[mrhyperpenguin]

This is why I chose to learn DirectX first rather than OpenGL.

It's kind of like the Android vs iOS debate. DirectX is like iOS in that there's one main feature set which runs on a lot of devices. Whereas OpenGL was pretty fragmented because of extensions.

The only fragmentation on DirectX that I remember is the vertex-texture fetch (which was only supported by NVIDIA cards) vs render to vertex buffer (only supported by ATI cards) features in DirectX 9.0c. After that, Microsoft really started emphasizing the notion of a standard feature set.

OpenGL moved away from all of that starting with OpenGL ES which is partly why it has became so popular.