Year of the Linux Desktop

It's closer than you think!

Microsoft has decided to turn into Apple, and will be moving towards closing their OS ecosystem and focusing on making their own hardware/software products:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/technology-business/microsoft-pc-and-tablet-makers-youre-not-our-future-195877

Valve is releasing Steam and Source Engine for Linux, allowing 3rd parties to release for Linux as well:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/127475-valve-confirms-steam-and-source-for-linux-signals-low-confidence-for-windows-8

Valve is developing an open game system/common platform based on Linux and PC hardware:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/40592/Valve-confirms-console-and-mobile-hardware-plan

Wayland 1.0 release this summer, finally something to replace X11/X.org:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzQ
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5OTY

Furthermore, the continued economic recession/depression will drive more and more businesses to adopt Linux, and this will increase spread to user's homes. As consumer's budgets become smaller, they will adopt Linux in increasing numbers as they become aware of it through the grape vine and wish to keep their old computer hardware running without relying on unsupported and out-of-date software.

Those with money will choose Apple over Microsoft.

Microsoft's business model is dead.

>>43
Game programmer here. You are wrong. Direct3D11 is actually a superset of OpenGL 4.3, although they are almost at feature parity. OpenGL lacks support for building command buffers/display lists from other threads, where as D3D11 has deferred render contexts which can handle this. There are no OpenGL extensions from any vendor which solves this. Direct3D11 implements everything that OpenGL 4.3, plus vendor extensions, implements minus the deprecated stuff in OpenGL like the immediate mode functions and fixed-function pipeline.

Direct3D11, if you look beyond the fact that it uses COM and has that OOP feel to it, has a better object model than OpenGL that results in less call overhead when mutating render state. Render state changes are batched far better and the API has a better fit to how driver implementers do things internally.

John Carmack even admits this now.

That said, it doesn't matter what you use. Game programmers ultimately have to build code paths for whatever is best supported and has the best performance on each of the targeted platforms. There is no OpenGL support on the XBox 360. On the PS3, only OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported, so most developers just bypass the API and go right down to the metal and program the GPU via IO ports and memory mapping, and then offload a bunch of processing onto the Cell SPU cores on the CPU.

Which API has a better design doesn't matter at this point. Shipping code that can beat the competition and deliver a superior game and visual experience is what matters.

Furthermore, 3D graphics APIs are going to be almost irrelevant for this next console generation. Developers are moving back to pure software rendering that uses the GPU as just another general purpose processor cluster, and it looks like OpenCL will be the biggest player here. OpenGL is just used for the framebuffer. OpenCL has interop capabilities with both OpenGL and Direct3D as part of the specification, for resource sharing.

Even on the next XBox, where MS won't support OpenCL, because AMD is open sourcing their OpenCL stack and Clang/LLVM already compiles OpenCL Kernel C for Power and AMD's GPU ISA, it will probably only take a couple of man months to build your own OpenCL implementation for XBox. Spending two months getting OpenCL working on XBox Next is better than spending 10 man years building an entire DirectCompute + Direct3D render code path.