They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and iterated it up to a worthwile competitor to OpenGL, which stood still for many a year (extensions notwithstanding).
Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market.
Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.
Comments
They were much of a muchness. Like a lot of things Microsoft, the early versions of D3D were pretty poor, but they listened to feedback from devs and so on and iterated it up to a worthwile competitor to OpenGL, which stood still for many a year (extensions notwithstanding).
Also early on I think driver support was an important factor in D3D getting traction, as proper OpenGL support was mostly only in the blindingly expensive workstation graphics market.
Nowadays I think on the PC most games are D3D because that gets you a long way towards an xbox360 port.
> a long way towards an xbox360 port.
"The Xbox (name derived from "DirectX box")"