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Open GL vs Direct X
- Thread starter appleater
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Developers just write the code that makes them the most money. In this case it's DX since it's MS's technology. 3rd party technology is often better and more open but big companies like their own stuff.
Direct X is anouther campaign created by MS for market domination. That is all that company is about. Just check http://****xbox.com/ if you don't believe me.
"500,000 people surveyed, and 42% of 360s had to be replaced. 55% of those people had to have it replaced more than once."
Open GL was able to compete with DX11 3 years ago. Its a shame there are not many game developers who use open GL or Mac OSX simply because of MS dominance.
"500,000 people surveyed, and 42% of 360s had to be replaced. 55% of those people had to have it replaced more than once."
Open GL was able to compete with DX11 3 years ago. Its a shame there are not many game developers who use open GL or Mac OSX simply because of MS dominance.
theres nothing wrong with dx. theres no conspiracy as well. name a company that doesnt want to make their company standard?
they used to have to pay to use dx, while opengl has always been open if i remember correct. windows doesnt lock out opengl and everyone and anyone is free to use it in development but they choose not to. they arent strong armed into not ddoing so. blizzard i believe is one of the biggest opengl users.
anyway i would like to see more games using opengl just so they can be ported easier and properly.
Which one would you choose? Windows market with ~90% market share (even bigger in gaming) or Mac market with ~10% market share? It's just business for them. Even developers have a mouth to feed
Developers will always choose whats better propagated and suited. In this case DX wins because of Windows being everywhere. Simple.
I am not saying that there is anything wrong with dx, infact its pretty damn good, all I am saying is that MS did strong arm open gl out of the market, see the article I posted.
MS is rubbish and the fact that most game developers have to resort to using dx and windows because its the cheaper more popular one thanks to MS (not a good thing). What about indie game developers who want to develop using mac or linux, what third party sdk do they have to resort to? torque
? theres nothing left ever since idtech got bought out my zenimax.Not sure. All I know is that games which run on both OS X and Windows, invariably run like crap on OS X, comparatively. *shrug*
That is a very general statement, it depends on how the game was developed. Look at Blizzard there games run beautifully on mac osx and windows.
Funny you should say that. I have a 2007 Alu iMac, bought the day it came out, which was my only computer until recently. Playing around with Bootcamp (thank you, Apple) opened my eyes to how much smoother the game runs on Windows. "Runs beautifully" is not exactly how I would describe WoW on a Mac. Fast forward to now and I built a PC which is roughly equivalent to the low end Mac Pro. Some of the components are better, but it's close enough. On this machine, WoW runs like a champ, pretty much steady 60fps, most settings on ultra and 4x multisampling. Maybe into the 40s during heavy AoE pulls in ICC25, but still eminently playable.
Out of curiosity, I put Snow Leopard on a separate HD, to see how much better Mac WoW would run on the much more powerful hardware, compared to my iMac. To make a long story short, it was underwhelming; it didn't seem a whole lot smoother than the iMac was, and that is with most settings on good or fair, and 1x multisampling (hell, because of ongoing driver bugs, you can't even enable multisampling and any water quality setting above 'fair'). Just yesterday, doing the elemental invasion, the game was basically unplayable on the Mac side, while still getting good fps on the Windows side, this with probably 150 people on screen together and all the spell effects, not to mention the elementals
Also, when you check out the Mac technical support on the official WoW forums, even the Blue posters as late as yesterday, admit that WoW still has major performance issues on the Mac, but they are 'working with Apple' to resolve them. The problem is, is that this has been the story for months and months. It's pretty bad, to be honest, and is part of the reason my iMac is up for sale, with no new Mac to replace it.
I don't know whether you can chalk that up to OpenGL vs. DirectX, or Windows vs. Mac OS X, or whatever other comparison you want to dream up, the bottom line is, it's pretty disappointing
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Yeah, but OpenGL works on both the 90% Windows and the 10% Mac. So "which one would you choose" is really 90% vs 100%.
Not to mention OpenGL works on iOS devices too, which is definitely an upcoming gaming market.
Oh yeah, Linux too. So OpenGl works for the 17 people that game on Linux.
Don't matter, most PC games right now are ported over to 360, which both use OpenGL. [Edit- meant to say DirectX, don't know how I didn't catch that sooner...]
OS X OpenGL drivers are awful, they run about half the speed of Windows on my card. OpenGL itself might be great, after all, games coded specifically for PS3 look great, but the PS3 uses a weird version of OpenGL 1, which allows programmers to code far closer to the metal than OpenGL (I'm not a PC programmer, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
I really doubt that post was made to drive hits to Wolffire, that blog post was from earlier this year :/
OS X OpenGL drivers are awful, they run about half the speed of Windows on my card. OpenGL itself might be great, after all, games coded specifically for PS3 look great, but the PS3 uses a weird version of OpenGL 1, which allows programmers to code far closer to the metal than OpenGL (I'm not a PC programmer, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
I really doubt that post was made to drive hits to Wolffire, that blog post was from earlier this year :/
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I agree with you about the awful OS X drivers, but that is only because there is not nearly as much support for it as DX for obvious reasons. cough cough...MS..
btw the wolfire blog post is to get everyone in this thread on the same page.
Ok, there is much more to it then what I am about to mention but a brief overview of why Direct X is favored over OpenGL is two main reasons:
1. Direct X, as of right now, has the advantage with graphics and speed, it also incorporates everything (sound, graphics, etc) without the need for extra libraries (kind of).
