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Wikipedia wrote: Microsoft had marketed Direct3D as faster based on in-house performance comparisons of these two software libraries. The performance deficit was blamed on the rigorous specification and conformance required of OpenGL. This perception was changed at the 1996 SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) conference. At that time, SGI challenged Microsoft with their own optimized Windows software implementation of OpenGL called CosmoGL which in various demos matched or exceeded the performance of Direct3D. For SGI, this was a critical milestone as it showed that OpenGL's poor software rendering performance was due to Microsoft's inferior implementation, and not to design flaws in OpenGL itself.

With the mainstream adoption of graphics acceleration hardware, the use of one API or another no longer implies the use of a specific optimized software renderer. Instead, the low-level rendering logic is implemented in the graphics hardware and its drivers, and thus is largely the same whether OpenGL or Direct3D is used. This trend has revealed that neither API possesses an inherent speed advantage over the other. The performance of an application depends instead on the programmer's skill, the quality of the drivers, and the performance of the graphics hardware.

Wikipedia wrote:The advantage of OpenGL's inclusive, extensible approach is limited in practice, however, by the market dominance Direct3D has achieved. In recent years, games have rarely implemented features until Direct3D has supported them, and graphics cards vendors have been reluctant to implement features that current or upcoming versions of Direct3D will not support.