Welcome to the OpenGL forum

[hutch--]

I confess to being an illiterate in graphics programming but I have seen some very good demos and application graphic over time written in OpenGL. "hitch" sugested te idea and as he has considerable expertise in this style of coding I have asked him to moderate this new forum.

[Mark Jones]

 Cool, nice job. :)

A question please. For awhile there D3D seemed like it was going to dominate the marketplace, but now OGL seems to be (arguably) more popular. Is there any kind of a shift in hardware support towards either standard?

[hitchhikr]

Not that i know of.

D3D have improved lately and this tends to disappear but learning OGL is still easier due to the cleaner structure of the API.
D3D is MS only so i guess some people have problems with that.

[hutch--]

Mark,

OpenGL was originally a Silicon Graphics initiative and its advantages are that it is a mature technology that is well understood by many people and it is suported on many platforms and hardware, SGI included. DirectX has certainly improved and some of the game using it perform very well but its cursed with a COM style interface where OpenGL is more an API interface. I don't personally have much use for gaphics programming but if I did, it would be OpenGL.

[zooba]

nVidia don't seem to talk about DX as much these days, but the fact that it is proprietory to MS may restrict the ability to construct extensions in hardware, whereas many OpenGL instructions are built directly into the GPUs. Possibly they use the same instructions for DX, but they don't talk about it much ;-)