Doom Creator Says Direct3D Is Now Better Than OpenGL 405
arcticstoat writes "First-person shooter godfather and OpenGL stickler John Carmack has revealed that he now prefers Direct3D to OpenGL, saying that 'inertia' is the main reason why id Software has stuck by the cross-platform 3D graphics API for years. In a recent interview, the co-founder of id Software said, 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He added, 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'"
DirectX (Score:1, Interesting)
It would be nice to see open source community wake up and start developing a competitor, as just now Microsoft is the driving force that innovates new technologies for PC and Xbox360 graphics and gaming. But for once it looks like the fact they're the only one doing so isn't slowing them down - they do a good job.
Carmack is the best friend OpenGL has ever had (Score:4, Interesting)
Geez, if I were an OpenGL developer and Carmack started talking about things that OpenGL should implement to make his game engines work better, I'd be like "Yes sir, Mr. Carmack!" Seriously, those game engines are what's keeping people using OpenGL in the first place. It's too bad that ID software doesn't have the resources to fork that shit and develop it to suit their needs. I'm sure that it would be better.
It's pretty obvious that the smartest Microsoft engineers are working on game-related projects, and it's smart. Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing. DirectX is a big part of that, and the Kinect has also really stirred the pot. Lots of comments here are to the effect that Carmack is stating what has been obvious to everyone else for years. Yes, Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just ... quixotic. It's not quite like RMS saying that he really should just start using Windows because it works better, but it's about 10% of the way there.
Re:DirectX (Score:3, Interesting)
Like most companies, MS has done good and bad things, sometimes with the exact same action. To blindly label all Microsoft as evil and all things Linux as good is just illogical, unjust, and rather stupid. Unfortunately there's a lot of that around here.
So here's a few opinions bound to start the flaming from the mindless:
Microsoft has done many good things over the years.
Linux isn't the ultimate OS, and has less than even chance of ever becoming it.
Macs breakdown and have plenty of bugs and crashes.
Too much choice bogs things down.
Microsoft has done some rather heinous things over the years.
A properly updated and configured Linux makes a really good desktop.
Apples 'think like we want you to' design of products works well for many people.
The lack of choices can be frustrating to anyone that's creative, or knows what they really want.
The gasoline corps are laughing all the way to the bank with giant crocodiles tears for the current 'crisis'.
Asbestos Undies upgraded with Nomex PJs, I'm ready for you
Re:DirectX (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is modded insightful ?
Free Software is not a religion, it is a policy, and as strong political roots, altough these political roots are certainly not aligned to "bipartisan politics".
The issue with open souce and OpenGL is that a large part of the implementation of OpenGl (at least the efficient implementation) does not depend on any open source activist/developper but on the good will of video card developpers.
Now Microsoft has the "monopoly advantage" if they say now you need to cut off your left feet to implement Direct3D the videocard fabricant (Intel, Nvidia principally) will find somebody in charge of getting his or her feet cut off to keep the market.
OpenGL has to reach a concensus...
What should we be thinking? (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly, I don't have the knowledge to comment on the technical aspects of this topic. But as far as philosophical commentary, I might suggest that if there is merit to Carmack's statements, then OpenGL people should sit up and take notice.
This reminds me of XFree86. Does anyone remember those old farts? For years and years, all we got from them was slow, incremental adjustments and changes. Sure there were improvements but they were so slow in coming and they never seemed to want to commit to anything that looked like a drastic change. Finally, people rebelled and X.org was born and the Linux distros out there haven't looked back. X.org made some great changes from the git-go even if recent improvements seem to have slowed down a bit lately.
When it comes to display technologies, there is clearly plenty of room for improvement as we go. Frankly, for the desktop, I would rather like to see a departure from the apparently network oriented display model and over in the direction of the hardware driver type model. (Wouldn't it just be awesome if someone could create a Linux display system that could use Windows driver binaries in a wrapper much the way certain network device drivers have been in the past?) I know there has been talk about such graphical interfaces in the past and I am unsure what came of it. I really don't know a lot about these things, but I do know what is lacking and I know that for my purposes, I don't need a networked, multi-user oriented display system on my laptop... just a quick, high-performance display with great 3D graphics.
So taking into consideration what Carmack says, what could this hint at in terms of what direction Desktop Linux should go? Sure Server Linux should keep X.org and stuff like that -- it has its place without question. And if a new model for graphical display results in being directly compatible with DirectX? Wow, what a neat thing? (I would be afraid of bringing in Windows vulnerabilities and instabilities... would that necessarily be the case? I know with the Windows driver model with things running at ring-0, there is huge potential for big ugly crashes...)
Anyway...
Re:Not only that (Score:3, Interesting)
This post doesn't make any sense. The people who define the OpenGL spec include delegates from ATI, Creative Labs, Intel, and Nvidia. Khronos doesn't go out and engage the vendors? They're a consortium of the vendors you claim they don't engage.
The reason for the core OpenGL spec lagging with consumer level graphics stuff is largely due to its incredible breadth of applications and target platforms. With OpenGL 3.0 there was a lot of contention between the people who wanted to turn it into a streamlined real time gaming API, and the people who used it for other industries where a lot of features not supported on gaming hardware were still useful for non-gaming applications. It started with a very ambitious revamping proposal, followed by months of (rather aggrivating) total silence, then culminated with the deprecation model that's currently in place.
OpenGL's problems don't have anything to do with Direct3D being more in the loop than they are about new hardware developments. It's inherently more challenging to keep pace and be flexible because they're maintaining a broad spec used by a lot of different companies in a lot of different specialized fields. As far as feature deployment is concerned, on more than one occasion Nvidia has had drivers out on the same day Khronos releases a new spec. Current desktop OpenGL is quite a nice, modern API that's suitable for cutting edge game development. The new deprecation model allows driver authors to create profiles optimized for specific classes of applications (of which there are many where OpenGL is useful). On Windows, libraries like GLEW make Microsoft's decision to not move the ABI forward a non-issue. OpenGL ES is very much a modern API that's useful across a wide variety of in-demand mobile platforms. The way modern GL handles things like VBOs and render to texture are at least as good as Direct3D.
I'm not advocating the use of OpenGL over D3D or vice versa. Right now I primarily do Android and web development stuff, so I'm kind of saturated in OpenGL-centric environments. I just felt the need to respond to that weird claim that Khronos is disengaged from hardware vendors. Khronos largely ARE hardware vendors.
Sincerely,
MS Fanboy with an Xbox 360, XNA Creators Club subscription, and a deep love for Visual Studio and C# who uses Bing search (and doesn't think IE9 is absolutely terrible)