I did game engine development in the late aughts. It was embarrassing how good DirectX was relative to OpenGL at the time. Not merely for reasons of the API bei

I did game engine development in the late aughts. It was embarrassing how good DirectX was relative to OpenGL at the time. Not merely for reasons of the API being newer: the mechanism for discovering the capabilities of a graphics card in OpenGL was actively hamstrung by a total lack of incentives for vendors to not just lie to the API about capabilities (such as declaring such-and-such shader feature was supported when in reality it was computed in software on the CPU and if you enabled it you got seconds-per-frame performance). In contrast, the DirectX logo was revocable; if a company put together a card that sucked, Microsoft could just decertify it (or refrain from certifying it). There's a reason so many cross-platform games of the era had some kind of demo or animation that'd run near the beginning; it was secretly the way to test card capabilities and figure out whether the hardware could do what it said it could.