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I'd like OpenGL to be better but... you should understand that considering the history of APIs' development, it's not surprising that D3D's performance can surpass OpenGL's, and the reverse tends not to happen often.
Microsoft developed D3D in the time of 3D acceleration for PC's, and worked with (/conspired/whatever) with some influential PC 3D hardware vendors (<cough> nVidia) from the beginning... and it took shape as primarily an API to access specific hardware functions of current and upcoming hardware through device drivers. So, it targetted performance for new 3D hardware. On top of this, it is relatively easy to develop a D3D driver that'll give you good performance, because the most commonly used functions of D3D basically have a one-to-one correspondence with the intended usage of current hardware. I'd go as far to say that if I were to develop a D3D and OpenGL driver for a new card, my OpenGL driver may be no more than a wrapper calling D3D.
Bad news, but this is how I see it :)

on the other hand, COM and enumeration are bullshit :)

You've done a wonderful thing superplek :D

just so you don't get me wrong, OpenGL is an excellent API for 3D graphics development.. and it seems to decrease development time.. I'm just be the devil's (superplek's) advocate and focusing on the performance difference, which should be negligible as long as your drivers don't suck and you're careful to optimize your OpenGL code instead of taking the easier ways out that are provided.

I don't quite see what's wrong about enumeration.

You have to provide some way to enumerate video devices if you want the applications to directly support multimonitor stuff.

And you have enumeration with OGL too, atleast under Win32 (Pixel Formats ring a bell?)

Iam not sure about this.. but multi-monitor shouldnt have anything to do with opengl.. you should enum that in windows and set the opengl window to whatever desktop you want.. the problem is most likely in opengl32.dll or so.. iam not sure tho.. but i still think it sucks not having a device =)

Actually, there ARE(or were) openGL drivers only wrapping D3D (Kyro most notably) which sucked A LOT. Good opengl drivers (NVidia, recently ATI too) tend to give more direct control on what's happening on the card, and are usually speedier. (i am actually looking forward to 3DLabs entering the consumer 3d market.. they are in fact more going the opposite direction: their d3d drivers will probably just wrap the gl drivers, which, actually is the more natural way to go)

err.. I don't see that as being natural at all, since as I said, I think D3D focuses more at access to hardware while OpenGL's original focus had a stronger emphasis on actual development.. but whatever :) I think most people would rather see code duplication than actual wrapping in their drivers anyway, providing that they ever use their cards :)

Go Superplek, go superplek
*JUMP* *JUMP* *JUMP* *JUMP*
Go Superplek, go superplek
*JUMP* *JUMP* *JUMP* ....

DirectX 8 RULEZ haha, you OGL biotches!!
:D :D :D

What about SDL? Nobody's mentioned that at all :)
I've just started learning SDL and OpenGL, and from what I can tell, SDL makes life sooo much easier.
How do people think it stands up to Dx or bare GL?

ahh the scene are still the same retarded "i think im god and my code is sacred" bunch of kids....

the guy who asked the question to get started got ONE stinking link and that was about all the usefull information he got.

do anyone need a good musician/designer/graphician for their crew btw? i have some ideas that might bring out some noise, and i have choons that will kick you down. the scene musicians need to get their head out of their ass and produce other stuff than wanna be artistic white noise, pink noise, brown noise, plain noise, module noise, noise noise..................rant rant rant............

rant rant rant yes indeed
aint that what its all about?

"i think i'm god and my code is sacred"
most sceners dont think this.. at least my scene code is categorized under d:\workspace\code\hacks
guess that explains ;)

have a nice day

iblis: don't know get api wars have to do with some coders ego trips..

I meant "iblis: don't get what api wars have to do with some coders ego trips...". argh.

Superplek is for losers.

cd is a 16-year old fuck who releases borntro's ladies and gentlemen ;)

now it's your turn again little twit :D

i am the God, who invented all good things in life (sex, drugs and hari krishna).

nope. not ALL good things in life.

remember, chaos invented rot-zoomers, and w.e. lorensen and h. cline invented the marching cubes algorithm!

hehe sure api wars may have nothing to do with coder egos :)
but it sure as hell doesnt have anything to do with getting started either, and that was the original question asked, not what api is the better, the guy obviously wanted to do some OpenGL stuff ;)

so now that we are off subject anyway, how was peoples x-mas? mine was wikkid, got stuffed as a pornslut and got nice presents :D

and all that just because santaclause got crusified....or what was that again? :p

it's all a matter of fate and religion.

Expecting a real answer on scene forums is pure naivity anyway, so who cares? :)

make up your own bloody fx!

damn _ you sound real clever :p

It's actually not a bad idea at all. Experimenting with code is much more fun (and more instructive) than re-coding standard effects.

I bet most of us started out doing a sinus-plasma or similar (atleast i did ;-)