God I get sick of people stating id used DX first then went to GL. id has always used GL for all their game engines since Q2 if I remember right. I am not sure but I am assuming Unreal3 is using DX but the game is being ported to GL by Ryan Gordon to run on Mac... I know their toolset will be usable by all platforms so I am unsure what they are using to allow this.

Jeez, Yann. I keep fighting the urge to respond to this thread, and then a point comes up that I just *have* to respond to, but you beat me to the punch! [grin]

OpenGL won't die IMO.

Doom 3 and various other games use it. The title we are working on (AAA) is also in OpenGL.

the funny part, is that hodge dont even know some things about opengl, and put the ID example. id and DX? what is the point? not because carmack port his game to XBOX all of us have to use DX. hi is not god, please.

"i thought on mesa", nice excuse, for a poor knowledge
"BTW ID software first built the newer doom engine with support for directX then added OpenGL", yeah yeah

same word as yann
far far away(i'm from chile xD) i'm smelling some zealotry

as i see, this is a another D3D vs OGL thread xD

Vicente
my english sucks :P

OpenGL surely will never die but the most compelling evidence that points to its fading away from mainstream markets is the fact that the next iteration of Windows is not going to natively support OpenGL (or so i've heard). This fact alone should definitely change the landscape and will probably be a determining factor in many studios API of choice. I think it's a terrible idea that Bill will not natively support it as it completely destroys backwards compatability with many applications and narrows the scope of applications that can be run on a strictly windows based system (that is unless the user installs the OpenGL SDK which they should!). However Microsoft is solely interested in market share and money. I assume this is a strategic position, albeit IMO a stupid one. I frickin' love me some OpenGL

Someone better tell Sony that OpenGL is dead, they don't seem to know about it.

Besides, Microsoft don't write graphics card drivers, ATI and nVidia do. Whether programs running on the new windows can use OpenGL simply is not up to Microsoft.

The new windows uses DirectX to render it's GUI. How many people will notice that the new windows GUI has been disabled when they're running a fullscreen game?

True that GPU manufacturers are making the innovations. They are making the hardware obviously. BUT, I think MS also has a say in this because they demand certain features from the GPUs for the DX10.

Would we be getting Geometry shaders in GPUs if MS left it out of DX10? I am not saying MS invented Geometry shaders or anything, they have been thought about since a long time, but if it was left just to the IHVs, would they have come up with Geometry Shaders at this point? Would they have agreed on how it should be exposed? I don't really see this happening in the ARB. Just see how long it took to get FBO and it might still get minor changes. Wheras D3D specified the interface and in case it was wrong, then they will update it in the next version of DX10. But at the ARB they try to get it right before entering into the core as unlike D3d OpenGL retains the same API and hence they are very cautious about modiying the core api -which is good. But for the end user it only means a mich longer time before he gets the features exposed in a single interface across all hardware.

So now MS specifies how Geometry shaders are to be used (after discussions with IHVs ofcourse), and they say they must absolutely have it for DX10. MS has that authority, wheras there is no such authority in the ARB. And added to that MS slaps on NDAs on the IHVs. Have geometry shaders been discussed in the ARB yet? Or texture arrays? I see details of this only after the DX10 info has been made public. MS should be having a more open discussion but they will not.

I am only using the Geometry shaders as an example. Some might say its not the right way to do it, or it might not be very useful, but atleast we are getting some big changes.

Also d3d has the advantage that, newbies need to get the DX sdk and they are set up. They have lots of examples. They have d3dx which handles a lot of lame things that have to be written by the newbies in case of opengl or they should try to find some other libraries for it. Which makes OpenGL less attractive. With the ARB we have the problem they don't do much about making OpenGL easier for newbies to pick up. There is no standard way for newbies to pick up, some find glew, some find some headers and that they have to get the function pointers at runtime, some write their own bitmap loaders, some use glu, some use devil. All this, simply creates more problems for them. Which d3d users don't have. We need a standard opengl sdk, which tells the newbies what to use and what not to.

I wish that sony contributes some standard helper toolkit for OpenGL as GL ES 2.0 is being used in PS3. Khronos group seems to be getting things done. (and yes I know that people from the ARB also participate in the Khronos group).