Directx and Open Libraries list? [closed]

Question

I've just been looking for comparissons between open and proprietary frameworks and libraries. More so just to get an idea of what exists than how they compare.

For example:

We have

DirectX (graphics) and its open counterpart OpenGL
DirectX (sound) and OpenAL

But there are other DirectX libraries that I can't find open alternatives to such as

DirectInput
DXGI
Direct2D
DirectWrite 

Doe's anyone have any list's or Comparisons between Directx and their open counterparts?

Answer 1

http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/2001-October/020502.html

Quoting

I don't know of any single place where you'd find something like that, but here's some basic info, along with common opinions:

OpenAL: 3D audio "rendering". OpenGL style API, which is implemented on the most popular platforms. (Don't know what people in general think, and I don't use it myself.)

OpenGL: Pretty nice, and available on pretty much anything that can do 3D. (If nothing else, there's at least software Mesa.) Many prefer this to Direct3D not only because it's portable, but also because they find the Direct3D API messy and constantly changing. Drivers for this API are often slower than those for DirectX, but

Direct3D: Probably the most popular 3D API on Windows - but be warned; you'll probably never see it running on anything but Windows! It has two "modes"; immediate and retained. The former is lower level than OpenGL, and is basically a rasterizing API for 3D engines. Immediate mode is higher level than OpenGL, dog slow (or so they say...), and is a 3D engine, more than it is an API around which you would build one. Drivers for this API are often faster and more up to date than OpenGL drivers for the same hardware, especially for low end cards.

DirectDraw: The 2D rendering part of DirectX. Supports setting up fullscreen video modes and direct access windows, and accelerated blits, including color key blits. Alpha blending is not supported before DirectX 8.0. It's a very, very low level API, and doesn't wrap the differences between windowed and fullscreen mode, back buffer handling and other "messy" stuff.

Glide: AFAIK, a low level rasterizing API. It's implemented only by 3dfx drivers (and some more or less dodgy wrappers...), but used to deliver superior performance and control, compared to OpenGL and Direct3D. IMHO, forget about this one, unless you're going to build custom arcade machines using 3dfx hardware or something...

OpenML: Cover's everything, looks nice, but where's the code?

SDL: Somewhat like OpenML in theory, but much simler, and much more real! It wraps various other APIs (it's not a driver framework) and handles input (keyboard, joystick, mouse etc), audio output, video output, threads and more. Can set up display contexts for OpenGL rendering. It still has some minor issues, but most of them are totally irrelevant to games. Never heard of a user not liking this one... :-)