RE: 3D

[Brent Fulgham <brent.fulgham@xpsystems.com>]

> > I think an OpenGL binding would be extremely useful.  
> > DirectX is of less interest, as OpenGL is generally 
> > the API of choice for most graphical applications
> 
> This hasn't been literally true for a good many years. The 
> vast number of entertainment products developed with DirectX
> totally swamps the number of OpenGL apps. Interesting, DirectX
> support is moving much faster into the high end tools space
> than OpenGL is moving into consumer apps. In fact, the
> last set of figures I saw showed OpenGL heading backwards in 
> terms of its percentage of consumer apps.
>

Could you direct me towards some references?  Anecdotal evidence
does not seem to bear this out, at least in the Unix/Linux
world.

> > .. multiplatform compatibility.
> 
> The last time I checked most consumer 3D cards provided a broken
> implementation of OpenGL at best. Measured by the number of 
> boxes you can produce a tolerable level of performance on, DirectX
> outscores OpenGL *hugely.* Cross platform doesn't mean much when
> it equals many, many times fewer platforms. Not to me, anyway.
> 

By that argument, perhaps you would also argue that we should all
be programming in Visual Basic?  After all, many many many
times more boxes are running software written in that than in
Scheme.

I'm not sure that your statements about OpenGL are accurate.
Or do the frame rates produced in games like Doom or Quake to be 
intolerable?  Both of these were written to the OpenGL API,
not DirectX.

Regards,

-Brent