Worse than any nVidiot or Fanatic..

[ChrisRay]

I really really detest 3dfx fanboys. I dunno Why, They all seem to have an axe to grind,



They either "refuse" to acknowledge anything offers better Anti Aliasing than the Voodoo5, ( I mean my god the R300 AA is light years beyond anything my Voodoo5 offered)


They all seem to think Nvidia is purely responcible for the downfall of there company. No Company has done more damage to the 3d industry than 3dfx has,

Playing Old 3dfx Games with Glide. Is one of the most frustrating things in existence. Even games which used Direct3d were coded to work only on 3dfx Cards,(Final Fantasy 7 for the PC, Mortal Kombat 4 PC) Searching for a compatible glide wrapper drives me nuts. it's a real pain in the butt to get old games to work.

Anyway. End Rant, and Damn 3dfx, Damn em down to hell :o

Sorry for my rant ;)

[Sledge]

I never understood the existence of Glide. Glide is just OpenGL with a few modifications. Why not just support OpenGL? Duh.

[ChrisRay]

Glide's original purpose was to provide a 3d API for developers to use, DirectX 5.0 was very very buggy for 3d acceleration at the time.

So Glide was a quick stop solution. However by the time DX 6.0 rolled around. Glide became pretty much useless. But 3dfx continued pushing it due to it being there API.

[jbirney]

Originally posted by ChrisRay
[B]They either "refuse" to acknowledge anything offers better Anti Aliasing than the Voodoo5, ( I mean my god the R300 AA is light years beyond anything my Voodoo5 offered)

Fire up CounterStrike, which some 50,000 people still play everyday according to the on-line states. Then watch the alsing on the alpha textures that are used in that game. Sorry if todays cards can not handle simple games then I have to nock it a bit. And no the AA on the R300 is not light years ahead. Yes its more advanced but its also what 2 years newer? Yes the AA is awesome on my R9700 Pro and yes its better than the V5's AA.


They all seem to think Nvidia is purely responcible for the downfall of there company. No Company has done more damage to the 3d industry than 3dfx has

Poppy ****. 3DFX started the industry.


Playing Old 3dfx Games with Glide. Is one of the most frustrating things in existence.

I remember playing Unreal when it first came out. Very sweet. In fact Tribes and a host of other games gave me no issue with Glide back then.

I never understood the existence of Glide. Glide is just OpenGL with a few modifications. Why not just support OpenGL? Duh.

Go back in time. OpenGL support was not exsistant back then. DX sucked there was nothing else. At that time Glide was not that bad of an idea as it gave devlopers and consumers a work able solution. But Glide had its own issues...and may it RIP.

[Sledge]

OpenGL support was not exsistant back then. DX sucked there was nothing else.

My Riva128 supported OpenGL. I'm fairly sure the Rage3D chip also supported OpenGL because I used CAD/solid modeling software on a computer with an ATI card.

[ChrisRay]

Poppy ****. 3DFX started the industry


I have to disagree. 3dfx may have been the first in the industry, But starting it? The immersion of other chipset manufacturers was a huge part of the OpenGL and DirectX API.,

If Anything, Microsoft is the one who has pushed the 3d industry. Not 3dfx. 3dfx Just happened to have the first Viable API. But their pushing of it after the arrival of DirectX is pretty detestable.


I remember playing Unreal when it first came out. Very sweet. In fact Tribes and a host of other games gave me no issue with Glide back then.

Talking about now. Glide only games today, Getting them working on Non 3dfx Cards.

ire up CounterStrike, which some 50,000 people still play everyday according to the on-line states. Then watch the alsing on the alpha textures that are used in that game. Sorry if todays cards can not handle simple games then I have to nock it a bit. And no the AA on the R300 is not light years ahead. Yes its more advanced but its also what 2 years newer? Yes the AA is awesome on my R9700 Pro and yes its better than the V5's AA.


WIll give ya the benefit of the doubt with Alpha textures, Why I feel Super Sampling is important.

But of course it's newer, Of Course its better, Thats the point, Anyone who's seen ATIS AA Quality has to give them a nod too it. It makes 3dfx AA look like a blurry mess. But some people wont give up a Voodoo5 based on them thinking the AA is way better or somethen.

[lukar]

Voodoo 3 gave me the best gaming experience ever, and the glide was awesome at that time. DX sucked, and any DX 6.0 game compared to 3DFX glide was a joke. TNT and other Nvidia chipsets as well as ATI's were actually a garbage comparing to performance and quality of 3DFX in glide and openGL games. For example you could play Fifa Soccer by choosing D3D or glide. I even brought TNT 2 to play it and it was a joke, disaster, bad quality of picture, everything was suttering. I took TNT garbage back... For all these years I never understood the fact that many people brought Nvidia's ****ty video cards. The first good card was GF3 line, following by GF4ti and now they screwed it with GFX.
The first awesome ATI's card was Radeon 1. I still own that card. It has 32mb on it, PCI version and it is ripping off any GF2...

I remembered playing UT1, wow that was awesome.

Like it or not??? Glide haven't any 'slowing down, suttering, or glitch issues like D3D had introduced by garbage chip TNT. That was knew for me at that point of time...

3DFX pushed the hardware industry...

Microsoft pushed their API, and their vision about gaming, which is wrong, and they won. The same for Rambus...
DDR is wrong and it's the worst possible solution for PC. Rambus is much better thing. Those guys with new SISR659 chip and PC1200 rambus modules will push 9.6GB of memory bandwidth, something what DDR technology will not achieve for a whole one year. Sony Corporation know what's a good solution, and what's a bad solution and of course they gonna have rambus chips in PS3.

