OpenGL <= DirectX

Is opengl losing popularity to directx? I have been hearing this lately from people i know. I hope this isnt so because i want to learn opengl as opposed to directX.

No flamewars please. This has been discussed so many times. If you are really interested in this topic then search the board (link at the top right) for previous references. If you want to learn OpenGL then learn it - it’s irrelevant whether it is/isn’t hypothetically winning/losing vs DirectX.

jerry jerry jerry

in reference to the second reply, i am not wanting to start a flame war GROW UP. I just dont want to waste my time learning something that will be considered useless 2 years from now.

Originally posted by UT_jerryspringer:
in reference to the second reply, i am not wanting to start a flame war GROW UP. I just dont want to waste my time learning something that will be considered useless 2 years from now.

I’m probably a lot older than you As I said, if you really are interested in this topic and not just trolling, search this board and the advanced board for “DirectX” and you’ll find lots of one sided opinions for OpenGL (what do you expect - this is an OpenGL board). Searching the boards will invariably turn up answers to most of the questions you might have. Everyone should do it before posting a question.

yes you are right i did check the boards and i found biased answers. Where can i find straight answers from an unbiased source.?
: ).

well, the point is not whether it’s “useless” in some time, the point is whether you wanna learn it. why do you think some people nowadays still use atari, amiga, c64 ? they do not waste a second to think about the sense of their doings

Originally posted by UT_jerryspringer:
yes you are right i did check the boards and i found biased answers. Where can i find straight answers from an unbiased source.?
: ).

Well, I don’t go there often but http://www.flipcode.com is a general coding site with discussion boards that caters to both OpenGL and Direct3D. No matter where you ask this question, though, you’ll get strong opinions. It’s like “Windows vs. Linux” or “vi vs. Emacs”. You’ll have to make up your own mind about which is better. Bear in mind that to a certain extent you’ll be able to do exactly the same thing with either API and knowing one will make it easier to learn the other, since they have similar abilities.

Why do I like OpenGL? Clean API, scales well to powerful workstations, nVidia extensions for my card, supported by id and JC, excellent documentation and tutorials online, excellent website (here), stable API, portability, etc, etc … Why don’t I like Direct3D? No reason, I never learnt it so I can’t really put it down. The DX SDK is a little big to download though unless you have a broadband connection.

I opted for OpenGL myself instead of DirectX for a few reasons.
resons I didn’t chose DirectX:

  1. I couldn’t find websites that had tuts, docs, examples for directx. This was when directx 8 1st came out.

  2. Those Microsoft *astards change the thing at least once every year.

  3. From what I heard at the time all the books avaliable for directx were for directx 7 or below and also the reviews by readers on the books out at the time were terrible to say the least.

  4. Micrsoft’s docs on DirectX 8.0 are huge and confusing as hell, at least for me at the time.

  5. Microsoft controls DirectX, there is no ARB for DirectX(as far as I know). So Micrsoft has sole control of it.

Reasons I chose OpenGL:

  1. I already brought the Red Book for OpenGL 1.1 like 3-4 years ago. 1.2 was already out but the 1.1 Red Books has been working great for me.

  2. There are plenty of GOOD programming resources on the web for OpenGL.

  3. Portable. I can run it on different operating systems if I wrote my code to do so.

  4. Few OpenGL commands. There are very few OpenGL commands to remember. They aren’t a pain to type either. I personally hate typing all those 128 character microsoft functions.

  5. Groups of companies control the OpenGL standard. Hardware designer are free to add their own extensions, which directx doesn’t. Is it me or does it seem like Nvidia is running the show with the OpenGL standards?

Having played with it for a bit I’ve found OpenGL to be really nice. Very clean and get some nice pretty polygons with very little coding.

I actually went for opengl instead of d3d by accident

I wanted to learn d3d because that’s what everyone talked about but did not know what to do. Our school compiler(borland C++) had the libs for GL and a small documentation so I just experimented with GL. It took me a little while to like it. Then I got serious and wanted to check out d3d. Oh boy! what a maze d3d is!

But anyways, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with d3d. The problem is that it’s from a 2 faced company who only cares about profit and that will do anything it can to sabotage it’s competition.

Now for some hard facts: opengl came into existence before DirectX. Its a decendent of IrisGL. IrisGL was specific to SGI systems. OpenGL is designed to be highly portable. Future versions of opengl will not mean you have to rewrite your code. It is used in the army simulators, in medical visualization, in univerities for research, etc.

If anything I typed was wrong, please correct me.

V-man

I never write any graphic code before
but now I have to make a project of
3-D, and it will run both linux and windows
so the only choice is OpenGL.

I think the APIs is not important,
either of them works well.
What’s important is What you want to do.

I sincerely hope this isn’t relevant (I hate Direct3d), but it might be…

Symbol Last Trade
SGI $ 0.42

Will Opengl survive if SGI doesn’t?

I don’t think SGI is much involved in OpenGL anymore. They no longer update their drivers for OpenGL windows. The people putting out the new opengl specs, 1.3 for example, have been Nvidia not Sgi. So SGI disappearing will probable not effect OpenGL much as long as video makers continue to release OpenGL drivers for their cards.

I use OpenGL for one reason alone … The U.S. Military has invested heavily in cross platform systems for real-time simulation and visualization. There is a great deal of money to be made in this arena and … being heavily funded by the U.S. Government … it ain’t gonna go away any time soon.

MasterDark, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, but sgi still owns the OpenGL trademark, still does conformance testing and licenses implementations and if you read the 1.3 spec you can see that it’s maintained by a bunch of guys at sgi. If sgi goes down the drain that probably still wouldn’t mean the end of OpenGL though. It is an open standard after all.

>>>They no longer update their drivers for OpenGL windows<<<

Although SGI wants to, they are NOT allowed to update the windows software drivers (according to Jon Leech). Only MS can do that. The ARB is thinking about an alternate route to slip by MS.
If the ARB does do it, they will most likely be sued by MS.

V-man

The ARB controls what goes into the OpenGL specification, not one single company. Permanent members of the ARB are Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SGI, Evans & Sutherland, and 3Dlabs. Every year the ARB evaluates the membership status of the auxiliary members, which currently are ATI, NVIDIA, Apple and Sun.

SGI holds the OpenGL (and OpenML) trademarks. SGI also hold the source to the OpenGL specification, and is the one doing the edits to the specification.

As for the remark about not being able to update Microsoft’s opengl32.dll, that is correct. Microsoft controls that dll, it is part of the OS. However, there is now a handy little SDK that helps application writers get to OpenGL 1.2 and 1.3 entrypoints much more easily, developed by Intel. See http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/sdk.html

Barthold

–quote
Permanent members of the ARB are Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SGI, Evans & Sutherland, and 3Dlabs

Interesting to note that Compaq is now owned by HP. I imagine HP has a lot tied up in OpenGL.