Direct3D: What's the advantage

[usual_suspect]

Is there some advantage to using direct3d to accelerate a game as opposed to openGL? Is it easier? cheaper?

The reason I ask is, I just downloaded the demo of Venom. It looks to be a great first person shooter, except it's direct3d not openGL.

I have a 64MB CL GeForce DDR (225/380) (latest drivers) PII450, and 384MB of system RAM. Enough to handle any game I should think. However, Venom slows down considerably with 1024x768x16. It's too annoying to play it with all that sluggishness.

Am I missing something with regards to direct3D?

 

[Sunner]

Not really, they are just two different API's.
OpenGL is, as the name implies, an open API available on pretty much every platform out there.

Direct3D is Microsoft's API, which is available for Winblows only.

Personally, I'd like to see OpenGL prevail and Direct3D burn, since I considder the latter to be nothing but a political move from Microsoft's to control one more part of the industry, which sucks IMO.

 

[JERR]

Your processor/MOBO is slow if you need ultimate performance. When I switched from a p2 450/100 with 384MB RAM to a P3 733/133 with 256MB RAM there was a big difference in system performance. Your ultra fast graphics card is probably outpacing the rest of your system right now.

 

[Chuck]

I would imagine Direct3D games get a lot of support from MS, so it may be easier to make...

The main design difference between D3d and OpenGL is that in D3d most of the code is done by MS, and the card manufacturer just does a little bit. But with OpenGL the card manufacturer has to do most of it (therefore making D3D drivers much easier to produce, and therefore much more common on windows PC's).

D3d was a bit ghey to start with, but even John Carmack has admitted that D3D is now basically as good as OpenGL (but OpenGL got there way before).

 

[tonster]

I am not one of those "I hate microsoft!" clones, but I really do hate d3d. I have always disliked it. I think it is slower and uglier than open gl. I really wish 3dfx had kept their act together, because glide rox. The only thing is, I hear it's a bear to program for. As for d3d, it is easy to program for, but up until dx 7.0, it didn't have near the options open gl did. Open gl, as was said earlier, allows code to be written for it. This is all well and good as long as your manufacturer keeps updating their drivers to support the new extensions, but if you have an older card, then you are up a creek. Fortunately, you are one of those who has a fairly new card.
I have to say that d3d CAN look good, but I've seen some awful implementations of it. Open GL on the other hand, is usually implemented much better. If it hadn't been for the 3 API's at battle (Open GL, D3D, & Glide), I think D3d woulda lost. But because D3D worked on almost all cards, it was the bridge between open gl and glide so to speak. I know that isn't very clear, but I hope you get the picture

 

[pen^2]

d3d can be pretty good IMO... 3dmark2k and xl r8r looks pretty damn sweet, dont ya think? i thought the whole thing about glide is its easy to program in.... isnt glide basically castrated version of OGL optimized for (feature limited) voodoo based cards?

 

[tonster]

I'd have to research it a bit, but I think that glide is totally different than Open GL. 3dfx created the API on their own, and from what I understand, it sux to program for. I don't know anything about programming, but that's the general consensus (from reviews I've seen). Anyway, I am a voodoo guy all the way, because of descent 2 & 3, tribes, unreal tourney, NFS and a few other select games that seemed to really bring out the best in those cards. Unfortunately, my next card my be a different chipset-they can't seem to compete with Nvidia in anything but glide based games. Kind of a shame really.

 

[Chuck]

I think the problem about programming for glide is that when 3dfx made it their aim was to make the fastest API around (and therefore they could not spend a lot of time creating a nice structure to it - but just had to make thing specifically for the way voodoo's are made). So it's a bit hard to program for glide with performance AND program for an other API for performance. There are quite a few posts by Tim Sweeny and John Carmack on /. and other places about this. But i've probubly got the wrong end of the stick though because i'm stoopid

 

[BFG10K]

OpenGL is much easier to program than Direct 3D. Overall both APIs are probably around the same speed, although Direct 3D does allow some low level texture stuff which OpenGL can't do.

Microsoft can update Direct 3D whenever they feel like it. OpenGL has to meet a committee's approval before any new major features are added in.

As for myself, I really don't care which one I use as long as the game runs well. And I have seen some pretty good engines using both APIs.

You can read one of Carmack's old .plan files where he explains the differences in more technical detail.

 

[usual_suspect]

Thanks for all the info. I was surprised to hear that d3d was approaching openGL in terms of speed. I bought Aliens vs. Predator (d3d) and I always thought it ran slower at the same res/bpp than openGL games at the same res/bpp.

Now I download Venom,also d3d and got sluggish performance again.

Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges but with my setup I've been able to play any openGL game at 1024x768x16 with all the eye candy and smooth framerates. I just cannot say that for d3d games.

If you like first person shooters, definitely check out the Venom demo though. The link above is to fileplanet which is usually a pretty fast download. I'd be interested in hearing other peoples opinions and experiences with it.

 

[andri]

3DFx Glide was made because Voodoo Graphics chipset just didn't have enough features to support OpenGL. OpenGL is still the standard in high-end rendering and graphics but it is open and multi-platform so of course Microsoft didn't like it. Microsoft built D3D in response, and to get broad support from manufacturers D3D emulates some things that can't be done in hardware on the CPU (OGL required hardware support for all OGL functions, or the drivers had to emulate them). Thanks to Microsoft, even SIS has made so-called "3D" acceleratos which will never support OGL because they support only one or two functions. But when implementing those two with Direct3D, SIS marketing can scream that yay, our card is a 3D accelerator... my ass it is.

Marketing jerks have ruined this world