Why Windows and What is Direct3D?

Microsoft used OpenGL up until 1995, when Direct3D was released. There were initial plans between SGI, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard to unite OpenGL and Direct3D APIs, but due to financial problems at SGI, the project was abandoned, and Microsoft went on to develop its DirectX API

 

However, due to Microsoft's DirectX, many people believe that OpenGL has become outdated. OpenGL's review board, as well, has caused problems for it. Microsoft is no longer a part of the board, obviously, but there is a long list of companies that are, all with different interests in the 3D graphics field, which causes a substantial amount of conflict in the decision-making process

 

One of the biggest advantages of OpenGL is its ability to be used over a variety of operating systems and programming languages. Every major operating system; which includes Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, SGI, Linux/BSD, and UNIX supports OpenGL. This is a huge advantage over its competitor Direct3D which is a Windows only based graphics API.

Although typically written in C and C++, OpenGL has the ability to be called upon using Delphi, Basic, FORTRAN, Ada, and others. Many beginning users turn towards a utility called GLUT to learn OpenGL. GLUT (pronounced like the glut in gluttony) is the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs. Created by Mark Kilgard, GLUT is meant to get away from the complexities of differing operating systems; allowing the user a uniform working area to create OpenGL applications, without having to worry about differences in operating systems. It implements a simple windowing application programming interface for OpenGL, which makes it considerably easier to learn about and explore OpenGL programming. Although GLUT helps with learning OpenGL, it’s geared more towards small to medium sized programs.

 

The programmers of GLUT admit that it’s not a full-featured toolkit, and larger applications should be created using more sophisticated software.