Is OpenGL generally slower than D3D or Glide?

[Rice]

Not sure, but I feel it is slower on my PC.

[Hacktarux]

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]

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!).

[Rice]

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]

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.

[Rice]

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]

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.

[adi]

on nvidia cards I feel theres a big speed increase with open gl

[Smiff]

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]

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