DirectX? why gaming companies don't go OpenGL?

[t0rek]

Yes, as the thread title question describes, I was wondering this lately, and I want to know what do you guys think about it.

I know lots of games are DirectX based, and OpenGL has a minority, but not because of that has less quality. Just take a look to the Doom3 engine, I know is aging, but when it was out it was revolutionary, and if you look nowadays, Prey rocks!

The next generation of videocards will be indeed DirectX 10 compatible, and we already know the issue about the huge power consumption they will take. Both ATI and Nvidia doesn't care in solving this problem like Intel or AMD. Why? because people that buys high end video cards are a minority, not the millions of clients adn companies that make pressure to Intel and AMD to reduce energy to save money.

With games so good looking as Prey. Why OpenGL isn't exploted so much as DirectX? I don't know too much about the next OpenGL version, not even if it is being developed.

It's unfair that MS force us to upgrade to Vista (not only the license will be expensive, but you will of course have to buy more RAM for it). If a new version of OpenGL would come up, and with big support from gaming companies, and GPU makers, the "forced-upgrade" to Vista to play the new games won't be necesary. Don't even talk about the buying a console option.

Well maybe I wrote some crazy things, maybe not, just my 2 cents, what do you people think?

[ScottJC]

People play follow the leader, Windows has always been the leader and DirectX is windows' primary graphics library means more companies jumped on directX over opengl. Here's another example: Why wasn't betamax adopted over vhs? Vhs and betamax were both excellent in their time but VHS took control of the market.

As for Vista forcing us to upgrade, pleeeeassse. We will upgrade anyway, its what we do. Nobody is going to force us to do anything but are you really going to stay on your pentium 4 1.6 Willamette forever? I really doubt that.

The world of computing is forever changing and Windows Xp is just NOT going to cut it with newer hardware like vista is going to be able to. Its like Windows 98 running my ATI X800 Pro, its just stupid it would not work as well as it does on XP.

There is so many games that you cannot play with a Geforce2MX... that is essentially a rubbish card. I am willing to bet you'd have to force yourself to upgrade to a more recent card to play a game like Hitman blood money so how is that any different from upgrading to Vista? I rest my case.

Windows Vista is the next Windows, people will jump on board because windows is still currently the market leader and Windows Vienna will no doubt be jumped apon by the Vista users as well. it's all a game of follow the leader.

On the other hand, Hackers will most likely make directx 10 apps work on XP so theres nothing to worry about if you're the scared to upgrade type.

[WhiteX]

Why wasn't betamax adopted over vhs? Vhs and betamax were both excellent in their time but VHS took control of the market.


If you look at the VHS vs. Beta standards, you see the much higher-quality standard dying because of [the porn industry's support of VHS],' he said. 'The mass volume of tapes in the porn market at the time went out on VHS.'

All because of porn, baby.

The thing about DX is that it lowers the production costs, make no mistake but even the D3 engine uses DX for input and sound, from time to time M$ needs to make us purchase something, that is their business, for me the main thing is that Windows gaming is way inferior on coding compared to Console gaming and is way more expensive.

[Shin_Gouki]

The answer is simple, why should they?
Infact OpenGL is harder to use for game devs.Dx is not just Graphics(think about that!) you could put it that way:
ht plattform on customer side and the support for devs(from ms) is simply WAY better then OpenGL.
wbr Shin Gouki

[Cyberman]

The answer is simple, why should they?
Infact OpenGL is harder to use for game devs.Dx is not just Graphics(think about that!) you could put it that way:
ht plattform on customer side and the support for devs(from ms) is simply WAY better then OpenGL.
wbr Shin Gouki
First you should study the history of DirectX. Don't draw conclusions based on now. This is now. DX was brought out by MS circa early 90's it was not supported by many games, because it was obominable to program in and deal with. Now directX operates very similarly to OpenGL in structure et al, it didn't then and was quite difficult. What happened? MS borrowed OpenGL's strong points and added 'stuff' :)

DirectX has nothing to do with a good API or with making great games. It has to do with money and revenue. OpenGL did not lock people into the Windows API/Platform DirectX does. This makes money for MS. New features are added not because MS wants to add new features, it's in order to maintain control. By maintaining control, they make money. This is a marketing tool used by MS for years. This is the proper perspective too look at it. As for DirectX being 'way better' than OpenGL, ehhhh ... that's an opinion perhaps you are just use to it. Audio wise DX has some definate advantages I suppose if you want EASY and 'rich graphics' poo in games GO for it. I'm not much for hack and slaughter games with great graphics. Quite frankly I find myself laughing at games these days. Now if it's an RPG with graphics that get the point across and a reviting story, I'll play it. I'm still playing FF7 for the nth time. The point of games is to enjoy them, not be wowed by them. There is an immense difference, I've noticed.

