Apart from the fact that DirectX 12 predates Vulkan by a substantial margin (and includes APIs for more than graphics), this is a pretty major reason. The API itself is only one concern and I can't tell whether it's easier or harder to use OpenGL (assuming an expert at both) - it's just different. The tooling surrounding it is a completely different story.
Even during DirectX 9 there was a tool that would show you the state of all your backbuffers after draw calls[1]. It was extremely spartan, but with such a simple tool debugging shaders became enormously easier. I'm not sure if anything exists for OpenGL today. They productized this and more in VS2017[2] - including being able to step through shaders in a debugger. The big draw to the Windows platform for developers has always been the tooling and Microsoft knows this.
VS and DirectX aren't going away until people stop regarding them a "just a text editor" and "just an API" respectively. It would help if people earnestly competed with what Microsoft is doing, instead of dismissing their products for no other reason than dogma.
Comments
Apart from the fact that DirectX 12 predates Vulkan by a substantial margin (and includes APIs for more than graphics), this is a pretty major reason. The API itself is only one concern and I can't tell whether it's easier or harder to use OpenGL (assuming an expert at both) - it's just different. The tooling surrounding it is a completely different story.
Even during DirectX 9 there was a tool that would show you the state of all your backbuffers after draw calls[1]. It was extremely spartan, but with such a simple tool debugging shaders became enormously easier. I'm not sure if anything exists for OpenGL today. They productized this and more in VS2017[2] - including being able to step through shaders in a debugger. The big draw to the Windows platform for developers has always been the tooling and Microsoft knows this.
VS and DirectX aren't going away until people stop regarding them a "just a text editor" and "just an API" respectively. It would help if people earnestly competed with what Microsoft is doing, instead of dismissing their products for no other reason than dogma.
That ended with the exit of Balmer.
[1]: https://tomtech999.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/debugging-direct...
[2]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx
A few years ago Crytek open sourced this: https://renderdoc.org/
I’ve mostly used the tool with DX11, but they also support OpenGL, GLES and Vulkan.