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Conina on 27 May 2017
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NATO said:
zero129 said:

I know Valve is giving a lot of credit for making Pc gaming more mainstream etc.

But MS has its place too, after all if it wasnt for the work MS done before hand for PC gaming the most likely wouldnt even be a Valve.

This isn't true at all, at best you can credit them for DirectX, but in the early days of PC gaming and when valve initially established Steam, many games used PowerVR, Glide, OpenGL and software rendering, to this very day a large portion of games utilize openGL over DirectX

DirectX was a BIG progress for PC gaming. It was soooo much more than just the Direct3D part you are comparing to other graphic interfaces like PowerVR, Glide and OpenGL.

Thanks to DirectSound and DirectMusic game developers didn't have to worry anymore about considering every popular sound card/chip and their settings (memory address, IRQ, DMA) and worry about compatibility to future sound chips.

The same goes for input devices (DirectInput + XInput), network settings for local multiplayer games (DirectPlay), media files (Direct MediaX + DirectShow)...

And as much as I loved my first Voodoo card with 3dfx chip (Day 1 buy)... there weren't many games that took full advantage of the Glide API, it was often an afterthought delivered by patch. PowerVR support was even worse.

And there aren't very much OpenGL games for PCs that didn't also support Direct3D or that even run better with OpenGL than with Direct3D.

id Software prefered OpenGL, but outside of games using their engines OpenGL never got very popular for PC games. But it was a very good option for devices and OS without DirectX-support.