2. Direct X is Windows only and most PCs are windows, and definitely almost all gaming PCs are windows, and consumers want the best graphics so they go with Direct X.
Yes, to all of you programmers out there there are many different other reasons and such but I'm keeping it simple for forum reasons.
I personally think Direct X is a pain in the ass since some things, such as any functions you create using matricies have to be entered esentially backwards : /
1. Direct X, as of right now, has the advantage with graphics and speed, it also incorporates everything (sound, graphics, etc) without the need for extra libraries (kind of).
2. Direct X is Windows only and most PCs are windows, and definitely almost all gaming PCs are windows, and consumers want the best graphics so they go with Direct X.
Yes, to all of you programmers out there there are many different other reasons and such but I'm keeping it simple for forum reasons.
I personally think Direct X is a pain in the ass since some things, such as any functions you create using matricies have to be entered esentially backwards : /
They definitely have being working on the fix for awhile, it seems to be the new wow patch and osx 10.6+. Sooner or later its going to get troubleshooted.
I am not saying that there is anything wrong with dx, infact its pretty damn good, all I am saying is that MS did strong arm open gl out of the market, see the article I posted.
MS is rubbish and the fact that most game developers have to resort to using dx and windows because its the cheaper more popular one thanks to MS (not a good thing). What about indie game developers who want to develop using mac or linux, what third party sdk do they have to resort to? torque
Calm down, it's not that bad
Firstly DX is the best graphics API for games right now, although the down side is DX is only on two platforms (Windows and 360). Meanwhile OpenGL has stagnated in recent years. There are many reasons for this but the most commonly accepted reason is when you have a large open source project like OpenGL with many different groups using it you cannot have have such targeted development as you need group consent for any changes. If you read up about the Mount Peak etc roadmap you can see how the original aims for OGL 3 changed over time due to the different factions on the OGL board. Microsoft as the owners of DX can focus on areas and improve things quicker as they do not need to decide by open committee on the future direction of the API.
The ID engine was always a quite expensive and complex solution for the more indie developer, however everyone still has access to UE3, Unity not to mention the now open source implementations of Quake 2 and Quake 3 engines which you could use. I don't think the cost of paying for a AAA game engine is the main problem for smaller games companies. Also it is worth mentioning this technology is not available for any developers apart from Bethesda so it is not like this is stopping indie game companies specifically as nobody will be able to license the engine.
Edwin
Around the time prior to GL 3.0 I would have agreed that the pace of updates was too low. OTOH there have been steady specification updates to GL starting with 3.0, about every six months since then ( see http://www.opengl.org/registry/ ).
The current 4.1 spec exposes just about everything DX11 hardware can do, and you can get 4.1 drivers on Windows, these have been available for some time.
So it's important to keep in mind the difference between progress on specs and progress on drivers (which as you can see, varies by platform).
I like this blog, he does a good job of highlighting specific items in the evolution of OpenGL.
http://www.g-truc.net/post-tech-lastest-full.html
The current 4.1 spec exposes just about everything DX11 hardware can do, and you can get 4.1 drivers on Windows, these have been available for some time.
So it's important to keep in mind the difference between progress on specs and progress on drivers (which as you can see, varies by platform).
I like this blog, he does a good job of highlighting specific items in the evolution of OpenGL.
http://www.g-truc.net/post-tech-lastest-full.html
Back in 2007 when Crysis was being photo realistic, we had Quake 4 on id Tech 4. There was no comparison.
Tech 5 looks nice but around the corner we have UE4, CryEngine 3 and whatever major update Valve has planned for Source. Chances are they will all be on par with one another.
Calm down, it's not that bad
Firstly DX is the best graphics API for games right now, although the down side is DX is only on two platforms (Windows and 360). Meanwhile OpenGL has stagnated in recent years. There are many reasons for this but the most commonly accepted reason is when you have a large open source project like OpenGL with many different groups using it you cannot have have such targeted development as you need group consent for any changes. If you read up about the Mount Peak etc roadmap you can see how the original aims for OGL 3 changed over time due to the different factions on the OGL board. Microsoft as the owners of DX can focus on areas and improve things quicker as they do not need to decide by open committee on the future direction of the API.
The ID engine was always a quite expensive and complex solution for the more indie developer, however everyone still has access to UE3, Unity not to mention the now open source implementations of Quake 2 and Quake 3 engines which you could use. I don't think the cost of paying for a AAA game engine is the main problem for smaller games companies. Also it is worth mentioning this technology is not available for any developers apart from Bethesda so it is not like this is stopping indie game companies specifically as nobody will be able to license the engine.
Edwin
Open GL's lack of funding and management is definitely proving to be crippling when compared to microsofts ownership of dx, however this is where the problem lies. with ms being the main driving force of api in the market thats when they start taking advantage and throwing out their gimmicks to put a new face on the same garbage from the last refresh. just look at dx9 -> dx10.
developers are wise enough to decide which property to use. what company does not spill propaganda over their products versus the next? if the developer isnt smart enough to decide which is best for them then thats not ms fault.
sry thats the way of the world, its not anything ms invented. i say again ms doesnt lock them out. they are not telling nvidia, ati to not refine their drivers for opengl. ms doesnt bend over backwards to accommodate but what company does for a competing product?
once again, i want opengl more mainstream than the avg guy because i actually play across many different formats however i dont blame ms for this.