Very interesting to watch that just a few minutes after reading this opinion piece on OpenGL vs DirectX: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010... According to that article, OpenGL has had features like polygon tessellation for years. - DeWitt Clinton

OpenGL had a lot of stuff for years before DX, but ARB became too bureaucratic like the W3C and OpenGL stagnated, while NVidia and ATI continued to innovate like Firefox/WebKit, and Microsoft was more accommodating as a benevolent dictator. Now OpenGL is catching back up with 3.0 and OpenCL, but DX11 still has some features OGL is missing. The key is a programmable tessellation system. DX11 added a "hull shader" and "domain shader" that happen after vertex shading but before geometry shading. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us... - Ray Cromwell

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the hull shader, tesselator, and domain shader concepts at a glance, but they look like still more points for OpenGL to chase on DirectX. I just read the opinion piece DeWitt links to, and afaict it's full of errors and half-truths. Which is unfortunate, as I really would *prefer* a world where OpenGL was the standard to follow, and where half the drivers weren't garbage, but that seem like more wishful thinking than anything else. - Joel Webber

Speaking of which -- can any of you guys who keep up with these things speak to the *actual* state of OpenGL on Windows? What I'm most concerned with is whether WebGL is doomed to failure (at least in the near term) by crappy drivers. - Joel Webber