damicatz
   |
Posted - 2006.05.09 21:33:00 -
[2]
Eventually, you will be required to upgrade to Vista to experience any new graphics. Right from the dev blog. I have stated an alternative that allows the same level of fancy graphics, would use a single code-base, instead of two, and that would work with more operating systems than just Vista and would be futureproof and not require a new codebase should Microsoft decide to pull another DirectX 10 style stunt in the future.
http://www.opengl.org
Or perhaps a comparison :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL
 Quote:
The principal reason for Direct3D's dominance in the gaming industry is historical. In the earliest days of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics, 3dfx was the dominant force, and their Glide API was used by far more games than D3D or OpenGL. Glide was much lower-level than D3D or OpenGL, and thus its performance was greater than either. Performance is the most important facet for game developers, so the less easy to use Glide API was preferred over the other two. This helped catapult 3DFx into the forefront of 3D hardware in those days.
As hardware got faster, however, the performance advantages of Glide began to be outweighted by the ease of use. Also, because Glide was restricted to 3DFx hardware, and 3DFx was not being as smart about hardware design as its main compeditor nVidia, a hardware neutral API was needed. The very earliest versions of Direct3D (part of DirectX version 3) was not the simplest API to use. The next Direct3D version (in DirectX 5) was much more lucid. As interest in making Glide only games or games with multiple renderers dropped, there was a choice to make: OpenGL or Direct3D 5.
Making games that use OpenGL while using the non-Direct3D portion of the DirectX API is no more difficult than making a game using all of the DirectX API. The decision to use Direct3D over OpenGL was made from simple pragmatism: in those days, OpenGL implementations were difficult to work with. Writing an OpenGL implementation requires implementing every feature of OpenGL, even if the hardware doesn't support it. If the hardware can't do it, you have to write a software rasterizer that can handle that feature.
Originally by: Redundancy
What we show at E3 will be the current client, extended with graphical goodness to bring it up to date. Given that we've announced that we're just starting development on a Vista client, but that the current client is and will remain the focus of our efforts for some time to come, I'm afraid your comment is just not true.
|