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Comment by daedhel | Hacker News Reader

I regret that DirectX won over OpenGL.

OSX + IOS + Android + Linux + WebGL + Windows vs. Windows

And you are calling the game now?

From the point of view of the quantity of PC games that use DirectX, OpenGL is losing. WebGL, as you mentioned, may really be a turning point. If Internet Explorer implements it natively, then the OpenGL stack on Windows may become much stronger. If game manufactures then started using OpenGL, DirectX would finally start to die (although, it still has the XBox).

So from the point of view of only games that run on the only platform that supports DirectX, OpenGL is dying?

You don't think that's maybe a problematic sample to draw conclusions from?

I mean, from the point of view of iOS and PS3 games, DirectX is non-existent. Taking these kind of sub-samples of the total game market produces degenerate results.

He's saying there are more games on Windows than on the platforms that use OpenGL. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a reasonable argument. It doesn't really matter how many platforms implement OpenGL if nobody uses it.

> It doesn't really matter how many platforms implement OpenGL if nobody uses it.

Except that it is used, extensively; it's just not used much on Windows. Therefore, looking at Windows games and proclaiming that OpenGL is dying/dead is a really silly thing to do -- OpenGL ES knowledge is an extremely hot commodity among iOS and Android devs, etc.

If "the only platform that supports DirectX" you mean "Windows", and therefore that "only games that run on Windows" means what I imagine it would have to, then... well, I for one don't think that's a problematic sample to draw conclusions from. In fact, if you want to get an idea about video games, especially (but not only) ones that run on computers, this is actually one of the better samples you could pick ;)

Quite a few OS X games, particularly the ones from very large companies, use a DirectX wrapper, like Cider. While they are technically running on OpenGL, the coders wrote DirectX

This is a complicated issue that has already been discussed on a previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2711231

Reply on news.ycombinator.com