However DX is by one software tyrant, whereas OpenGL is by comittee. A tyrant can dictate the standard easily, a comittee is rather slow on just about everything. :) That's life, dictatorships are far more efficient than democracys so changes to OpenGL have been and will be slow. I don't really care about DirectX or MS anymore, thats SEP (SomeoneElses Problem).

A famous (or infamous) letter from ID software's lead programer in the early 90's reflected the fact that DirectX stank until version 7. Why? Well it was thrown together in summary. Just like internet explorer. And like internet explorer it does have some issues and is integrated into the OS so people CAN'T remove it or use an alternative API. (See Windows Vista) Now if you like that sort of thing feel fine and enjoy it. I personally dispise being told "You have to do it MY way!" by MS.

But as WhiteX says it boils down to porn!

I'm not sure about the production costs, I think that is only relevant by the familiarity of the programers with the API. I have noticed low cost games love DX, I played blood rayne 2 for about 2 days until I decided that although Rayne looked cool in tights and dresses and wot not, the game sucked. Blood Rayne was a WHOLE lot better so I went back to playing that instead.

As for my preference is OpenGL, I'm familiar with it and I can use it under Linux PalmGarnet or Windows (for now at least).

Cyb

[Cid]

I don't know about you guys, but to me it seem like DirectX games usually run faster than those with OpenGL. Maybe it is the graphic card that I have.

[Slougi]

Ati's OpenGL support stinks, so yes.

[smcd]

Ati's OpenGL support stinks, so yes.

I've noticed this myself but thought maybe it was just me. ATi seems to do well with DirectX and nvidia OpenGL...

[Cyberman]

I've noticed this myself but thought maybe it was just me. ATi seems to do well with DirectX and nvidia OpenGL...It's very simple nVidia invests more time into the OpenGL drivers. Of course since OpenGL in Vista and beyond is translated internally this means OpenGL can never be faster on said OS. It also means that any new additions to OpenGL is up to Microsoft to support not the vendor. MS has found a way around the not supporting OpenGL problem (because vendors supported it on prior OS's they couldn't control this apart from saying 'spend less time on OpenGL your directX port stinks!').

Cyb

[t0rek]

As for Vista forcing us to upgrade, pleeeeassse. We will upgrade anyway, its what we do. Nobody is going to force us to do anything but are you really going to stay on your pentium 4 1.6 Willamette forever? I really doubt that.

lol, you feel very confident with that P4 3.2 Ghz don't you? netburst sucks if you don't already know, I'm using the willamete because my AMD64 fried and you know it.


On the other hand, Hackers will most likely make directx 10 apps work on XP so theres nothing to worry about if you're the scared to upgrade type.

I wouldn't count on that, I think that's not possible IMHO, however if possible it won't be performance wise.

[ScottJC]

lol, you feel very confident with that P4 3.2 Ghz don't you? netburst sucks if you don't already know, I'm using the willamete because my AMD64 fried and you know it.
Vista beta runs quite well on this system actually, plus I will upgrade my PC as well so I don't get where you got the "very confident" thing from... I never said that my system was immune from it being nessicary to upgrade to run the latest and greatest things, its already showing its age in some respects.

My point still stands, we will upgrade anyway... if insulting my currently vastly superior system is the only responce to that you've already lost this argument.

[t0rek]

vastly superior system? well I don't think your P4 was vastly superior to my old AMD64 however I'll give you the point for your 2 Gb of RAM. Anyway, I coincide with this guy (http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_ready.asp) in Vista issues, so I'll probably wait for Vista SP1 for installing it.


My point still stands, we will upgrade anyway...

