Carmack says Direct3d is better than OpenGL

[Gerix]

John Carmack recently said that Direct3D is better than OpenGL due to making "incompatible changes to improve the API." He also mentions that if they just had to move their games over, id would make the switch. But since they would also have to rewrite the tool code, they will stick with openGL for now. Oh snap!


Still, it seems like a major (intangible) blow to openGL to have such a huge backer say "The only reason we use it is because we're too lazy not to." Well, at least we still have Wolfire Games.


I'm afraid I have no experience with DirectX, because one of my programming constraints is "cross platform."

 

[second exodous]

Well yeah, openGL updates are not updates at all. With the last major opengl update everyone was pissed because it didn't update anything in fear of it breaking compatibility.


I hope this starts a race because right now keeping compatible is actually breaking compatibility. Microsoft took FOREVER to catch up to GL and they just barely passed them up so if GL wants to stay competitive they still can easily, I just hope they do.

 

[WizardStan]

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to whomever is working on the OpenGL designs. "Oh boo hoo, we need to break this compatibility to get better codes. Users'll need to have older libraries installed and we'll need to figure out a way to grandfather them in. That's going to take us, like, 2 hours to figure out, to say nothing of the extra 50MB of storage space people will need on their multi-GB machines. I don't think we can do it!"

 

[Gerix]

I don't really get the need to remain backwards compatible. It's nice, but it's probably more important to stay current. I installed Rosegarden last night and had to put Qt3 support on my system. Why can't they do something like that? Plus, I think openGL is more popular with the open source community. If anything, it seems like openGL would be better able to get away with dropping backwards compatibility than Microsoft. (<-That assumes vendors care about supporting their older packages. Sometimes I hate who gets ahead in business.)


Edit: Sorta ninja'd by WizardStan. Not "Death Punch" ninja'd, but still.

 

[second exodous]

Microsoft had nothing to loose, you have to remember that. There were a lot of horrible Direct3D releases but who cares? They were number 2. When they started catching up I thought OpenGL 2.0 came out I thought it was going to be a huge update and leave Direct3D in the dust. Yeah, I was one of those that was pissed.


Now OpenGL has nothing to loose, I say they should start a race like I said earlier. I think if they do they can leave Direct3D in the dust.

 

[Alec]

I think he's just prodding the Gallium3D developers to work faster