Quote Originally Posted by Akira13 View Post
IMO there's literally nothing else you could use other than OpenGL or DirectX to write a reasonably well-performing game nowadays (whether in 2D or 3D.) I mean, you could build it around a general-purpose graphics library like BGRABitmap or Graphics32, but that's still ultimately going to be significantly slower than any hardware accelerated solution. There's no advantages to ever using a software renderer unless you have no other choice... Also, in regards to: I personally think the real reason is because 80-90% of the "engines" people have written in Pascal are useless to begin with. Namely, a huge portion of them use immediate-mode OpenGL, which is about as slow as you can possibly get. It's honestly even slower than a well-optimized software renderer in certain cases. Yet for some reason the Pascal community has continued to use it well into the 2000s (and still does in many cases). Why? I don't know. Maybe because people think "stuff that reminds them of C or C++ is scary" (which is another huge problem honestly. If you think C++ is scary you should quit trying to develop games right now, as you will never make it anywhere.) As far as I'm concerned, there is no logical reason for anyone to have used glBegin/glEnd or anything of that sort any later than 2001 or so. Anything after that is just laziness on the part of the developer. Even if you don't use shaders or vertex buffers, you can at least use glDrawArrays with client-side arrays! Sorry if any of this sounds abrasive, that honestly wasn't my intent... and it is worth pointing out that things ARE finally starting to get better in this regard. The Castle Game Engine for example, has a well optimized modern OpenGL renderer that doesn't use any immediate mode at all, as far as I can tell.
I dont think that there is really anything out there that is still in production that uses legacy opengl.