this is old, its also wrong in many ways. i keep hearing 'OpenGL' is cross platform. This is a quantifiable lie. I have written cross platform rendering engine

this is old, its also wrong in many ways. i keep hearing 'OpenGL' is cross platform. This is a quantifiable lie. I have written cross platform rendering engines and worked with many, I can tell you right now that platform and vendor specific hacks for OpenGL are a necessary evil if you want your stuff to work properly. If you are working in a cross platform environment you abstract away rendering then whether you are using DX or OpenGL (or anything else - RSX, or whatever...) is not really important. The question I always wonder is why OpenGL isn't this... if I can make it so can anyone else, absolutely. Its not hard or especially time consuming and gives you the power of actually being cross platform. This is a constantly improving situation though... for example I no longer need to tell a large number of Intel graphics cards that clockwise is infact counter-clockwise for face winding - because they are obsolete and the drivers have improved. There are still many problems of that nature though... you might not realise that the driver is processing your vertex shader on the CPU for instance which makes for a significantly different performance profile to similar hardware in that class...