Comparison of OpenGL and Direct3D - Portability

Portability

Direct3D is officially implemented only on Microsoft's Windows family of operating systems, including embedded versions used in the Xbox family of video game consoles and Sega's Dreamcast. Several mostly functional ports of the Direct3D API have been made by Wine, a project to port common Windows APIs to Unix-like operating systems, and Cedega, a proprietary fork of Wine, but this is impeded due to the interdependence of DirectX on many other components of Windows, and because Direct3D's proprietary nature requires reverse engineering, a difficult process.

OpenGL has implementations available across many platforms including Microsoft Windows, Unix-based systems such as Mac OS X, GNU/Linux. It is a misconception that variants of OpenGL are used on Nintendo and Sony platforms, as they have developed their own libraries. The PlayStation 3 game console has an OpenGL implementation, but it remains unused by most developers due to performance issues. A subset of OpenGL was chosen as the main graphics library for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Symbian in the OpenGL ES form.

Microsoft's OpenGL driver provides hardware acceleration in Windows Vista; support was dropped in Windows XP, not long after they failed to deliver Fahrenheit Low Level support for an OpenGL/DirectX merger in the late 1990s. OpenGL hardware acceleration on Windows is achieved by users first installing installable client drivers (ICDs) developed by GPU manufacturers. These ICDs are, in virtually all cases, bundled with the standard driver download package from the hardware vendor (IHV), so installing recent graphics drivers is sufficient to provide hardware OpenGL support.