Is this a bad thing? They created it. Tons of developers use it. It works. How is this a bad thing?
The "$" isn't necessary.

Despite being somewhat satisfied with D3D, we still get a lot of games on the market that are poorly programmed, hence resulting in crappy performance, unless you have a very decent system and/or a patch to overcome that handicap.

Tons of developers use D3D for games. Why? Microsoft does abuse it's dominant position in the market (are you aware of all the lawsuits and legal warnings from courts they've been getting the last few years?) so it's obvious they have some (in)direct "influence" on the developer's API of choice. After all, what's the OS those games will run with...? (rethorical question)
The $ is perfectly understandable cause they care more about money nowadays than innovation and the "quality" experience end users get with their products.

Do you have any proof that OGL is faster than D3D? Are you basing this on an experience with 1 graphics card?

Well, I've had a Riva TNT 2 Ultra w/ 32 MB RAM, a GeForce 4 Ti 4800 w/ 128 MB RAM, a RADEON 9800 PRO w/ 128 MB RAM and now a X800 PRO w/ 256 MB RAM. My own experience (and most of my friends as well) is that OGL games and benchmark applications are just as fast or even faster than D3D. But it's obvious that every system has it's own performance (due to different hardware/software combinations, etc) so results may very from one user to another.

BTW, OGL is used everywhere, including the professional market and even the military use it in their own simulators. Only on the gaming market D3D has the edge, due to Microsoft's position, once more .

Why would they be interested in OpenGL? They developed Direct3D, it works and is what they use. Why bother with OpenGL? OpenGL can be use in their OS but understandably they would rather use Direct3D for their own games. I don't blame them.

Neither do I blame them. But they sure aren't going to do anything with Windows in order to optimize OpenGL's performance. Remember the browser wars? Only Internet Explorer would work best in XP, and the competition complained (which spawned legal fights) that they were being harmed by not being able to optimize their own products in XP. Abuse of dominant position on the market? I'd say it's about right...

I doubt it would be more useful to those with less powerful hardware. D3D works on "less powerfull hardware" as well.

With all due respect, when was the last time you played D3D games on a low end PC? D3D gaming experience is only "acceptable" in the mid to high end video cards. I know so cause I've seen some really bad experiences on low end GPU's (had a couple of them myself), and that's the reason why I stick to the midrange GPU's (can't afford the high end stuff - ridiculous prices and not enough performance gain).

So, if D3D is so much better than OGL, then how come we don't see things like Beryl cube on XP and Vista?

I've actually seen this thing running great on a low end PC with a cheap on-board integrated graphic card. Really fluid! Amazing!

Why haven't we yet seen D3D pull a stunt like that on XP or Vista with the same hardware requirements? Surely it can be done, but most likely on a far superior machine. 😒

Here's some interesting links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Op … GL_and_Direct3D

http://www.createdigitalmotion.com/2007/08/20 … why-use-directx

OpenGL 2/2.1, not OpenGL 3, is roughly equivalent to DirectX 10 as far as supporting flashy new features. Thanks to extensions t […]
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OpenGL 2/2.1, not OpenGL 3, is roughly equivalent to DirectX 10 as far as supporting flashy new features. Thanks to extensions to the OpenGL spec, in fact, OpenGL developers often get earlier access to functionality than DirectX 10 developers do, or at least get it on more platforms more quickly.
(...)
There’s a lively discussion of the OpenGL vs. DirectX debate on the OpenGL boards. Here’s my favorite quote, from forum member Robert Osfield responding to the question of why choose OpenGL over DirectX:

I think one should ask this question the other way around. What possible reason would there be for choosing D3D9/10 over OpenGL 2.x/3.0, given the later is exposes equal or more hardware functionality, and runs on all Windows platforms, and all other major desktop/workstation platforms.

http://www.astahost.com/microsoft-cripple-ope … hics-t7377.html

Interesting videos showing Beryl Cube (OpenGL) running on Lynux. Be sure to read the comments...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ukrq2RDwGPk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E3EBeaCrhn8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=MyiacxtIzYk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dQkSObRtw0o
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PjLtUkKLPhI

I believe this should be enough to demonstrate OpenGL's raw power when put to good use.

There are many OpenGL active projects. It's a widely accepted 3D API and is available and in use regularly across many and varied platforms and applications.OpenGL is far from a dead standard, so I don't think you need to convince people of it's versatility, scalability or performance capability. The problem as I see it is lack of reason for gaming devs (almost every 'serious' app has proper OpenGL support) to choose anything else but DirectX/D3D. Until we have a competitive desktop OS solution that encompasses broad IHV support, support infrastructure and published future direction coupled with enough money to make that all work (- even IF they rob people blind!) then we will mainly see OpenGL in Open Source games.

One problem with OpenGL though, over the years, has been proprietary hardware extentions. Remember Neverwinter Nights? They used proprietary NV extensions and it caused all sorts of performance problems and missing features on ATI hardware. Doing that is almost the same as using the old manufacturer specific APIs of the olden days. A Radeon can't match up with a low-level hardware-specific NV extension. It may not even be legal to do so? I don't think MS allows that kind of thing with D3D.

And as for the love of MS, well I guess that's possibly because MS gives them more support than the haphazard OpenGL ARB? MS has a vested interest in making gaming work well with their API. Games aren't getting cheaper or easier to make, and so if these game companies get help with one API more than the other, I'd say they are going to go that route.

You can see this too with how so many games have NVIDIA's "Way It's Meant To Be Played" logo now. NVIDIA has a much better developer relations program than ATI/AMD. So, you are going to see games run better on NVIDIA hardware. Of course, such a program can and does help everyone because 3D programming techniques aren't always innately hardware-specific. (ATI however has really been slowly falling apart lately IMO)

It's not like Linux,Mac,etc really offer any real opportunities for profit on these modern $20-30 million game projects. Windows and consoles are it, really. Because of dev costs, there's a lot more risk to game development than there used to be. The route of least resistance makes business sense. Helps game devs stay in business, hopefully make the best possible code, and be able to eat and stuff. 😀