OpenGL still better than Direct3D for non-games? [

Question

The standard model has been that OpenGL is for professional apps (CAD) and Direct3D is for games.

With the debacle of openGL 3.0, is openGl still the natural choice for technical 3D apps (cad/GIS)?
Are there scenegraph libraries for Direct3D?

(Of course Direct3D is windows only.)

Answer 1

Not an answer as such but is interesting to note the latest versions of AutoCAD give you a choice between using OpenGL or Direct3D drivers in the "3dconfig" setup option. Fundamentally, AutoCAD is a Windows-only app so it made sense for them to (finally) support Direct3D. See page 15 of this Whitepaper from AutoDesk for more info.

Answer 2

Like always, this depends on your situation.

In my experience, currently (2008) OpenGL driver quality on Windows is much worse than Direct3D driver quality. If your situation is such that you can't reasonably demand your customers to always have up-to-date drivers, or tell them to change their graphics cards to the ones that have better OpenGL drivers, then OpenGL is a pretty bad choice. In this case, I'd go for D3D renderer on Windows, and OpenGL renderer on OS X/Linux (if you have to support those platforms, that is).

Having two renderers is not that hard; in my experience working around driver bugs takes much more time than writing and supporting the rendering code paths.

Of course, there are some (specific) situations where D3D just does not have the features needed, e.g. quad-buffered genlocked output; or geometry shader support on Windows XP.

So in short: if you want better drivers on Windows, use D3D. If you don't care about driver quality much, or need features that are in OpenGL but not in D3D, then use OpenGL.