Although I'd love to see OpenGL being a well-established solid platform for gaming especially on OS X while throwing out closed APIs like DirectX, I believe we are too far from seeing that happen, yet. The reasons are a combination of s/w and h/w vendors/creators that have established a status quo in the gaming market, that is very difficult to steer towards a different direction, even with the rising of mobile devices. Here's some points:
as time flies, directx will be least favored since arm chips (whats in mobile phones) are starting to catch up to intel and amd chips.
which means that sooner or later, apple will probably allow gaming from ios be played on desktops/laptops and android apps in chrome and chrome os.
Yes, Apple will surely do that in the near future. But, IMO, that will not be because iOS devices are catching up with PCs, rather than Macs are turning into iOS devices. The gap between the PC AAA directx titles, and iOS device gaming is still devastating. ARM processors might catch up for the low-end computers but GPUs are not.
On top of these, we should consider that Apple has recently taken a slight move away from OpenGL, creating Metal. It might be a stripped down version of OpenGL, but still it is a different API, exclusive to Apple devices.
windows might be the most popular desktop os, however opengl is open sourced and apple/google won't be using directx anytime soon since they'd have to pay microsoft some money which they can neglect by supporting opengl.
Indeed, Apple and Google won't be using DirectX anytime soon. I'd bet they'll never will. But, as things are right now, gaming market (aka most big s/w houses) don't seem to care much about this.
opengl isn't worse than directx, its just that before mobile gaming came to be a success, most of gaming was done on desktops/windows and the developers are too lazy to switch to opengl.
If only it was a matter of developers laziness. However, developers are not the ones that take such decisions. Gaming companies (and, TBH, the publishers behind these companies) are the ones taking all decisions, and they do that according to profit.
physx is unique in that only nvidia supports it, and mobile users mostly do not use nvidia... there's another thing called Havok which amd and other companies use and is more widespread. the other thing is that companies like blizzard entertainment started to make their own physics engine... not having to rely on physx nor havok. (this is the case of diablo 3)
osx doesn't need to care for physx, just like it doesn't need to care for directx... its pretty damn obvious that opengl and other physics engine will be more wide spread as time goes on.
Agreed. After all, Apple is moving away from nVidia GPUs in every new Mac model. On the other hand, they don't seem too willing to jump to the open source train. Creating Metal and keeping iOS closed does not show any team spirit. I would not bet that we'll see Apple joining forces with Linux to support OpenGL anytime soon. Besides that, as the new Mac models keep becoming less upgradeable in every iteration, hardware vendors won't be investing on Mac platform.
once mobile chips are fast enough to be placed in laptops and desktops, OSX/iOS and android/chrome will dominate windows.
tldr; physx and directx is old news
I wish this would be true, but on a serious gaming area, the gap is still huge. Also, let's not forget that ARM is a different - not compatible - platform, so the gaming houses should really make a brave switch (nobody wants to develop on two platforms concurrently).
even valve who only makes opengl games have stated opengl is better than directx. blizzard entertainment sure has no issues using opengl.
Yes, Valve has said that. They even gone further that this, by saying that Mac platform is a more attractive platform to create games on, since it has more stable / less variable h/w. But this was said around - not remember exatcly - a few years ago. Since then, nobody else made such a claim (not because it is not true, but because market goes where the money is).
if you play games on mobile, you are starting to notice just how well opengl works, the amount of games that are pouring out on mobile and the amount of unique games is proof directx is no longer needed.
Mobile gaming has been improved vastly during the last 2 years. Nobody can deny that. However, playing games on both PC and mobile devices, also makes obvious how far they are from each other.
and once opengl is more supported on desktops, the more OS's it could likely support... some company could come up with a whole new OS like ios/android and bam the games would work if the OS supported opengl (why wouldn't it)
thats why on steam, valve was able to port mac games easily to linux. the mac/linux game ratio is almost identical on steam. only reason osx has more game support than linux is because of feral/aspyr etc which port directx games to osx. if they did that to linux than the ratio would be completely equal.
Linux has its own demons to beat, though, before it becomes a respectable gaming platform. It suffers from a huge fragmentation (so many distributions, so much instability between them) and lack of support from h/w vendors.
All in all, I believe we are far from seeing the fall of Microsoft / DirectX empire, yet, as lots of things have to change from both sides in order to see that. Apple has invested too much on their successful mobile ecosystem, but it is obvious that they don't care much about desktop gaming - they never did.
So, is the solution to this a potential merge of mobile and desktop platforms ? Maybe in the future, but not just yet. Someone has to convince all these big players on the gaming industry that it is worth the effort. Apple should prove that they still care for desktop computing and Linux should put their stuff together and create a more attractive desktop platform, if they want to turn things.
