Eolais
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Posted - 2007.02.10 11:05:00 -
[2]
 Originally by: Tunajuice
Over 97% of the gaming market using windows. When you own a software company and are going to write a 100 million dollar game, tell me how much you are willing to spend to make the game compatible with a tiny share of the market? If your product isn't selling at Blizzard levels, it is NOT going to be viable to produce your product for that tiny %. Also realize that both nivida and ati graphic drivers for linux are usually not as advanced as their windows counterpart, so even if you could play a game in linux, there is no promise that it works at an acceptable speed.
Agreeing 100% with this. On top of that, ATi doesn't seem to care about the Linux community at all. Anyone who owned a Radeon 9800 Pro a few years back would know what I mean.
Originally by: Tunajuice
openGl was the language used by SGI on their $100,000 workstations before windows computers were used. Therefore, the only choice was to develop the programs (CAD, etc. etc.) in openGL. So as time went on, there was never a reason to rewrite everything and make a direct-x port out of it.
Also realize, they have different targets. In openGL you just write your code, and hope the hardware will accelerate it. In direct-X, you have much lower level control of the hardware, which can make it easier to write games in. DirectX has many many features built in that makes creating a game in it more easy, which is why the vast majority of games use it. If openGl was better for games, it would be used.. there is no man from Microsoft holding a gun to 99% of the worlds software devs and MAKING them use directX. ATI and Nvidia cards both still support OpenGL...
This is also true. I'm sure Tunajuice knows this, but I just wanted to clarify that not only did SGI use OpenGL, they developed it. As for professional 3D packages using OpenGL, they supported it back before DirectX was even popular. On top of that, Autodesk Maya was developed by Alias|Wavefront (which became Alias, which was bought out by Autodesk (a ******* tragedy)), which was a subsidiary of SGI. So, it's no wonder that Maya supported OpenGL.
Another big thing with OpenGL is it was/is the defacto *nix real time renderer, and with major production studios using IRIX/Linux/etc. software in their pipeline, they'd sometimes find it easier to use modeling software that could work on the same OS.
Granted, they have since put a lot of work into providing DirectX development tools, ranging from shaders to renderers. It's obvious that DirectX is the dominant API for modern game development (once again, everyone uses Windows), so they naturally have to provide such things.
And there's nothing bad with DirectX. Most computers have no troubles running it, and any good programmer doesn't fret about the limitations of one API versus the other.
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