| > ease of development Apart from the fact that DirectX 12 predates Vulkan by a substantial margin (and includes APIs for more than graphics), this is a pretty major reason. The API itself is only one concern and I can't tell whether it's easier or harder to use OpenGL (assuming an expert at both) - it's just different. The tooling surrounding it is a completely different story. Even during DirectX 9 there was a tool that would show you the state of all your backbuffers after draw calls[1]. It was extremely spartan, but with such a simple tool debugging shaders became enormously easier. I'm not sure if anything exists for OpenGL today. They productized this and more in VS2017[2] - including being able to step through shaders in a debugger. The big draw to the Windows platform for developers has always been the tooling and Microsoft knows this. VS and DirectX aren't going away until people stop regarding them a "just a text editor" and "just an API" respectively. It would help if people earnestly competed with what Microsoft is doing, instead of dismissing their products for no other reason than dogma. > Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish That ended with the exit of Balmer. [1]: https://tomtech999.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/debugging-direct... [2]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx |
A few years ago Crytek open sourced this: https://renderdoc.org/
I’ve mostly used the tool with DX11, but they also support OpenGL, GLES and Vulkan.