Thread: Hi! I'm new

Originally Posted by Bubba

Under the hood OpenGL uses Direct3D because Direct3D is the only way to access the graphics hardware in Windows.

At the driver level, I'm assuming.

Originally Posted by Bubba

Under the hood OpenGL uses Direct3D because Direct3D is the only way to access the graphics hardware in Windows. I just found this information out recently and was taken aback by it. It should be noted that it is just my opinion you should use Direct3D. Inevitably the decision is yours on what API to use. Most, if not all, are quite similar in principle.

Take it from someone who has written drivers for Windows graphics cards that this is not true. You may well be able to implement the OpenGL using D3D and thus not need to talk to hardware from the GL code, but it's not at all necessary to make the driver this way.

I doubt even that Vista does it that way, although they have changed the driver architecture quite a bit for Vista, and I haven't followed this for some time [we had two people working on "Longhorn" drivers when I was writing XP/2K drivers].

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Mats

Take it from someone who has written drivers for Windows graphics cards that this is not true. You may well be able to implement the OpenGL using D3D and thus not need to talk to hardware from the GL code, but it's not at all necessary to make the driver this way.

This was verified by Microsoft. I did not think this was the case either until I found this out from them. Of course it could have been a ploy to get us to use DirectX but who knows. Microsoft has made every attempt to make DirectX the API of choice and are now targeting the console market as well with their recent changes and XBOX to PC compatibility. I seriously think OpenGL has a huge fight on their hands on the Windows platform since Microsoft owns the graphics API and yet also owns the Windows API.

Hopefully we will continue to have both choices on the Windows platform. Better yet it would be nice if Linux could start running more and more games.

Regardless of which API you choose you will encounter the same graphics principles because the underlying hardware is the same. You will always have matrices, textures, vertices, indices, transformations, etc, etc.
Choice of API has nothing to do with actually learning how to write games. Most of us here are still learning how to write games even if we have a very good grasp of C++ and a good grasp of the graphics API we are using.

Originally Posted by Bubba

This was verified by Microsoft. I did not think this was the case either until I found this out from them. Of course it could have been a ploy to get us to use DirectX but who knows.

I think it may be true for Vista - but it's also possibly a misunderstanding that the latest hardware has support for DX10 for example, and that the graphics is "using DX10 hardware" - but you can naturally let DX10 hardware perform OpenGL drawing - it's pretty much doing the same thing anyways (texturing, pixel shading and what else based on various vertex lists and such).

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Mats