OpenGL and Direct3D will allow you to do essentially the same thing. They accomplish it in different ways -- if you are in doubt, pick one and give it a shot, see how you think it feels. Then take a look at the other, and decide which you like better.

The only caveat would be, for OpenGL, don't try to compare the immediate-mode (glBegin / glVertex / glEnd) portion of the API with D3D directly. You'll likely see the immediate mode API first learning OpenGL, and there is no equivalent in D3D, which may seem like a disadvantage. However, GL's immediate mode is one of the slowest methods of rendering available in the API, so if you intend to do things that are nontrivial eventually, you'll want to use a more efficient rendering method.

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There's one critical problem, which is that very nearly every OpenGL teaching resource available (especially NeHe) is awful and teaches you to write OpenGL code that you should never, ever write. I guarantee you that the code GogetaX writes is uniformly ancient OpenGL code that should never see the light of day, through no fault of his own. It's rather difficult to learn it properly when all the resources are 1) severely outdated 2) written by clueless people, or 3) both 1 and 2.

I totally agree, a lot of OpenGL tutorials are ancient code. However I would say there seem to be a lot more OpenGL tutorials and materials around so they are good to get you going and then you can learn better ways to do what you understand to do another way.

I find OpenGL a lot easier to work with than direct 3D, I learnt OpenGL first using immediate mode and got to grips with that then progressed to using vertex arrays and VBO's so I found switching to direct 3D after this very simple (as direct3D vertex buffers are very similar to OpenGL). It seems OpenGL has a nicer learning curve than direct3D - all be it using some deprecated OpenGL code.

In general though your doing things that both GL and DX can both deal with and especially when using shaders I don't really see benefits over which one you use. The reason I use GL more commonly is because I have a nice little engine and just feel more comfortable using GL. Once you know one of them pretty well the other should be easy to pick up because when learning a graphics API you will learn lots of rendering techniques, maths and so on that have no bearing on which API you use.

Yup. DX9 by default, but DX10 works too.

I prefer DirectX too. Really easy to learn. You can even start a new project with sound and gamepad support with a wizard. They also have tutorials for both dx9 and dx10 in their SDK.

Quote:Original post by Promit
There's one critical problem, which is that very nearly every OpenGL teaching resource available (especially NeHe) is awful and teaches you to write OpenGL code that you should never, ever write. I guarantee you that the code GogetaX writes is uniformly ancient OpenGL code that should never see the light of day, through no fault of his own. It's rather difficult to learn it properly when all the resources are 1) severely outdated 2) written by clueless people, or 3) both 1 and 2.

Are there any good tutorials/resources available that you can recommend? I've
got the book OpenGL Game Programming by Kevin Hawkins and Dave Astle. Is it still a good resource or is it so dated that it's no longer useful?