[sldev] DirectX - feasible to replace?

[Gareth Nelson]

>> DirectX comes into play for hardware detection. OpenGL doesn't give all the
>> informations DirectX can give. That's what I heard so far.
I'm going to be controversial here by asking "is that info really
required when users can scale down their quality settings manually?"

> For Windows, DirectX works better than OpenGL for most lower end
> chipsets. That's gradually changing, but for now, adding a DirectX
> back end would add benefit for a couple years. A quick and dirty
> substitution hack is feasible for someone who knows both rendering
> subsystems well, but it would take quite a few eyes on it over many
> releases to iron out all the eccentricities DX would introduce.
Which chipsets in particular? The 2 big names (ATI and NVidia) do
quite well in OpenGL on all platforms.

> The better solution is to rework SL to replace all OpenGL use with a
> retargetable engine like Ogre, which can speak GL, DX, and god knows
> what else. At least one viewer project's working with Ogre. However
> when last I looked, they only seemed to be using it to add features,
> running it in parallel with the built in rendering instead of trying
> to excise the OpenGL calls.
What is this other viewer? RealXtend?

The reason i'm asking about this is because i'm fiddling with my
cross-platform build right now and honestly dreading having to fiddle
with the DirectX SDK. My first thought is to just cut out all DirectX
use (from a first glance there's a bit of sound code which appears to
be now replaced by OpenAL and the hardware detection at startup) and
replace it. I actually couldn't find where the 3D rendering is done by
DirectX, so perhaps i'm missing something obvious.

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