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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Kind of crazy to think that the only reason OpenGL was ever a thing for 3D gaming was because of John Carmack's obsession with using it for Quake II back in the 90s.

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Quake is just (a probably small (not wanting to dimish it, of course)) part of the history. SGI and the enormous effort to get compliant implementations on many different systems and architectures are what made OpenGL what it eventually became.

I think both SGI and Quake were absolutely crucial.

Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space.

Quake (and Quake 2, and Quake 3, and the many games that licensed those engines) really opened the floodgates in terms of mass market users demanding OpenGL capabilities (or at least a subset of them) from their hardware and drivers.

I'm not sure how to measure this in an objective way, but if the mass market of PC gamers didn't dwarf the professional CAD/modeling market by several orders of magnitude, I will print out my HN posting history and eat it.

Microsoft never owned the 3D gaming API space, SEGA, Sony and Nintendo also have/had their own APIs.

And yet the modern GPU features are pretty much the result of a close symbiosis between hardware vendors and the Direct3D team. For a while, GPUs were categorized by the D3D version they supported (today the focus has moved more towards raw compute performance I guess).

In the PC yes, many of those features were originally developed on arcades and game consoles.

TMS34010 (1986), Renderman Shading Language(1990), Cell (2005),...

I never heard about SEGA, Sony or Nintendo 3D APIs being used on a PC. I guess somebody somewhere did it, but it's so insignificant.

I never heard about 3D gaming API space being something PC only, maybe in some fancy FOSS circles.

You're having a different discussion than everybody else.

Everybody else is this discussion is talking about the PC 3D API space. The place where OpenGL lives. It's right there in the title of the linked article.

"Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space."

Ctrl+F "PC" => zero results found.

Context matters. The context of the entire post is PC graphics APIs.

In this thread we're talking about the impact of Quake's OpenGL support in the early days of the Quake franchise (1996-1999).

OpenGL was most definitely PC-only[1] during those days[2]. So to anybody who understands the subject matter... it's extremely obvious we're talking about PC graphics APIs.

I am sorry you don't know the subject matter or the history, but that is a poor excuse for attempting to "correct" people who do. Very rude.

---

[1] "PC" as in "personal computer", not "Windows PC". OpenGL has been supported on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.

[2] OpenGL basically is still PC-only, although since Linux supports it, it can run in a lot of places. PS3 and mobile devices had OpenGL ES, a different and more stripped down API)

Fun fact: the earliest archived OpenGL site was a big "FAST GAMES GRAPHICS" banner with an animated Quake 1 graphic and a menu for other stuff :-P

https://web.archive.org/web/19970707113513/http://www.opengl...

I don’t know that it was the only reason, but Carmack’s push for OpenGL certainly helped. A lot of things related to 3D games are thanks to doom and Quake.

It also helped that the API was actually user friendly compared to the earlier versions of Direct3D.

> A lot of things related to 3D games are thanks to doom and Quake.

Quake sure, but Doom? IIRC Doom is far more like Wolf3D's 2.5D/raycasting than the "true 3D" of Quake, it cpu rendered to a frame buffer with zero hardware acceleration. I find it hard to believe it made any lasting impact on any subsequent 3D rendering APIs.

Quake got official 3D accelerated versions like GLQuake and VQuake. The improved visuals and better performance these versions offered drove a lot of early 3D accelerator sales in the consumer space.

Quake didn't use hardware acceleration either. It was only the later VQuake and GLQuake releases that did.

I think for the purposes of this discussion "Quake" is acceptable shorthand for GLQuake, Quake 2, Quake 3, all the games that used those engines, etc.

John Carmack a couple of years later, back in 2011:

> Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He also added that 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'

> It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point,' Carmack told us. He also explained that the developer has no plans to move over to Direct3D, despite its advantages.

From https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...

For context https://www.chrishecker.com/OpenGL/Press_Release

Back then OpenGL was objectively a much better API than Direct3D. A few years later it was the other way around though (thanks to D3D's radical approach to create a completely new API with each major version).

And yet it still got its ass kicked by Direct3D because Microsoft made better stuff. Better API, better tooling, better debuggability.

Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so.

Ye good ol' Microsoft stiffled OpenGL on Windows, hence open letter https://www.chrishecker.com/OpenGL/Press_Release not to mention insidious thing they did on Fahrenheit (next gen OpenGL+Direct3D, one to rule them all) when they were supposed to be working on it together with SGI. Microsoft did a well job after with it, but they were and are a shit company that made sus maneuvers to make success; Not all of them technical.

Well, except for only working on xbox and windows, which pretty much destroys it as a viable direct target for modern games or apps.

> Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so.

If you remember what Microsoft was like in those days, the chances of D3D being standardized in a viable way on any platform but windows were about the same chances as an ice cube in hell stands.

Nintendo and Sony 3D APIs are also exlusive to their consoles, people keep forgeting about them.

> a viable direct target for modern games

Aside from PlayStation exclusives, nearly every AAA game in the past 20+ years has targeted Direct3D and HLSL first. Any other backend is a port.

The XBox versions of DirectX aren't exactly compatible (in some pretty significant ways, IIRC)

Technically, also Linux (and probably other Vulkan platforms) with dxvk.

I had no idea this was a thing! Cheers.

There's also VKD3D for dx12!

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