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I would be curious to see whether it's a common opinion that DirectX was a bad thing for the games industry. It was preceded by a patchwork of messy graphics/audio/input APIs, many of them proprietary, and when it started to gain prominence, Linux gaming was mostly a mirage. A lot of people still choose to build games on Direct3D 11 or even 9 for convenience, and now thanks to Proton games built that way run fine on Linux and Steam Deck. Plus technologies like shadercross and mojoshader mean that those HLSL shaders are fairly portable, though that comes at the cost of a pile of weird hacks. One good thing is that one of the console vendors now supports Vulkan, so building your game around Vulkan gives you a head start on console and means your game will run on Windows, Linux and Mac (though the last one requires some effort via something like MoltenVK) - but this is a relatively new thing. It's great to see either way, since in the past the consoles all used bespoke graphics APIs (except XBox, which used customized DirectX). An OpenGL-based renderer would have historically been even more of an albatross when porting to consoles than DX, since (aside from some short-lived, semi-broken support on PS3) native high-performance OpenGL has never been a feature on anything other than Linux and Mac. In comparison DirectX has been native on XBox since the beginning, and that was a boon in the XBox 360 era when it was the dominant console. IMO historically picking a graphics API has always been about tradeoffs, and realities favored DirectX until at least the end of the XBox 360 era, if not longer than that. |
So it isn't that portable as people think.