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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

John Carmack, the man arguably responsible for Windows' popularity as the "gaming" OS, uses a Mac?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised given that id used to write their software on NeXT computers, but still...

EDIT: Since the downvotes seem to assume I am leveling a criticism at him, this is genuine surprise, not flame-baiting.

Actually, he is responsible for graphics cards having to ship OpenGL drivers. Without Quake, MS would have probably been successful in killing OpenGL on the desktop.

MiniGL actually.

In the age of APIs like Glide.

Even if Microsoft cared about OpenGL, the API never had any love from console and graphic card vendors in terms of tooling and support for game developers.

Carmack was never responsible for Windows popularity as games OS.

PCs were already popular for gaming with MS-DOS.

Carmack only started to like DirectX around DX 9, by then dozen of Windows games were shipped using WinG and DirectX.

What made Windows popular for games was Microsoft as platform owner payed attention to the wishes and needs of game developers.

Yeah, the GP post couldn't be further from the truth. Carmack was a OpenGL proponent until long after they had lost the war to DirectX. He wrote Quake3 in OpenGL so that it could be released on Windows, Linux, and MacOS simultaneously.

When you're engineering at that level, you probably aren't a fanboy, and more likely to be a rational engineer. He's been on record a number of times extolling the iPhone's architecture for gaming.

Lots of peeps at Google use Apple hardware. It's just hardware.

He also did several clients for Linux (doom3, quake etc...)

That was many years ago, and he has since had only scathing words for the platform, as far as I know.

Probably with good reason, far as graphics go... Drivers are a complete clusterfuck over there, and OpenGL is such a confusing mess compared to relatively clean DX9-11 APIs.

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