Quote Originally Posted by Anton View Post
I'm interested to know are there big performance differences between OpenGL and DirectX on Windows, I have read some articles stating the Direct3D would perform better on Windows platforms?
From my expirience that largely depends on graphical drivers. One think that you definitly want to avoid is using graphical drivers that are installed by windows itself.
Always instal official drivers from your graphic card manufactuer becouse drivers that come with windows often don't provide full functionality and in case of some older graphics card they even limit OpenGL to OpenGL 1 compatiblility even thou the graphic card itself does full support OpenGL 2.
I'm not sure how it is this with newest graphics cards becouse now I always install official drivers right after installing chipsets drivers for motherboard. Now in case of older computers and ATI graphics card it is also recomended to install sound drivers before graphical drivers especiall for graphics card that already support HDMI so that graphics drivers can corectly interface with sound drivers (I had encountered severl dificulties when this didn't happen). But on newer AMD graphics card this is no longer necessary as they have full sound card support integrated right into them and therefore no longer require your computer to have other sound card.

As far as raw performance goes I have rarely seen any significant diferences when comparing benchmarks between DirectX and OpenGL. And whenever DirectX actually did give higher performance running of DirectX benchmark itself utilized CPU much more than the OpenGL benchmark therefore I can conclude that the aditional performance of DirectX test was due to aditionaly utilizing CPU for certain graphical processing. But in games that probably would not give you much performance boost, infact it could result in worse performasnce becouse it would eat up CPU performance that might be necessry for your game logic.