OpenGL or DirectX? [closed]

Question

I know this is probably a very subjective question, but I just want to start with the one which is the easiest and fastest to learn, so that I can get started with a small project of mine as fast as possible, it's a a little 2D game, to start with at least.. Which one would you recommend me to go with? And I'm using C++

Bootee

I wouldn't call these exact duplicates, but read the responses to these questions (if you haven't already): https://mcmap.net/q/747942/-directx-or-opengl-closed , #1141635 – Wax

Answer 1

First question: Are you on Windows? If not, use OpenGL.

If you're on Windows, this will come down to a matter of taste. The APIs are different, but the concepts required are very similar for both OpenGL and DirectX. Most things are supported on both, although they do work a bit differently.

Microsoft provides quite a few samples and a decent framework you can use for DirectX (9 or 10), which can make it easier to get started.

That being said, if you're targetting Windows Vista/Win7 only, moving to DirectX 10 may make life easier. A lot of the annoyances in DX9 and earlier were removed in DX10, and the API is a bit more clean.

That being said, if this is for a game, I'd recommend looking at using a middleware engine like Ogre instead of writing directly in DirectX OR OpenGL. This will make your life much simpler, especially while learning.

Tunny

Except in my case where I obsessed over collecting engines and actually didn't get anything done. I definitely do much better drawing one triangle at a time. Oh and I recommend OpenGL because then your program can run on Linux... If you make the rest of it Linux-compatible, anyway. – Wax

I think Ogre has become the jQuery of games programming in terms of everyone just saying "Use Ogre", probably without having tried it. I would not recommend Ogre for a newbie. You need to understand the principles of graphics programming, and for that you should be exposed to a 3d API in a very low level way. – Bryanbryana

Answer 2

I haven't used DirectX, but OpenGL is fairly simple and there are some good beginner's tutorials at NeHe. Also, if you even want to go cross-platform, you'll need OpenGL.
However, DirectX isn't just a graphics library, you can also use it for sound, etc. so it's probably worth looking into.

Dissonance

Though the commonly-used SDL library, using OpenGL, supports input (and manages your windows, and helps you be cross-platform) and has sort of "plugins" for sound, network, etc. OpenAL is a great sound library too, and has the same sort of syntax as OpenGL so that it feels familiar. – Wax

I've always had issues with OpenAL's sound buffering, it always sounds a bit choppy when playing multiple sounds simultaneously on Windows. On Linux it's fine though. Anyway, I would use SDL/OpenGL. – Stacked

Answer 3

If it's just 2D, then perhaps it might be worth looking into SDL, which is already cross platform and seems pretty easy to learn. There are many tutorials on the net, but one particular site I remember is Lazy Foo's SDL Tutorials. You can also mix OpenGL with SDL, there are tutorials for that as well.

If you don't want to use SDL, and you are on windows, I would recommend DirectX. I do recognize that the choice between them ultimately ends up in a flame war pretty much anywhere on the Internet, but my understanding is that DirectX is geared towards game developers, so you will find many utility libraries, functions, and classes that might facilitate various tasks. With OpenGL, you would have the ability to write cross platform code, provided that the helper functionality such as image loading is also cross platform (For which there are indeed cross platform libraries).

So my bottom line is: Both are fine, OpenGL gives you cross platform code (Provided you write it), and DirectX gives you more game development oriented tools and libraries.

Ciapas

Answer 4

If it's all about getting started as fast as possible, I'd recommend OpenGL on a NVidia GPU. You can throw almost anything at it and it will display something. However, if you want to achieve decent performance with low programming effort, I'd recommend Direct3D. There are too many ways to do things in OpenGL, and beginners will most certainly discover the slow paths first since they are covered by many ancient tutorials (see NeHe). Additionally, debugging OpenGL apps is painful, although tools like gDEBugger can help.

Heliport

It is a good point about NeHe - whilst they where/are very well made tutorials, they are dated now. So if you use them, be aware that a lot of what he teaches is basically bad practice now. – Cindicindie

Answer 5

If you have some COM experience and it does not make your head hurt I'd recommend DirectX, just because SDK has a lot of good examples/tutorials right out of the box. If you better prefer more C-style programming or are confused with COM stuff then I'd say OpenGL.

Throw

Answer 6

As pointed out by several of other people, If you are planning to port your "Game" to other platforms other than windows, you better start using OpenGL.

If it is just a simple 2D game, and you won't need a 3D support for now, SDL would be a better choice, later you can combine "SDL" and "OpenGL" together. ( you can directly use openGL from SDL, it even has it's own header in SDL ).

At the same time, DirectX offers features that neither OpenGL, nor SDL can give you. OpenGL is way behind DirectX. [ OpenGL 3.0 is nothing more than an incremental update, the API hasn't changed much since 2.x ].

So if you are planning to write a game for windows, just use "DirectX", if not "OpenGL" and "Sdl".

Finally if you aren't looking for headaches just use a GameEngine, e.g. C4 Engine. Believe me when you go for 3D you have no choice, since there are so many topics that will need a lot of time to "Dig" and "Learn".

Staggard

I'd encourage you to look at the changes in OpenGL 3.2. It's much closer to the featureset of DirectX 10.1. NVIDIA also already has a driver out for OGL3.2, and ATi is already working on it. The specification came out Monday. – Groundspeed

Thanks greyfade, I took a look at it, It looks promising, and as you said it "IS" much close to feature set of DX10, The only problem that I have with what you said, is that it hasn't been officialy tested yet - I have to wait and see the other ppl would say, because I really don't trust Khronos, they really ruined GL reputation -. Still If I wanted to learn something just for windows, I would go for DirectX. – Staggard