Oh really I didn't know that... so do you mean a computer user should upgrade every 2 years or so? that's a new for all the IT community around? I didn't know that PCs become obsolete with time....

[sammyboy]

Quite a vast majority of people don't upgrade their systems very often (except when Dell tells them too :getlost: )

I kind of upgrade my system, but I don't go buying a new mobo just to get the latest gfx card, I just upgrade to my needs. I mean, in the 3-4 years I've had this comp I've upgraded from 512mb to 1024mb RAM and have upgraded my gfx card from ATi AIW 9700 to the x800 (though Im sticking the old RAM and gfx card into a computer and try to make some shitty media computer... pfft, who needs TiVo) But that is all I need, I will probably upgrade my hdd soon, for 2 reasons... 1 - I only have about 5gb left (buying the better gfx card makes me "buy" more games). 2 - I'm thinking about modding Linux in the future, and instead of running two computers (One for the actual programming of the OS the other for the running and rebooting of the OS) I will just have two hdds in one computer. The smaller one for Linux, the larger one for windows.

Anyway, Im going offtopic

75% of people don't upgrade their systems very often... their usually the techno-phobes, and are happy with their Dells :getlost: And they get people like me and you to install XP on a computer that couldn't handle 98.

About 15% of people upgrade their systems when they need to/want to run some new games (like me).

The remaining 10% upgrade their complete system each time a little piece of hardware is released, like a processor which has a whole 5MHz of speed improvement which requires a whole new slot, which just so happens to be in the most expensive mobo around, and no where else, and then, who gives a shit when you then have to upgrade the rest of hardware to work on the mobo (you know who you are, you, you.... geeks).

Wait, Im still off-topic... err...

w00t DirectX/OpenGL.

[ScottJC]

Oh really I didn't know that... so do you mean a computer user should upgrade every 2 years or so? that's a new for all the IT community around? I didn't know that PCs become obsolete with time....
Well permit me to explain something to you, you can stay on the same machine as long as you like - but you will miss out on a lot of things, you can still use 486's to this day but you would severely miss out in that circumstance.

I'm quite happy for you to remain on that willamette, it means nothing to me if you upgrade or not but I assume you may want a faster machine before long, but feel free to remain on your machine as long as you like.

Even if Vista never came out, new video cards would come out and new games to exploit this new hardware so you're out of luck because this is basically the same thing - if you want to play say... Tomb Raider Legend 5, with Pixer shader 10.0 you're going to have to be forced to upgrade to your ati radeon 10000 xp (game and hardware made up obviously).

I do not see how that would be any different than upgrading to Vista, both costs you money and since a graphics card is not the only thing you'd have to upgrade you'd probably end up doing an overhaul anyway.

Having a new operating system to take advantage of newer hardware isn't a bad thing. Heres another example, would my Pentium 4 (HT) work as well under windows 9x? The answer: NO. It would work but not as well, because Windows 9x doesn't support hyper-threading.

So in this instance If I want to take advantage of my processors hyper-threading feature (however small or large an advantage that may be, example here) I'm going to have to upgrade to Windows 2000/XP/2003 to use it. Now I could've started a thread bitching about that quite easily if I had a windows 95 machine and wanted so badly to use that, might sound trivial but its kind of the same issue.

I remember a public outcry when Windows XP's validation feature was announced, people got over it, people will get over this.

Not many games will use DirectX10 at first because XP will remain dominant for a while and as for Halo 2 (The only game I know so far thats DX10) I can buy that for 5 bucks and play it on my xbox 360 quite happily so theres no issue.

Go ahead, don't upgrade see how much I care but I have a feeling you will upgrade eventually - i've got a pretty good argument here and your arguments against mine seem to be nothing more than basic insults - Dunno why I go out of my way writing about a page of text when all i'll get in responce is sarcastic comments.

End of the day, microsoft can't make us buy Vista and if a couple of games we can't play then so what, if I don't own a ps2 I can't play ps2 games can I? Just like how I can't play Linux games on Windows - lets bitch about that ;)

[sammyboy]

"Even if Vista never came out, new video cards would come out and new games to exploit this new hardware so you're out of luck because this is basically the same thing - if you want to play say... Tomb Raider Legend 5, with Pixer shader 10.0 you're going to have to be forced to upgrade to your ati radeon 10000 xp (game and hardware made up obviously)."

