Specifically, DX came into being to attract developers to the Windows 95 platform. At the time, OpenGL, besides being open source, was also remarkably slow on consumer hardware at the time. In fact, even now, it's really only found a good home with high end renderers and on very few current games (for example, World of Warcraft uses it on the Mac). Also, back in the late 90's (I want to say around 1998) Microsoft teamed up with the OpenGL creators to build a unified API. Eventually it fell apart, and I wouldn't hold MS blameless in that happening (I don't know for sure why it failed, I could probably take a look at wikipedia) but they tried.I'll never understand these theories. What would MS gain by holding back development? If we could do so much more with the hardware than we are doing, wouldn't Microsoft want to include that in DX10 to sell copies of Vista? Wouldn't independent developers or even large publishers like EA or Ubisoft be writing hugely successful game engines in OpenGL if were that much faster?It should be noted, for transparency, that there is a modified embedded OpenGL implementation in the PS3, and it certainly can churn some graphics out, when it works and developers can get past programming for parallel processing.

They're not accusations, it's just how I see it happening. As I said, it's merely my opinion.Well, I just think it's funny how an OpenGL API such as X-Plane, or other OpenGL-based programs run on my machine without any kind of hick-ups. When I run a DX-based program, I'm definitely not seeing identical performance. It stutters, and system performance is degraded. I think that goes to say quite a lot. If in fact, DX was on a level playing field with OpenGL, wouldn't we already have vollumetric clouds and fog, something that was available almost 10 years ago? What about blowing snow? Phong lighting? Multi-texturing? Where are they? The technology is certainly there, and the hardware we have supports the use of it.Doesn't surprise me a bit with why the collaboration between MS and OpenGL failed. MS obviously wanted to control the marketing element, as they're doing with DX and hardware vendors. It boils down to greed in the market. If they can't control anything, where is the marketing ability? It's very evident here. Personally, I'm very disappointed with the hype that's been pushed about DX10, and what we currently have. As you're probably well aware as well, FSX has disappointed quite a lot of people, and it's become very apparent that this release has severely crippled the addon market; we're not seeing many addons being released for obvious reasons.I think I understand the theories; it's money. Whenever greed and control comes into play, there's trouble. From a marketing standpoint, you keep upsetting your customers, and they aren't going to stick around. I think a lot of people are disappointed with what was churned out this time. It's definitely starting to open my eyes to what's happening.

This has nothing to do with OGL vs D3D. Here is an article from the official OpenGL.Org page http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/and I quote "These figures show that Windows Vista performance for full-screen Direct3D games is comparable to the performance delivered on Windows XP

That didn't seem to be a hog.

I'm pretty sure I got the Beckman video jean luc mentioned, though I haven't yet watched the whole thing to check for a part about fs. In any case, it's very interesting. EDIT: It is, the content about flight simulation begins at 5 minutes into the video.Here's a link for the full video http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=314874Here's a youtube excerpt that deals with Rigs of Rods' innovative use of simple but many times iterated particle physics to model complex automobile movements. I think it's okay to have the link here because it's posted by "pricorde" the designer himself, who's own material is in the video of course and who says "Needless to say, I'm very honored by what he says. Thank you Mr. Beckman".

Here's the link to the Rigs of Rods site, where you can download the program. http://rigsofrods.blogspot.com/

XP and Vista for both, XP being the reference. I didn't see any pitch of OGL against D3D. Which is what some posters refer to above. Unless I completely missed the point.

I didnt want to cut and paste the entire article, please do go read it. It has graphs comparing various apps running on both D3D and OGL and concludes there is no difference.

>The issue here is we, the Aces dev team, need to be smarter>about how we render the entire planet next time around.I think Phil just said ACES are rewriting the rendering engine for FS11. Now everyone should be happy! :)Phil do you think FS11 will use multi cores more than FSX what with quad core being entry level by the time FS11 is out?

but the graphs, it seems to me, represent % of performance between XP (being 100% all the time) and Vista with both OGL and D3D. Their point, obviously, is not to say that OGL is better than D3D but that both OGL and D3D perform similarly on both OS. That's different.

certainly making better use of the CPU (multicore use and overall performance) and the GPU(resource management and overall performance) are targets for the future.

There was a comment that by simply switching to OGL magically all issues would be removed because its so hugely better. If the OGL site itself is claiming they perform similarly - how can OGL be so hugely better?The issue is not which API FSX uses, FSX would have the same issues on OGL. The issue is in how FSX manages and renders the world.That is my point.

Edit:I don't want to direct the conversation, but I'm settled on the OGL thing.

DC-9, you hit the nail on the head. Everyone knows this, they just don't want to admitt it because we have already spent too much money as it stands!!!

>DC-9, you hit the nail on the head. Everyone knows this, they>just don't want to admitt it because we have already spent too>much money as it stands!!!No, as we've illustrated pretty conclusively here, everyone does not "know this", and in fact, the OpenGL website pretty plainly refutes any claim to superiority.

>The issue here is we, the Aces dev team, need to be smarter>about how we render the entire planet next time around.That is great news Phil :-)Cheers,Andr