Well, seems MS marketing was successful on you. The opposite is true  
- with OpenGL you can access the full range of hardware features that  
a specific vendor puts in their cards, not only the ones that MS  
deems worthy of supporting. Using OpenGL you can program with DX10- 
like features even in XP (for example, NVIDIA's demos usually use  
OpenGL).

- Bert -

On May 28, 2007, at 19:36 , J J wrote:

>
> And if you are making a game, the directX 10 or 15 or 2000, what  
> ever comes with Vista is the most advanced graphics API you can  
> have on a desktop as far as I know.  Some people may let that go by  
> just because it isn't "freedom 0" or whatever.  But probably not  
> people want to make money selling 3D games. :)
>
>> From: Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
>> Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list<squeak- 
>> dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list<squeak- 
>> dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>> Subject: Re: Balloon 3D
>> Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 17:49:19 +0200
>>
>>
>> On May 28, 2007, at 17:22 , Brad Fuller wrote:
>>
>>> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The bad thing is that all of this requires hacking C code  
>>>> (twice, for
>>>> OpenGL and Direct3D), inventing new plugin interfaces etc. This is
>>>> *so* much nicer in Croquet where you do everything from  
>>>> Smalltalk,  and
>>>> for OpenGL only ... But once the low-level work is done it  
>>>> should be
>>>> relatively simple to use.
>>> Why not dump Direct3D support? That'll make it more attractive  
>>> to  update
>>> now and in the future and less platform specific.
>>
>> Because OpenGL support on Windows is consistently inferior to   
>> Direct3D support on consumer-level hardware. I prefer OpenGL over  
>> D3D  any day, but reality is that as long as you want to ship to a  
>> non- technical audience on Windows you absolutely need to support  
>> D3D.
>>
>> - Bert -