Some former critics of Direct3D acknowledge that now Direct3D is as good if not better than OpenGL in terms of capabilities and ease of use. In January 2007, John Carmack said that "…DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with.

Just got this off wiki.. hmmmm..ouch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D

Did either of you actually read the article to understand what it was saying?  Or did you just see "blah blah blah IE6 must die blah blah blah?"

From the article you quoted:

Do you know why that was?  I'll tell you why--it was the best browser of the time.  Since IE4, Internet Explorer started kicking ass.  Internet Explorer rendered faster, had more features, and was better than its competition in almost every way (and the reviews showed).  Between IE4 through IE6, it pulled ahead further with every incarnation.  Netscape fell so far behind that they tried to rewrite it and it ended up turning into a steaming pile of garbage while IE just kept getting better and better.

IE6 is quite possibly the most dominant and successful browser ever made.

It's annoying to see people running around talking about how awful Internet Explorer 6 is when they really have no idea what they're talking about.  It's not bad, it's just old and past its time.

As a side note, the tansparent png issue the article author mentions is just an include and a single line of javascript away from disappearing.

I don't get why people keep ragging on MS for apparently abusing their OS monopoly. It's not like they force you to use their software. If you don't like IE then do download FF. It's just the normal user doesn't care enough to switch. Also WinXP is almost 10 years old, it's outdated, of course it's not going to be as fast as something that's not even a year old. This article was interesting...just a little stupid.

Well there was some stuff I already knew. Some stuff that I didn't know. Best of it was that it put's a lot of the stuff that I did know into perspective. That was a great article.

Good article. It's a pity MS were able to use their position to achieve this. While the businessman side of me thinks 'fair enough' the more liberal side of me mourns a system that allows an initially inferior and essentially not required new standard replace a perfectly fine existing one, and do so in a way that moves the situation from open standards to something overly controlled and influenced by a single company.

I do wonder sometimes, if both Sony and Nintendo had adopted DirectX and other MS standards into their consoles, whether MS would even have bothered with releasing a console at all to champion its own standards.

/agrees

Good intuition: as this would have implied most probably the adoption of some kind of Windows based system or subsystem, it would have meant for MS conquering not all the living room, but at least a share of it greater than what it did with XB1 and it's doing with XB360. And without having to fight and bleeding money for it, but actually profiting since the beginning.

If OpenGL wasn't caught between the past with old CAD software running on graphics workstations and a lack of investment in the future then sure, it would be a viable alternative. The recent release of OpenGL 3 wasn't taken with much enthusiasm from the development community.

As far as providing competition to Direct X its still a bit of a joke really. We have a better bet in getting OpenCL taken as a standard so let OpenGL die and have OpenCL take its place. The fact that OpenCL works on a wide range of platforms and is actually supported wholeheartedly by Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Apple means that the platform has a pretty decent shot at success.

just came in to state my love of open GL despite my love of xbox, the apple head in me believes strongly in open gl, never have i had to uninstall a newer version then install older one version of open gl just to be able to play an older game like i have had to with direct x

My 3d vision coding experience is limited to a machine with a Quaddro. There does seem to be random support for other cards via driver patches and registry tweeks at the moment, but in general I agree that nvidia has some work to do (they claim to be working on it). 3D vision isn't exactly seemless in DirectX either.

iz3d+opengl requires quadbuffering. You probably need to download rivatuner to get it to work.