[shmerl]

Intel HD 3000 has better OpenGL support on Linux (thanks to Mesa). It's at 4.0 with software implementation of ARB_gpu_shader_fp64. And I doubt it supports all of DX11 properly as well.

I don't think you need to worry about that when gaming is concerned though. It's too old and below minimum requirements of huge amount of games already.

[Const-me]

Yep, on Linux and OSX it supports OpenGL 3.3.

The hardware fully supports DX 10.1. DX 11 API works fine on that, with feature level 10.1.

> I don't think you need to worry about that when gaming is concerned though

That’s correct for AAA titles. Casual gamers however often play on PCs without a dedicated GPU.

[shmerl]

> That’s correct for AAA titles. Casual gamers however often play on PCs without a dedicated GPU.

Even in such case, they wouldn't commonly use Sandy Bridge generation GPU. And those who use it, aren't expecting recent games to support it (whether they are demanding or not). Increasing number of games already require OpenGL 4.x, even if they are not very demanding in practice. And now with Vulkan, older Intel GPUs simply won't cut it anymore.

[Const-me]

Choose OpenGL 3.3, you’ll loose gamers running Windows on Sandy Bridge GPU.

Choose Direct3D 11, you’ll loose Linux gamers.

Are you sure in absolute numbers, there’re more people in the second group?

[shmerl]

Modern engines will use Vulkan anyway.

[Const-me]

Maybe they will, maybe not.

Before it happened, software developers need to choose whichever GPU API works best for their particular project.

Personally, I have not developed games for several years.

For the last 1.5 years, I’ve been working on a CAD/CAM software. Traditionally people use OpenGL for this area. I have picked D3D 11 instead. The renderer is reasonably sophisticated; there are many complex shaders in there. The software is now used by thousands customers worldwide, and yet there were very few rendering-related bugs so far.