I wrote that the second version of “TigerHeart” should be able to use OpenGL and Direct3D for rendering. But why do we need to support both APIs today? It is a lot of work, which has to be done twice.
Currently some hardware vendors haven’t got good OpenGL drivers. So you can get problems to run your software on some graphics cards. But as a game developer you need the widest possible hardware range, which is able to execute your software without any difficulty. For this reason it is a good decision to choose Direct3D because its behavior is obviously more matchable. Moreover you get better support for older hardware since a lot of features can be simulated by the CPU when the GPU does not support it and HLSL shaders can be compiled to Shader Model 1, what is not possible with GLSL.
Media Seasons is not only developing games but also graphics software for television. Therefore a requirement is to output the rendered graphics on the SDI channels of a “NVIDIA Quadro FX” card. We use the SDI SDK to accomplish this. Unfortunately that software development kit only supports OpenGL, what is comparable to the Quadro drivers, which are optimized for OpenGL because it is still the standard API for professional products. So we are forced to implement a rendering path for it. But we do not have to make our TV software compatible for further graphics cards because in this market segment the developer is able to exactly specify the required hardware.