OpenGL vs DirectX

[GiantEvilPig]

I am confused, what is the difference between OpenGL and DirectX.

[DrMacintosh]

 

[Guest]

Open gl is a standard made by a group anyone can use. 

 

Directx is a standard made by Microsoft that’s only officiallly meant to work on Microsoft devices like windows and Xbox. 

 

Open gl is a 3D acceleration api that when used properly, has the GPU compute 3D graphic insteas of having the CPU do so. The GL stands for graphics library. That’s all it’s meant to do. 

 

Directx has that AND it lets you control some other devices like soundcards. 

[NF-F12]

They are both pieces of software that allow software to inferface with hardware, and both of them utilize different methods of enabling the general purpose.

 

Wikipedia can provide a decent enough basic explanation for both.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL

[Mira Yurizaki]

If we want to get technical:

 

• DirectX is a suite of application programming interfaces (API) that help software developers of certain applications do things. The one most people hear about is Direct3D, which helps developers of 3D applications write how to perform the 3D rendering to the graphics card. There's also a few others like Direct2D (for 2D stuff, duh), Direct Compute (for throwing calculations on the GPU instead of the CPU), XInput (basically handling Xbox 360 type controllers), and a few others.
• OpenGL is strictly just a graphics rendering API.

 

As people have mentioned, DirectX is made by Microsoft and is only supported on Microsoft platforms. OpenGL is maintained by Khronos and is open source, meaning theoretically you can take it and run it on any platform.

 

In terms of which is better from a feature set point of view, I don't think there's an appreciable difference. DOOM was first released on OpenGL and looked like any other DirectX title before the engine had a Vulkan (which is OpenGL's successor) release. I don't believe there's a graphical quality difference, or if there is one, you have to squint really hard to see it.

[Paddi01]

3 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

DirectX is a suite of application programming interfaces (API) that help software developers of certain applications do things. The one most people hear about is Direct3D, which helps developers of 3D applications write how to perform the 3D rendering to the graphics card.

I'm wondering why there are only very few DX12 games? Would it require too much effort? It exists since 2015.

[ShawnTD]

Probably due to how much market share windows 7 still had/has. To use directx 12 you need windows 10 to run it. Game makers would alienate a lot of players that want to hang on to win7.

[pipnina]

19 minutes ago, Paddi01 said:

I'm wondering why there are only very few DX12 games? Would it require too much effort? It exists since 2015.

2 minutes ago, ShawnTD said:

Probably due to how much market share windows 7 still had/has. To use directx 12 you need windows 10 to run it. Game makers would alienate a lot of players that want to hang on to win7.

Likely this, but it is also worth bearing in mind that Vulkan and DX came out at a very similar time, offered exactly the same (or better) performance and features and was cross-platform as a bonus. This comes at a time when game devs are more likely than ever to consider Macos/Linux as a release candidate. Of course some devs aare likely to use DX for some time (i.e. Ubisoft, EA) as they have their own engines built upon it for their own purposes only, and do not consider cross-platform at this time.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Paddi01 said:

I'm wondering why there are only very few DX12 games? Would it require too much effort? It exists since 2015.

DirectX 12 in a very simplified way of explaining it is a hardcore version of DirectX 11. DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 both have the same feature set (possibly with the exception of ray tracing, but that's actually it's own API) so in reality they can both produce the same image quality. You use DirectX 12 when your application is CPU bound and DirectX 11 can't provide enough performance.

 

1 hour ago, ShawnTD said:

Probably due to how much market share windows 7 still had/has. To use directx 12 you need windows 10 to run it. Game makers would alienate a lot of players that want to hang on to win7.

That didn't stop DX9 from being dropped by AAA developers around 2011 when Windows XP was still the majority OS.

[GiantEvilPig]

On 9/16/2018 at 8:02 PM, DrMacintosh said:

 

That really gave me a better idea about them. But also for some games I have a smoother experience with OpenGL. When I use DirectX, sometimes there is a BUNCH of stutter and 40fps looks like 5. I guess what I am saying is it depends on the hardware? Or how the game was made?