DirectX? Ha! - OpenGL is Superior

If you are looking to grab a developer’s interest, all you really need to do is begin popping out statistics. Feature something that’s not 1.2 times above par, but three or four times better, and you will know you’ve got them. That’s the good news Nvidia teamed up with AMD and Intel to present at this last week’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. AMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and Nvidia's Cass Everitt and John McDonald appeared on the same panel to explain the high-level methods available in today’s OpenGL implementations that reduce driver overhead by as great as 10x or more.  With OpenGL, an open, vendor-neutral standard, developers can get significantly better performance, up to 1.3 times. Though with a little tuning, they will often get 7 to 15 times more performance.

That’s a figure that will always make any developer sit up and listen.  Better still, the techniques revealed apply to all major manufacturers and are suitable for using across multiple platforms. And they brought demos, showing what these particular improvements mean on real world systems.  That’s because of the fact that OpenGL can cut through the driver overhead who is definitely a frustrating reality for game project developers since the beginning of the PC game industry.  On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate. On mobile devices, however, driver overhead is significantly more insidious, robbing both battery life and frame rate.  Learn more here.  With such possible superior performance looks like its time to kill DirectX projects and make them into highly tuned OpenGL applications for SteamOS and yes, even Windows.  Below is a video that you might get more out of if you develop with OpenGL.  I never developed directly with OpenGL but I know I will use engines and frameworks that do, especially after learning about this.