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Grimm

Direct3D vs. OpenGL

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What, exactly, is the difference between these two thingamabobbers? I really don't know much about them and it confuses the Hell outta me. All I know is that OpenGL apparently screws a lotta effects up and OpenGL: may be prettier or somesuch.

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Grimm said:

What, exactly, is the difference between these two thingamabobbers? I really don't know much about them and it confuses the Hell outta me. All I know is that OpenGL apparently screws a lotta effects up and OpenGL: may be prettier or somesuch.


Both OpenGL and D3D are programming interfaces for 3D displays.

On the end user side the major difference is that OpenGL support is not that good on some older or lesser known graphics cards. The major cards of today shouldn't have any problems with both. (If they do I'd call that a major flaw.)

The major difference is on the programming side. D3D is much more complex (and complicated) and harder to use than OpenGL and its restricted to Windows (I have worked with both!). So if you want to develop for various operating systems you are restricted to OpenGL.

The visual look of an D3d vs. OpenGL application depends on two factors: the programmers' skills and the quality of the driver. If all is done with the same quality there shouldn't be any visual differences.

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SlayeR said:

D3D is generally slower than OpenGL too. At least in my experience it is...


I notice no difference in speed on either one. But, if you have windows, a DirectX accelerated card (most new ones are), and a game that has DirectX, use it. DirectX used to be nothing special, but now with the latest Dx9 (and even Dx8 for that matter), they've added a bunch of great new features that are actually trickier to pull of in opengl.

I suggest doing some googling in your free time to find out more about these two programming APIs.

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Direct3D always seems to be faster on all my machines.
Especially on my Radeon, Tnt2, i810, and other cards.

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How do you compare speed? Unless you are using exactly the same game with exactly the same settings all comparisons are meaningless. They are monst likely meaningless anyway because bad programming (of the rendering code in the game) can seriously affect the results. Normally there shouldn't be any noticable speed difference.

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Well, OpenGL crashes all the games on my system (and won't let me save in JHexen), and Direct3D doesn't do it as often (and runs JHexen fine), so I know which is better for me.

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Something that hasn't been mentioned so far is that while virtually all 3D games in existence support Direct3D, there are quite a few that don't support OpenGL (at least, not without a 3rd party patch).

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NiGHTMARE said:

Something that hasn't been mentioned so far is that while virtually all 3D games in existence support Direct3D, there are quite a few that don't support OpenGL (at least, not without a 3rd party patch).


'virtually all' does NOT include any game based on an engine by Id-software and that is a lot of games that only support OpenGL!

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Graf Zahl said:

'virtually all' does NOT include any game based on an engine by Id-software and that is a lot of games that only support OpenGL!

Compared to all other games they are still rather few ;)

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Graf Zahl said:

'virtually all' does NOT include any game based on an engine by Id-software and that is a lot of games that only support OpenGL!

Quake engined games account for something like 1% (if that) of the 3D games on the market.

Fredrik said:

The difference is that Direct3D only works on Windows systems and that it sucks.

But as is often the case, the only reason why it sucks is that it was made by Microsoft.

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Fredrik said:

The difference is that Direct3D only works on Windows systems and that it sucks.



As a programmer I have to fully agree with this statement... ;-)
If I had to choose I'd take OpenGL all the time.

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Derrick said:

Direct3D always seems to be faster on all my machines.
Especially on my Radeon, Tnt2, i810, and other cards.

Hmm well on my old GeForce2 and my current GeForce4, OpenGL was/is significantly faster.

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I'm using a Windows 2000 system and Direct 3D doesn't even work for me anyway, so heh.

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Fredrik said:

I'm using a Windows 2000 system and Direct 3D doesn't even work for me anyway, so heh.

Windows '98 messed up on my comp and refused to re-install (the install program was trying to create a temporary directory on the CD drive :( ), so I was forced to install 2000 too. I've only had it on here a couple of weeks, but everything I've tried so far seems to work fine.

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NiGHTMARE said:

I've only had it on here a couple of weeks, but everything I've tried so far seems to work fine.

Yeah, no, my problem is clearly a local anomaly.

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Fredrik said:

The difference is that Direct3D only works on Windows systems and that it sucks.


roger that

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