This website is still under construction.


Here I will compare main 3D renderers for PC.
PlayStation has its own renderer and XBox is using DirectX.
For Nintendo Switch, you can use OpenGL and Vulkan.

OpenGL

OpenGL.org
Operating systems (GLFW): There also was PSGL for PlayStation 3 but there is no followup for PlayStation 4.

Old

1992 - 2008
At this time, we had no custom shaders or buffers. All shaders were predefined. For rendering you had to write all vertex data on separate lines startign with glBegin(...); and ending with glEnd();
glTexCoord2f(...); glColor4f(...); glNormal3f(...); glVertex3f(...);

Modern

2008 - now
Modern OpenGL means that we can use buffers for render and write our own shaders.

Tutorials:

3.0

2008
OpenGL 3.0 was first Modern OpenGL which came with some difficulties which were fixed in 3.2 and 3.3

3.3

2010
Considered to by Minimum Modern OpenGL Version not only because of new version of shaders but also because better support of buffers.

4.X

2010
OpenGL added more features which used to be in extensions and now can be used for easier development and optimization and Tessellation support.

Vulkan

2016
Khronos.org/vulkan
Operating systems:
Vulkan is not OpenGL 5 because OpenGL is still in development. It can be compared to DirectX 12 with features and to OpenGL with compatibility and platforms.

DirectX

1995 - now
DirectXUpdate.com
Operating systems:

8

2000, Windows 2000
DirectX 8 can be compared to Modern OpenGL because it was a huge step in 3D render.
It came with first version(s) of shaders.

9

2002, Windows XP
You can compare DirectX 8 to 9 here or here.
Direct X 9 brought Shader 2.0 with increased number of instructions which was extremely increased in Direct X 9.0c and Shader 3.0.

10

2006, Windows Vista
DirectX 10 is officially Major Update.
It came with DirectX 9 compatibility and (again) new version of Shader (4.0) which changed structure of graphics chips.

11

2009, Windows Vista
DirectX 11 also has support for DirectX 9 (and 10) and introduced (better) multithreading.
There also came Tessellation support.

12

2015, Windows 10
DirectX came with better optimizations which also applies for Virtual reality.

Used Sources

Wikipedia

OpenGL
Vulkan
DirectX

Stack Overflow

What's so different about OpenGL 3.x?
Difference between OpenGL 3.x and 4.X?
Which consoles may I target with OpenGL?
Transferring my OpenGL PC game to PS4 and/or XBox One

Khronos

Related Toolkits and APIs (OpenGL Wiki)

Hardware Secrets

DirectX Versions

PC Gamer

What DirectX 12 means for gamers and developers

Gamasutra

Nintendo Switch to support Vulkan, OpenGL