Gaming A pretty cool (brief) history of the OpenGL vs DirectX continuing battle!!

[dumbo2007]

I was searching for ways to record 2 game windows (1 opengl, the other the Orbiter DirectX window) simulataneously and came up with this cool answer to a question about D3D : The Birth of Conflict

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/60544/why-do-game-developers-prefer-windows

Didnt realize multitexturing had so much history behind it. Also reminded me of my 1st graphics card- a Savage S3

 

[Artlav]

Ah.

NVIDIA loved OpenGL, so when GeForce 3 hit, they released a slew of OpenGL extensions. Proprietary OpenGL extensions: NVIDIA-only. Naturally, when the 8500 showed up, it couldn't use any of them.

In order to have shaders of any kind on Radeon 8500 in OpenGL, ATI had to write a number of OpenGL extensions. Proprietary OpenGL extensions: ATI-only.

So you needed an NVIDIA codepath and an ATI codepath, just to have shaders at all.

That still smells familiar.

 

[dumbo2007]

Yeah, everyone wants vendor lock-in. The reason why we have so many issues today with something working on someone's machine but not on anyone else's. But things are still better now I guess with a lot more co-operation among the hardware makers and some standards beginning to emerge

The mobile handset companies seem to be quite good in following certain industry standards.