I just decided to do a little work that involved displaying some 3D content today, and since I have linux on my laptop I decided to give OpenGL a whirl -- really GLUT.
I have done a lot of tinkering with D3D when I had windows on my primary workstation. The unfourtunate news is I am no guru with it and my memory holds countless hours of fiddling with its settings and initialization code just to see some pixel on the screen that is not black.
It took me under one hour to get GLUT initialized, and intergrated into my project to do what I needed with virtualy no problems. So in summary I am surprised and in love with it being so easy to use for low performance applications at the least.
I haven't played with OpenGL, but I can say that I've never had any problems with D3D - Managed (now subsumed into XNA) or otherwise. It required a fair bit of code to get the first black backbuffer with nothing rendered up onto the screen, but after that it's fairly logical (fairly - not very ).
Candy wrote:I'm not using D3D since other OSes cannot even support it if they wanted to, not just because the interface is replaced every evolution.
I would consider this sometimes a good thing... I'm not a great fan of backward compatibility. Look at the x86 architecture, that horrible beast. There would be great need for a completely new architecture...
Anyway I have a little bit experience in D3D (8 and 9) and yes, it takes quite much effort to get a black backbuffer, but imho it's worth it. I like the object orientation of DirectX and the interface is imho very good (since it is revised with every version).
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