You know, I really believed that all until you told me about the game and hardware being made up. (Sarcasm in use)

[ScottJC]

"Even if Vista never came out, new video cards would come out and new games to exploit this new hardware so you're out of luck because this is basically the same thing - if you want to play say... Tomb Raider Legend 5, with Pixer shader 10.0 you're going to have to be forced to upgrade to your ati radeon 10000 xp (game and hardware made up obviously)."

You know, I really believed that all until you told me about the game and hardware being made up. (Sarcasm in use)
Yeah its a real crime to make stuff up to use as an example, lets get the law involved shall we. This just proves my point that theres no intelligent counter-argument and might as well just expect sarcastic responces.

I'd have a more challenging discussion if I talked to the brick wall outside no doubt.

[t0rek]

Go ahead, don't upgrade see how much I care but I have a feeling you will upgrade eventually - i've got a pretty good argument here and your arguments against mine seem to be nothing more than basic insults - Dunno why I go out of my way writing about a page of text when all i'll get in responce is sarcastic comments.

Hell of course it was all sarcasm, I was astounished how did you writed all that!. Didn't you know my comment was sarcasm and you still writed all that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

Hell not I'm not staying with my old Willamette, I'm using it because is the secondary system, and that what is for a secondary thing, when the first can' be used for example. In fact I'm not upgrading in these days, I'm rebuilding my primary rig, well with some little upgrades after all.

Of courses upgrades are necessary and obviously my last comment was sarcasm, your argument about why we should upgrade is not a pretty good argument, is quite an obvious one, you are being Mr Obvious here, in fact you don't have to wait for a major OS release to upgrade, is just like people upgrading their system everytime a new windows come out. Just imagine yourself with the same PC you had back in 2001 nowadays waiting for Vista to be released to upgrade? nah, upgrades should be time based, and they not always coincide with a new OS release.

If you know that "I didn't know that PCs become obsolete with time" was sarcasm why did you writed all that in the first place.

BTW this thread is about why gaming companies don't go OpenGL instead of using Direct3D and the pros and cons of both APIs. I never stated that I would never upgrade anymore, that's just stupid, I never claimed that I won't upgrade no more, instead I said that I'll wait for Vista SP1. In fact I opened like 3 threads in the last month for asking for opinios about my new upgrade I'm planning here in ET, so what is your point after all? It is just like you seem to have other abilities like talking to bricks but you don't read well my post it seems.

I forgot to tell you, that no matters if you have the last Core 2 Duo machine, Vista BETA2 is buggy, and running it quite well is a hard to see. But maybe MS will fix some of this bugs and stability in the future


Well permit me to explain something to you, you can stay on the same machine as long as you like - but you will miss out on a lot of things, you can still use 486's to this day but you would severely miss out in that circumstance.

Thanks for the 2006 Best IT quote of the year, you'll probably have a 131+ IQ to be able to do such wise and enlightning comment and share it with the ET community

[ScottJC]

You're missing the point, that wasn't an argument on why we should upgrade. It was more along the lines of "upgrading is inevitable". Mostly I get annoyed when people say they are going to be forced to upgrade to Vista because thats a load of crap since in all likelyhood most of us will upgrade to vista anyway. That plus you kind of provoked the rant I typed.

I was mostly just humoring you with most of that, I like to rant. As for opengl vs directX my first post in this thread covers why I think DirectX is winning over opengl. Don't worry so much most games released that support DX10 will probably have the DX9 librarys built into them as well for backwards compatibility.

Thanks for the 2006 Best IT quote of the year

Thanks for the 2006 Best IT quote of the year, you'll probably have a 131+ IQ to be able to do such wise and enlightning comment and share it with the ET community
Obviously your IQ is higher than mine since you took 18 minutes to edit your last sentence. The original sits above, thanks again for more insults! This has become nothing more than a slag-fest.

[ScottJC]

I've decided to post something totally unrelated (and previously something else I posted here) to the posts of today since they are all a bit retarded, yep, all of them even mine. Feel free to continue if you're that immature guys but i'm not stooping to your level.

