You won’t see OpenGL die out as long as there’s some money to be made on other platforms, people like John Carmack keep touting it for gaming (which will basically require OpenGL to keep up with what the hardware and software developers want), and professional 3d graphics stay with it (how many pro 3D apps use D3D? Not many, if any at all, last I checked).The legacy DirectX SDK is at end-of-life, but it's still available in order to support old games, tutorials, and projects. Every other 3d chipset maker is pretty much small potatos (except possibly Intel, since they’ve been putting video into more and more of their chipsets). ATI’s pretty much just getting their OpenGL support into shape, while their Direct3D support has been respectable for some time. Seeing where Glide is today, I don’t usually think of such things as stating that the API being emulated (or whatever you want to call it) is the real standard, more that it’s the exception.Īs for others implying that MS is trying to muscle the video card companies into supporting D3D, where have you been? nVidia’s been working with MS to help define Direct3D, just as they work at trying to get their implementations built into the OpenGL spec. I’m not sure how MS feels about it, but the last time I downloaded an OpenGL wrapper for anything was for Glide support on my nVidia cards (granted 3dfx went ballistic and shut most of them down, but that’s another story). I’m sure that MS loves this kind of publicity.

This is the sort of thing that implies that Direct3D (the 3d api in directX) is the “real” standard and that OpenGL is not.

Directx sdk 2010