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Comment by nawitus | Hacker News Reader

How relevant is DirectX11/12 these days now that OpenGL is so successful thanks to mobile and web?

Very much.

But OpenGL is also targeting and benefiting from these advances. Also, since the article is mindboggingly dumb, watch this: http://gdcvault.com/play/1020791/ (It might be that the DX12 announcement the author read was the source of misinformation, but anyway, this submission should have been flagged hours ago.)

The pc game space is still pretty much pure DX. Same for most of the hardcore Dev stuff.

Ogl is busy winning some ground but on the level the article is talking about... Slow gains.

No games console has first class support for OpenGL.

EDIT: Rephrased it better.

You know that thw biggest esport game (as in prize money) runs fine with openGL on Linux?

With valve developing source2, having ported almost all source games, and other AAA titles like Borderlands with first class Linux support, openGL it's very alive in gaming.

The keyword was consoles.

I believe most PC games are written against DirectX and XBox games obviously as well.

OpenglES 2 (which is what mobile runs) and WebGL are DirectX 9 equivalent. And on windows at least chrome implements WebGL on top of Directx and not OpenGl substrate https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

With feature parity latest DirectX can be compared only to desktop OpenGL (although OpenGL ES 3.0 is up and coming)

Firefox and IE both implement WebGL using DirectX too. It's a sad state of affairs when OpenGL drivers are so flaky that it's less trouble to write an elaborate cross-API abstraction layer and shader translator, than to just use OpenGL directly with a nearly 1:1 mapping.

I too would like to know the relevance. From a wiki article [1]

In general, Direct3D is designed to virtualize 3D hardware interfaces. Direct3D frees the game programmer from accommodating the graphics hardware. OpenGL, on the other hand, is designed to be a 3D hardware-accelerated rendering system that may be emulated in software. These two APIs are fundamentally designed under two separate modes of thought.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct...

You can run Direct3D in software, Microsoft even provides a software implementation of DX11 (albeit the subset that works on DX10.1 hardware).

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/gg6...

That quote is referring to early versions from over ten years ago. If you read the end of the section you linked, you'll find a description of how they provide basically the same functionality. While one may provide a convience method over the other, any functionality in one generally finds its way to the other.

It's relevant to pretty much all PC gaming. Not everyone is enamored by Candy Crush and its ilk.

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