originally Posted by mhagain
regards
-chris
Very true. Browser developers realized this when trying to implement WebGL on Windows using OpenGL. Now all Windows browsers that currently support WebGL do so by mapping the GL calls onto D3D (by default).
Wow! Obviously D3D fans are amazingly insecure! No OpenGL fans said a thing, yet D3D fans (who have no reason whatsoever to even bother with this forum) immediately jump on this thread.
Wow! The emperor with no clothes sure has a lot of apologists!
I find this hilarious.
Oh, there's plenty of things wrong with D3D as well, believe you me.
...and some of us actually use both APIs you know. Being a "fan" is probably the worst reason to select one API over the other. An API is just a tool. You select the most appropriate tool for the job you're doing and get on with doing the job (rather than obsessing over the tool you're using).
I made my renderer compatible to D3D11, so that now I can select which API I want to use. Surprisingly, once you did that, you stop thinking much about the API (because you are always working with an abstraction anyway).
D3D11 is in many ways a much better, cleaner and more consistent API. There are a few annoying bits, but compared to OpenGL it's all really great. Also there are so great tools for debugging and profiling (for free).
In the end I will always be stuck with also using OpenGL, simply because of cross-platform development. But I can understand very well, if people that work only on Windows, will choose Direct3D over OpenGL.
I have done OpenGL for over 10 years, so you could consider me a "fan" of OpenGL. But D3D is simply the better API in most aspects.
I had hoped for GL3 to make a clean cut and become really nice and efficient and all that, but well. At least the recent modifications have all made it better and not worse (as has often been the case in the GL1-2 era).
Jan.
GLIM - Immediate Mode Emulation for GL3
Yeah, that's what I was trying to point at. About 2.5 years ago it looked like OpenGL was headed over a cliff. And a LOT of OpenGL programmers said "see ya" at that time, and there was some degree of justification in that attitude.
So the main reason I bothered to even reply to a 2.5 year old thread was to kind of laugh in relief (at ourselves, at Kronos/ARB, at everyone who deserves to be laughed at). What looked like the Titantic tipping back before a slide into the deep turned out to be laughable... at least in the sense that OpenGL is still a perfectly viable API, and indeed more or less arguably as good and up-to-date as D3D. That could not be said 2.5 years ago, even by OpenGL fan boys.
I'm sure lots of other OpenGL programmers feel the same relief and amusement today, whenever they recall the "doom days" circa 2.5 years ago. Or maybe I'm wrong and nobody but me is amused or relieved.
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