OpenGL or Direct3D for a new Windows game project? Or something else?

Question

I\'m starting a hobby game project on Windows that will make heavy use of 3D graphics effects. It will most likely be written in C++.

Should I use OpenGL or Direct3D for

Answer 1

For the situation that you describe, I would recommend Direct3D.

The primary reason to use Direct3D instead of OpenGL is that often video card vendors only do a good job on the OpenGL drivers for their "high end" cards.

The low end game type cards tend to get poor and generally buggy drivers, causing problems on your end user's machines.

If portability is important, then that would be a big reason to look at OpenGL or Ogre instead.

But if you never plan to port, then focus on Direct3D since it is a more widely stable platform with better IHV driver support.

Answer 2

To answer this question well requires more information about you:

• what is your programming ability?

If it's high, I would probably start with Ogre (the best strictly rendering open source engine, IMHO) or another open source game engine, such as Delta3D, if you want additional features (sound, physics, etc.) that a game engine brings.

If you don't want to go with an engine, I would go with Direct3D, because it's being updated much quicker than OpenGL. I don't want to get into all the issues, but version 3.0 of OpenGL was announced during SIGGRAPH and most in the community were very disappointed with it. Direct3D puts you in a much better position to take advantage of shaders and other uses of the programmable pipeline.

If your programming ability is not too high, and you are doing this to learn programming, I would start with OpenGL, because it is easier to learn and there are more resources on the web (see http://nehe.gamedev.net for example).

Answer 3

It is my understanding that in Direct3D you must handle all resource allocation and management yourself, whereas the OpenGL specification leaves this to the driver/implementation rather than the application.

This allows Direct3D developers to use the best allocation and management methods suitable to the application, but is also extra work.

I have done the typical "Hello World" applications in each, and I prefer OpenGL over Direct3D, but that is just my opinion. You should try out both, spend a day or two learning and playing around with each, and decide for yourself.

Answer 4

The suggestions for abstraction of an engine are good, assuming that you know what you are doing. It's difficult to write a good abstraction layer for graphics without having done it already.

I would suggest that you just pick one. You will pick up the concepts from either easily enough -- enough so that you can potentially work on an abstraction layer, or the other library easy enough. But just do it. I really wouldn't worry so much about which is the right one. They are both good, solid performers. DX10 (if you have Vista) may have the slight advantage of more up to date shader models, but for someone starting now, that is pretty irrelevant I think. GL has the advantage that some of the nigglier matrix/vector math operations are either hidden from you, or provided for you (although I think DX has some of these as well.)

Answer 5

I did my dissertation at uni on a comparison of OpenGL vs Direct3D. The real benefits of Direct3D are that it has a regular release schedule - it's always being updated to take advantage of the latest advances in graphics hardware. How long has it taken between the OpenGL 2.0 and 3.0 releases? Also, a lot of work has been done in extensions for OpenGL, which means only some rendering will work on some cards.

Having said that, OpenGL will be easier to start programming with. As Direct3D is based heavily in COM, it has a steep learning curve.

If it were me, I would be choosing DirectX over OpenGL. That's at the cost of non-platform independance.

Answer 6

To start with, we've got the Wikipedia comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D.

But I'd really like to hear some practical viewpoints, especially in the light of recent developments of OpenGL 3.0 and DirectX 10.