3 ms·
or a new 3D system to get a single triangle to display The first hardware-accelerated 3D API I used was the first version of Direct 3D in 1996. It took days to
by zgluck 3y ago
or a new 3D system to get a single triangle to display
The first hardware-accelerated 3D API I used was the first version of Direct 3D in 1996. It took days to get get single triangle.
Carmack described it well:
https://www.bluesnews.com/archives/carmack122396.html https://www.bluesnews.com/archives/carmack122396.html
Direct-3D IM is a horribly broken API. It inflicts great pain and suffering on the programmers using it, without returning any significant advantages. I don't think there is ANY market segment that D3D is apropriate for, OpenGL seems to work just fine for everything from quake to softimage. There is no good technical reason for the existance of D3D.
...
Many things that are a single line of GL code require half a page of D3D code to allocate a structure, set a size, fill something in, call a COM routine, then extract the result.
- yowlingcat 3y agoI remember as a kid trying to get into D3D to do basic 3D rendering of a scene, stumbling and failing, and then trying to do the same thing with OpenGL, and it being simple and sane. I wonder where all of that unnecessary incidental complexity came from; was it from trying to make D3D sufficiently interconnected with other MSFT Windows APIs and the surrounding ecosystem?
- piva00 3y agoSame exact experience when I got my first Voodoo3, I spent weeks trying to figure out D3D from DirectX/MSDN's docs (was it even MSDN at the time?), and I don't think I ever got it to render a single triangle. I was pretty defeated for a while, took me months to get motivated to try it again using OpenGL 1.1, and it just worked. I don't know how faulty my recollection is but I think I remember it was also much easier to search the web for tutorials/discussions about OpenGL than D3D at the time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]