Why do game developers prefer Windows? | Hacker News Reader

Why do game developers prefer Windows?

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16 pointsrichardknop11 comments

The longest answer there is from 2013. What is the status of the same comparison (Direct3D vs OpenGL) right now? For a feature game with high-end graphics and 60 fps performance on high resolution, which one is more feature rich right now? Are there things one can do and the other cannot? For the things they can both do, are there any catches?

Is vulkan going to take over? It would be nice to have a common low-level API across all platforms (mobile,console,pc). I just wish Apple would support it and deprecate metal (with continued support for next 5 years).

i dont think vulkan will take over, but implementations of this API might. Vulkan is a bit to broad and complicated for direct replacement of DirectX, but i think once people develop some wrappers / libraries against it it will be immensly powerfull and easy to use (like directX has been). Projects like GLFW have already integrated it, and i'd like to see that be developed further to assist game developers in easily hooking into vulkan. Vulkan is very different from the others, and it requires a bit more in-depth knowledge to use than gl and directX as you are more directly managing resources, which was taken care for you in much cases in gl and directX.

Another avenue which will make vulkan powerful is that it's incoprorated already into a lot of popular engines, which makes it atleast easy to use for users of these engines. (unreal, unity etc.)

At first there was the AMD Mantel API and the game engine devs of EA Dice (Frostbite), from their experience Vulcan and the slightly different DirectX12 branched off. At the moment it seems Vulcan has more support than DirectX12. (OpenGL and DirectX up to v11 were older higher level APIs.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantle_(API)

> It would be nice to have a common low-level API across all platforms (mobile,console,pc).

I keep wishing the GPU makers would just expose an ISA, like CPUs do, instead of having to rely on flaky driver support.

If they're building the game for Windows (so not purely console) it's a lot easier to be able to run the game on the development machine if that machine is running Windows. If the dev machine runs Linux or OSX then either a reboot is needed (no debugging allowed) or a compatibility layer/emulator is needed (performance issues). Neither option works well. They could have a second test machine running Windows, but that's much more complicated, takes up more desk space, etc. It's generally much easier to write software on the target than it is to write on another OS/architecture/etc and cross-build.

This was posted on HN yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14903229), but there was more discussion on /r/programming: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6qrbeo/why_do_...

I'm not a game developer, but I think one of the reasons is Visual C++ (Visual Studio), which is still the best C++ IDE around.

And also the worst, from my experience. The good autocompletion isn't made up by the incredible slowness and latency as you type.

The reason I see as more simple, PCs were just more accessible due to cost and were easy enough for players to use, Microsoft invested in the tech so they’d perform well. So most gaming dev tech has a late 90s feel about it to this day.

> Microsoft invested in the tech so they’d perform well

This is the core of the reason. This extends beyond just the dev tooling they created, though. It also includes partnering with NVidia and ATI to create the best performing video drivers. Apple put a similar effort into making mobile games easy to make and performant, which is why they are the dominant platform in mobile gaming.

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