Richard Leggett on New Media

Gizmodo is reporting OpenGL 3.0 support in OSX 10.6.3, not massively exciting in itself, but OpenGL is something I have been thinking quite a bit about recently.

In my brief career as a programmer, I’ve dabbled with DirectX, starting with version 7. I found it incredibly cryptic as a mid-teen but by this time just about all console games had gone 3D, so I wanted to know how all of this worked. I never really touched OpenGL, it seemed like some sort of abandoned standard at the time, all the cool kids were off building stuff in DirectX, but I was to later realise this was just plain FUD.

More recently I’ve spent some evenings dabbling in Android and OpenGL ES. This is one of those things that if I don’t get on top of soon, I will totally be kicking myself in future; my perpetual bleeting about how big Android will be is not a well kept secret. Of course Android devices supports OpenGL ES, specifically 1.1 and in the newer devices 2.0. It’s a bit of a misnomer that OpenGL isn’t as powerful as DirectX, certainly John Carmack of id software, creators of the ongoing Doom and Quake series doesn’t think so. It’s true that most PC and XBox games use DirectX, and even that DirectX supports more advanced features, but it’s important to consider that the PS3 uses OpenGL ES (PSGL) as well as many, many devices…

This, when combined with the rapid acceleration of mobile GPUs, could be the most important shift in the 10 year battle between SGI’s OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX. In a nutshell, devices tend to exclusively support OpenGl ES. iPhones and Android powered handsets are multiplying; these are quickly spawning countless new games, from studios old and new, big and small, all coding for OpenGL ES. So could it be that this is the unexpected trojan horse, or was this outcome built into the very DNA of an open standard like OpenGL?

Another interesting rumour is Microsoft’s XBox live going mobile, which we can only presume will run exclusively on Win Mobile devices, and that would mean DirectX (?). Yet another twist in the tale is the ethereal WebGL, which when solidified promises to bring 3D to the web once and for all, and in doing so, bring it to all manner of platforms. So all in all the future is looking quite good for OpenGL, but there’s still plenty to play for.

As further food for thought, you may find this article on “Why you should use OpenGL over DirectX” of interest which was posted just recently.