OpenGL: the DirectX perspective

Abstract

OpenGL 4.2 and DirectX 11.1 are roughly at parity in terms of feature level support. However, game developers and many researchers are far more familiar with what's available in DirectX, and still think of OpenGL in terms of version 1 or 2, or OpenGL ES. However, they have the background, often including DirectX 11, to quickly learn what OpenGL has to offer in terms of a new API perspective. This course is designed to exploit this knowledge to quickly move into topics such as new hardware features exposed by OpenGL, and how OpenGL can be used in a high-performance renderer. We will show how difficiencies in older versions of OpenGL have been addressed, such as lack of shader binary support and efficient buffer management, and address topics high performance topics such as multithreading. We will look in some detail at the differences in OpenGL and DirectX that expose opportunities not available in DirectX.