Ok, i’m not trying to start another all out war here. But i was reading a thread in the advanced forum and everyone was just blasting away at how one API was better than the other.
First of all, in my opinion i don’t think that either is really BETTER than the other. I mean someone may like one over the other because of many reasons (coding style, like or dislike Microsoft)
So many of the reasons there are just bogus in a way. I mean cross platform. Ok…fine…OpenGl is cross platform, but most graphics applications run only on windows anyway! D3D sucks because it isn’t elegant like OpenGL right? Well no…i mean some people define elegant as a bunch of procedural calls and others as functionality being wrapped into classes.
Basically i’m saying why bicker about which is better? They both have their advantages and disadvantages so why not learn both and use the right one when the situation arises. For example if you need to render to a texture, use d3d…it’s a lot simpler using renderTarget(…) in D3D than it is drawing to a texture in OGL.
By learning both you also jump over the ‘language’ barrier and learn the real concepts behind graphics.
What do you guys think? Is it so unreasonable to learn both (maybe one better than the other)?
- Halcyon
P.S. The same thread exists in the beginner forum, but i wasn’t getting any responses there so i put it here.