why does blitz3d not use opengl?
Community Forums/Technical Discourse/why does blitz3d not use opengl?
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| Would it not be better to use opengl instead of directx? |
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| Not really. Back in the days of old when Blitz3D appeared, OpenGL was not as fast or as well supported by vendors as it might be regarded today. DirectX7 was a known quantity and presumed to work across all hardware. There are no reasonable advantages to using OpenGL over DirectX on Windows, that I am aware of. |
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| I remember, back in that time Blitz series for Windows just released, many computers doesn't have decent video hardware, most are using crappy intel integrated graphcs (not even HD series), and their OpenGL support are next to none. Personally I feel Intel have some working OpenGL implementation after HD2000, at the time being many game engines are playing Multi Platform strategy, and OpenGL become somehow very important. There're some OpenGL to DX (or vice versa) translators like GLDirect, DXGL, Project Angle, I didn't really tried those thing very much, as they're not simply to replace a DLL to fully be working yet. |
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| OpenGL was little or unheard of back then. Who knew it will be used for cross-platform gfx api. If Apple did not make the move to use OpenGL for their OSX then we got different api for each os, which is what is now happening today with Metal. But it looks like there's always a way.. https://moltengl.com/ |
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| When Blitzmax first came out in 2004, it initially was OpenGL only -- DirectX support was added 6 months later, after a bunch of complaints about poor OpenGL performance on Windows at the time, especially on lower end computers. B3D is older than that, OpenGL made little sense back then. |
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