Comparison between opengl and directX [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
OpenGL or DirectX?

Not want to trigger war, but really want to know pros and cons of those two mainstream graphic library?

Answer 1

To be honest the hard part is not the API, it's the higher level 3d stuff. Below that both APIs have vertex buffers, index bufers, textures, shaders, and so on and although they express that in different ways it's the concepts that are the hard part not the API. If you understand d3d11 then you'll pick up opengl in no time and vice-versa.

Practical considerations are that opengl is available on more platforms, but that d3d tends to be better supported and work better on windows platforms. d3d has a more object oriented interface whereas opengl has a strictly "c" style interface (Although it deals internally with objects through "names" and handles). This likely makes opengl easier to start learning than d3d11 which needs quite a bit of setup - but in "real" applications there won't be much in it.

d3d11 is designed to work better on multi core cpus and mult threaded software. This adds some complexity to using it, but allows you to perhaps take more advantage of the hardware then opengl might at this point in time. (However if you are still at the stage of asking which to use then it's very unlikely to matter to you!)

it tends to be much easier to find documentation for d3d9 than opengl (I mean for "modern" stuff, not examples using obsolete ways of doing things, (which is a problem with opengl, a lot of the tutorials and code out there is frankly obsolete and doesn't really use opengl properly now). Whereas it's quite hard to find good d3d11 examples and tutorials still.

If you've not used either I would very much recommend learning the basics of BOTH and the slightly different approaches to the same underlying functionallity. Don't get caught up in saying one is better than the other, learn both and see which seems a better fit. This is what most people do, unfortunatly most of the "advice" you'll get on the internet seems be to from someone who has decided that pushing one or the other API is important to them!

I found it a useful excercise when learning to abstract out the differences with a small c++ framework that creates textures, vertex buffers, index buffers, renderstate collections etc, and implements those concepts in terms of BOTH apis/.

Answer 2

OpenGL is a cross-platform API for 3D graphics. DirectX is a restricted-platform API for graphics, audio, music, device input, networking, and more.