They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and

They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and iterated it up to a worthwile competitor to OpenGL, which stood still for many a year (extensions notwithstanding). Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market. Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.