I'd like to say that I've never really been that bothered about OpenGL or DirectX but from what i've seen in some games that OpenGL does do a great job, however its not always that simple. I think the main reason why DirectX dominates over Opengl is purely because DirectX is windows' built in graphics library, like why Internet explorer is still dominating over firefox and others. People/developers just tend to use the default of Windows. Agree or Disagree?

OpenGL games run fairly smoothly on this rig but I have to admit on ATI DirectX definitely is faster. OpenGL may be free but so is ogg vorbis, game developers use the MP3 library (which costs) over the free ogg library as well so its not always a matter of cost its a matter of popularity as well I reckon.

[t0rek]

Well, I was also watching TV and eating, and doing other stuff what can I say? :P

DirectX winning? Prey is a good looking game and is not DirectX for example, but is a real fact that most games uses DirectX

As for DirectX 10 being hacked for using it XP, I already stated that I don't think that's possible. Why I said MS forcing us to upgrade to Vista? in the present a game like Vice City make use of DirectX 9 API, however a guy with a DirectX7 card can play it with the pixel shader effects. Now think about a guy with a good 7900GTX and if he want to play DirectX games he will have to upgrade to Vista and get rid of his expensive card, that's what I think it's kinda unfair.

EDIT: Agree, Good post but don't double post :P

[ScottJC]

As for DirectX 10 being hacked for using it XP, I already stated that I don't think that's possible.
Don't say no so readily, groups like reloaded have ripped out a game protection like Starforce (thats the strongest one) and people thought that was impossible at one point but thats nothing to do with this really.

Far more likely (although a bit far fetched) is the possibility of DX10 being hacked so it runs on XP, after all its just a library, but I don't believe that many new games besides Halo 2 will completely utilize DX10. XP is still going to rule the market for a while after vista comes out, look how long XP took to get to where it is now! :D

Games will probably include DX9 and DX10 if they do support DX10 so XP is safe for now. I double posted because I didn't want to re-edit, needed to start a new.

[WhiteX]

Always remember that graphic intense games deemed to run only on XP, like Doom 3, were hacked to run on Windows 9x.

[t0rek]

Yeah, but Reloaded made able to run Starforce games, but the god damn driver still runs in the background, so I won't recommend it because it might damage DVDRW drives and slow up Windows. In fact I won't recommend to run a Starforce protected game even if you own an original copy because of that.

As for DirectX being hacked, it might be a possibility but maybe performance would be compromised.

Anyway that's why I will probably wait to Vista SP1 to upgrade

[ScottJC]

Yeah, but Reloaded made able to run Starforce games, but the god damn driver still runs in the background
Actually unless you run the game which uses starforce, starforce is not running in the background... and fixed exes for your backups tend to not have the protection at all so you'd be safe to use em... use the sf removal tool and all your worries will be gone. i'll speak no more of this... seems a bit close to the line we shouldn't cross.

As for Vista SP1, that may not be such a bad idea because vista betas have a distinct lack of driver support so far. I assume a month or two and it'll be fine though (after vista comes out)

[t0rek]

Yes it does runs in the background. For any mod concerns I'm not talking about piracy here, I'm talking about how starforce protection load a hidden driver, if you install a starforce protected game you can check it in the link below, even if you are not running the game. As ScottJC stated the removal tool gets rid of it.

http://www.glop.org/starforce/detect.php

[ScottJC]

No, you must run the protected game before it installs the driver, thats why it will tell you that "you must reboot your system in order to run this game" on its first run. However, if you don't run the protected exe the drivers are never installed (i.e. if you put the unprotected exe in the game folder and run it).

Personally i'm not a fan of starforce either so whenever a no-dvd comes out for my starforce games I take it and remove the drivers.

I've got my bought copy of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory here and am running reloadeds no-dvd for it, it works great and when I run sf removal it says I don't have it installed. I've also got X3 the reunion on my system, same thing its not there.

But lets get back on track here (again heh)


As for Vista SP1, that may not be such a bad idea because vista betas have a distinct lack of driver support so far. I assume a month or two and it'll be fine though (after vista comes out)

To add to this, i'm going to probably try vista (final build) as it comes out to see how well everything works.

[t0rek]

So you are saving the $400 or are you waiting the people to crack it? :)