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Is OpenGL generally slower than D3D or Glide?

Hacktarux

Emulator Developer
Moderator
It depends of the hardware and the OS.
With a 300 Mhz processor and a nvidia card, i feel that opengl is really faster than d3d. With high end system, usually, i can't see any difference. With a voodoo card, opengl is slow.....
 

Trotterwatch

New member
I think the difference is how they are used - both have immense functionality and abilities.

The best to answer this type of question would be someone who is incredibly proficient in both languages (which isn't me!).
 
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Rice

Rice

Emulator Developer
I have Geforce2, still feel OGL is slower than D3D and Glide, probably the OGL plugins have not been optimized enough as Jabo's D3D and Dave's Glide64.
 

Smiff

Emutalk Member
for some1 w/ l337 emu skillz u do ask some really n00b Qs Rice. I tink ur prolly right. Also, nVidia have some of the best OpenGL drivers there are... so how anyone else is finding them I dread to think.
 
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Rice

Rice

Emulator Developer
ya, smiff, this IS a noob qs, I really wonder what kind of answers could come out. And I wonder if there could be a good answer.
 

Jsr

New member
On my voodoo3 is Glide most probably the fastest driver.
But after that would I say D3D, and then OGL who seems to be slowest.
 

Smiff

Emutalk Member
for a valid comparison you'd have to running the same task coded probably by the same person with somehow equivalent "optimisation level" running on the same system with the same settings (AA etc etc.).. and then it would only be valid for that task or similar. OpenGL on 3dfx is not fair because it uses an MCD (sort of a wrapper I believe) not an ICD.. similary Glide is iffy because they wrote the API aswell as the hardware and is not full-featured.

One particular area where OpenGL could I think give a significant improvement (I'm not sure on this) is in framebuffer handling, which DirectX (apparently) is not good for. Another obvious point is near plane clipping distance. However, most of these are issues of quality not speed.

In general though speed is more a matter of how well the hardware/drives and running code are optimised I think. It's all very theoretical, me no like.
 

linker

Emutalk Member
OpenGL is a little slower.
But it has great abilities.. just look at Quake3, UnrealTournament, RTCWolfenstein, Medal of Honour....
 

Harteex

Harteex das Brot
Open gl runs faster than Direct 3D on my GeForce4 mx with the latest Nvidia detonator drivers...
 

Eddy

I Run This
glide is the fastest api since its hardware specific, after that would be nvidia and its opengl, since its sort of for nvidia cards with nvidia extensions, ect. D3D is by far the slowest. Why do you think the quake iii engine was made in ogl? And the unreal engine? most games now run on ogl.
 

Reznor007

New member
Voodoo3 and newer use ICD's, but some of the basic polygon and texture functions are routed through the glide3x.dll driver. Had 3dfx not gone out of business, a new ICD would have been released that did all functions internally, instead of relying on glide3x.dll
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
Speed is relative.

ID started and fueled this debate a long time ago. .which is faster good old David was ticked off at D3D and it's crappy ness.. granted this was D3D version 1 or 2.
Turns out OGL is faster if the Drivers are properly done this test was done by a magazine that was independent of MS and SGI (EETIMES did an excrutiatingly long article covering ALL facets of the drivers etc.) OGL can be faster but D3D can be as well.

They handle organizing and rending information differently etc. Also they have rather different feature sets as well. OGL and D3D drivers for the same game look different in feel and quality of the video they are only close because the authors had to spend a lot of time getting D3D to look closer to OGL's output (that's not a joke).
I suppose D3D will someday catch up to the quality, but D3D was an overnight hack by MS. It's now at revision 8.X this should be a big indicator since OGL is 1.24. MS has made major revisions to D3D almost every 6 months except the last two releases.

Why use one over the other is a debate that could deadlock the internet. Bottom line is.. niether are as fast as the other, it all depends on the drivers and the person using the API.

Cyb
 

Reznor007

New member
OpenGL is actually at 1.3.

The big advantage to OpenGL is portability to almost any 3d capable platform. However, since it is not updated very often, it lacks in some important areas. D3D now has a standard pixel/vertex shader language, whereas OpenGL relies on vendor specific extensions.
 

Slougi

New member
Cyberman said:
It's now at revision 8.X this should be a big indicator since OGL is 1.24. MS has made major revisions to D3D almost every 6 months except the last two releases.
Just wait for DX9, Displacement Mapping :D
 

N-Rage

New member
Depends mainly how the Application/Game is written. Just play Serious Sam in OpenGL and then with DirectX. SS was written for OpenGL initially so D3D is much slower. Same goes with Halflife for example.

For me, most games run better in OpenGL, UT is one of the few exceptions.
DirectX is more flexible at the moment since its updated more often, but just wait for OpenGL 2.0 ;)
 

Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
Reznor007 said:
Well, it's supposed to, but we will see :)
That's the difference between OGL and DirectX
When MS says they are going to do something its 'Well it's in there but we don't recomend using it because it's buggy' when the OGL consortium does something 'It's in there it works. have fun.'

;)

Cyb
 

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