I think you missed the part where I said, "if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible".

The median machine (e.g. a typical Dell or HP machine bought at Best Buy) has FAR less capable GPU -- they're typically integrated with the motherboard. The makers of these onboard GPUs (a) care little to nothing about OGL support and (b) typically don't maintain/update their drivers once they have a stable version.

The rub (and MS's leverage) is that D3D is so entrenched as well as far ahead that it'd be corporate suicide to cut D3D support.

Also, it doesn't seem like you registered what I was saying with regard to the fact that OGL driver support either greatly lags or is unavailable (in any real, non-emulated form) on middle-tier Windows machines. In other words, if we removed D3D support, our company's receipts would be down by over 2/3 overnight. You have to understand the gravity of that.

It doesn't sound like you've developed much in the way of commercial quality graphics-centric software for "middle tier" end-users.

Long story short is that if you ship a 3D software title that's designed and marketed to be run on as many machines as possible, modern OpenGL drivers tend to greatly lag or be unavailable on many Windows machines. Vista and especially Vista 64 really made this worse since maintaining and upgrading GL drivers for middle tier GPU hardware is generally at the bottom of the priority list for 3D driver development. Meanwhile, D3D support tends to be solid, speedy, and well maintained considering especially when you consider what hardware they have to work with.

I'm a senior engineer at a software company that manages a cross-platform codebase that puts OGL and D3D under the same roof (we ship products for OS X and Windows). One of our older products requires OpenGL on Windows due to not wanting to rewrite all its shaders for D3D, and the number of support tickets that we get from that TOWERS our the number of support tickets from our other D3D titles combined. It's downright pathetic how poor OpenGL hardware and driver support is on these middle tier Windows machines.

The last thing the guys and Intel and Nvidia that maintain the drivers for built-in chips that go on the typical Dell machine give a crap about are the state of their OpenGL support. I'm typically surprised to see them have support past 1.3.

Bingo -- thanks dc29A, I was just about to make the post having just read that Tabbi piece.

Folks, if you haven't yet read that Rolling Stone PLEASE DO. This is the next CDS massive wealth transfer for GS and other investment banks, and it's being billed as this wonderful green gift with a giant green bow.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html

This is no joke folks -- wake up, the people are being robbed in broad daylight now.

The biggest lunacy present in the "hey, US laws don't apply on foreign soil" argument in the piracy defense argument is that all the bloody content that's pirated isn't Swedish!

How hard is it for piraters to understand that certain films and music won't be as prevalent if the profit incentives are zero? People don't work for free and resources (sometimes a TON) are consumed for these works to be made!

I'm a cofounder of a small software company that makes entertainment software and we have definitive, crystal clear data that shows how we've been hit by piracy--almost to the point of putting us out of business.

Engineers, artists, and writers work their hearts out to make copyrighted content and software, and it's absurd that their work can be illegally obtained simply because it's technologically possible.

By the same logic of the pro-piracy people, cloning someone in the future won't require the subject's permission since it doesn't hurt the subject. We need to do a reality check on the ownership of the creative works.

Totally. There's two and only two kinds of Diablo players: Softcore players who *think* they're playing and having fun and the hardcore players. It's cocky--I know--but every sure every other HC player stands by my here.

I'm thinking that they'll have HC mode simply because it's a such trivial add for them. In fact, I'm sort of nervous because I'm likely to run my personal life into the abyss if this game has HC mode. Of all things, I'm thinking of avoiding D3 because I'm fearful of fucking up my life! Yikes!