John Carmack, id Software technical director and stalwart OpenGL supporter, tells bit-tech that Direct3D has emerged as a superior graphics API. "I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today," he tells them. "Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better." That said, he adds id will not be making the switch at this point because the benefits would not be significant, and all their tools use OpenGL. "It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point," he explains. "OpenGL still works fine, and we wouldn’t get any huge benefits by making the switch, so I can’t work up much enthusiasm for cleaning it out of our codebase. If it was just a matter of the game code, we could quite quickly produce a DirectX PC executable, but all of our tool code has to share resources with the game renderer, and I wouldn’t care to go over all of that for a dubious win."