I know were talking about an old card, but this does cause problems for people wanting a successful indie games business.
I think it's just a badly built demo - my game runs at 200+ fps on my GF2 MX, which is under half the fill rate of a standard GF2, and I certainly haven't spent a lot of time optimising it.
I hear a lot of people claiming it, but actual evidence seems to indicate to the contrary. OpenGL failures are usually cause by obsolete drivers, not bleeding edge ones.
Definitely. If your end user has up to date drivers installed, it's extremely unlikely that he'll have any problems running your game, even if he's got and old/obscure card. Obsolete drivers, on the other hand, are the problem, and lots of people seem to have them installed.
A DirectX wrapper is not an ideal solution to any problem. DirectX is on it's way out anyway, it's only a matter of time. Microsoft already have the successor lined up. Any more work on DirectX is a wate of time, IMHO.
Well, a (for example) DirectX 7 game should work on Microsoft operating systems for a long time to come. There'd be a *huge* uproar if Longhorn didn't support DirectX 7 applications.
Microsoft actually spends a lot of resources to make its operating systems backwards compatible. They even disassembled Sim City (which wouldn't work on Windows 95), found the bug (where it used memory after freeing it), and fixed it by detecting when Sim City runs, and allowing it to write to memory that had been freed! Something like disallowing older DirectX versions would be totally unlike anything they've done in the past.
And right here, right now, DirectX 7 has a much, much higher success rate than OpenGL on every day machines. And they both have a pretty much 100% success rate if the user downloads new drivers, so either is OK.
The pervasiveness of the Quake engines (which have been around for some time now) really pushed a lot of manufacturers to release more sensible OGL drivers. If the GFX card drivers are reasonably recent, it's likely that OpenGL will run fairly well, if they're not recent, then a DX9 interface would likely fail just as miserably.
Well DirectX 9 would be suicide as well. Its install base compared to DirectX 7+ is tiny.
Ya know, I've played alot of AAA games where I've had problems in one way or another. What's the first thing you see when you click the trouble-shooting portion of the site? "Make sure you have the latest drivers."
Yeah, but if you're making small downloadable games, doing everything the AAA games are doing would be suicide. People will just download another game if they can't get yours to run, unless it's *really* special.
The updates are there for genuine reasons - the main reasons are stability and compatability. Just gonna have to accept it I'm afraid.
We, as developers, accept that. Our systems are usually nice and up to date with all the necessary patches. Our target audience (as in mine and anyone else with the same) simply isn't like that though. They don't fix things that don't appear to be broken - and if your game is the only one of ten that doesn't work, your game, not their system, will appear to be at fault. Even if your game would run with proper drivers.