12 Years of Portability Thanks to OpenGL: Mac - Windows - iPhone (and more)
blog.insightvr.com
How using a standards compliant library let me port a game that started as a CS course assignment to multiple platforms and eventually to the iPhone.
blog.insightvr.com
Notable games: Doom 3, Far Cry, Max Payne, the Quake series, Red Faction, Runescape, Second Life, Spore, Star Wars: Jedi Knight and Star Wars: KOTOR, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3, Warcraft 3, WoW.
Most of the big-name ones default to Direct3D when they're running on Windows though.
I have very little idea of how D3D and OpenGL work (I've never written anything substantial with them), but I'm very interested in the idea of an open standard for rendering games. That portability story in the post is great.
What's the deal with D3D? How is it better than OpenGL?
Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market.
Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.
"The Xbox (name derived from "DirectX box")"
Quoting myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038982