And believe me, PS3 will make Microsoft, PC, ATI, NVidia and everything what they achieved to look like jokes....

[vampireuk]

Just fire up Unreal 2 with a voodoo 5:D

[NickSpolec]

To bad for Rambus they employ morons in the front office.

A lawsuit trying to claim ownership of Ram technology?

Please...

[The Baron]

um, Radeon 1 gets owned by GF2s--I had a AGP 64MB Radeon VIVO (actually, it's in the other room)

[Sledge]

You prefer Rambus?

DDR vs RDRAM (http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/news/showpubnews.asp?num=25). In case you don't feel like reading, DDR won nearly all tests. The ones RDRAM won were by a very small margin.

But if paying twice as much for RAM that has an overall performance deficit made by a company who has more lawyers than engineers makes you happy, who am I to argue?

[ChrisRay]

Originally posted by vampireuk
Just fire up Unreal 2 with a voodoo 5:D


Played Unreal Tournament 2003 with a Voodoo5? Heh... You can play it @ 800x600 with 4x AA and medium, Quality textures and get decent frame rates I guess... :angel2:

[Hellbinder]

Poppy ****. 3DFX started the industry.

Poppy ****...

3dfx did not start the industry. Professional 3d companies did like SGI etc...

Further there were a couple other Companies out there with the First TRue 3d hardware on the market. Like the Rendition Verite 1000. Which I still own and is around my house somewhere.

3DFX was big and Did really push the 3dmarket for Gaming Forward. However the Very First 3dgames out there were games with Verite 1000 support. hell even Quake was first 3d accelerated on a Verite 1000.

[ChrisRay]

Further there were a couple other Companies out there with the First TRue 3d hardware on the market. Like the Rendition Verite 1000. Which is still own and is around my house somewhere

pics please?! I have never seen one of those ;) Oldest carsd I have is a Voodoo2.

[ChrisW]

NVidia was responsible for 3DFx's demise. They saw that 3DFx was in a particular weak position and struck. They knew they did not have enough money to successfully fight a lawsuit so they sued them into non-existence. They even released their own version of glide. What did they do with what was left of the company after they acquired their assets? They left 3DFx owners out to dry with absolutely zero suport. They also ditched their version of glide which goes to show you their reason for releasing it.

NVidia did to 3DFx the same thing Creative did to Aureal. They took out their closest competition and left their owners out in the cold. They also ditched the technologies they acquires (like Glide and A3D).

[cthellis]

Originally posted by ChrisRay
3dfx Just happened to have the first Viable API. But their pushing of it after the arrival of DirectX is pretty detestable.

Not sure why this in and of itself would be "detestible" since it took DX a while to catch up regardless, so there was still reason to be happy with Glide. Not to mention I wouldn't have minded a stronger showing for 3D card manufacturers to work through their own consortium rather than cave at the first sign of usefulness from Microsoft, so that gaming would be more platform independant than tied irrevocably with Windows.

If only OGL wasn't lagging so much right now...

[ChrisRay]

Originally posted by ChrisW
NVidia was responsible for 3DFx's demise. They saw that 3DFx was in a particular weak position and struck. They knew they did not have enough money to successfully fight a lawsuit so they sued them into non-existence. They even released their own version of glide. What did they do with what was left of the company after they acquired their assets? They left 3DFx owners out to dry with absolutely zero suport. They also ditched their version of glide which goes to show you their reason for releasing it.

NVidia did to 3DFx the same thing Creative did to Aureal. They took out their closest competition and left their owners out in the cold. They also ditched the technologies they acquires (like Glide and A3D).


ERR Irrc Nvidia "never" developed a version of glide. Creative did. Had 3dfx just went bankrupt. There wouldnt have been any support anyways. 3dfx had a heavy debt with it. No One was going to buy the whole company.

Nvidia bought their assets, But nothing else. Therefore 3dfx was able to use that money to pay off their debts, Buying the whole company woulda brought Nvidia down financially. In the end. 3dfx took the easy way out of its own financial Suicide. Coming out on top and laughing all the way to the bank.

Sorry. Nvidia approached them when they put the offer on the table to sell. It was 3dfx who decided to sell. Not Nvidia who approached them first.

I mean come on. Had Nvidia continued supporting Glide and Pushing it. Where would be today? Being upset at Nvidia for not pushing Glide is silly. Imagine where would be today if we had a Glide6x version by now.

[Edge]

I think most people are missing the point of Glide. Have you ever noticed that almost every game that supports Glide also supports software rendering? Or that many software rendering games had Glide added in a patch? The entire PURPOSE of Glide was to be able to easilly turn a software rendering game into a 3d accelerated game, and it was VERY simple to make a game that supported software mode into a Glide game. If Glide hadn't been around back then, the almost NO game would've supported 3d acceleration, and all the games that you're currently complaining about needing to use a Glide wrapper with wouldn't even have any 3d acceleration. Ironic if you think about it...you talk about how you hate 3dfx and that you hate having to find a glide wrapper to play a game with 3d acceleration, but without 3dfx the games probably wouldn't even be accelerated in the first place. And look at games like Unreal: they didn't even think of 3d acceleration back then, but then all the sudden 3d cards became really popular, so they quickly added a Glide mode which was both easy and VERY fast, but it took them YEARS to get a decent OGL/D3D driver for it, and even today many Unreal 1-based games have problems with non-Glide acceleration. UT2003 was the first release of the engine that really had a decent D3D renderer. Glide eased the market into 3d accleration.

Early D3D and OGL games were disasters. Look at games like Carmageddon 2 or Trespasser, or Resident Evil 2, or Final Fantasy 7, or even Diablo 2. Back then there was no "standard" for anything, so instead of making a generic D3D driver they simply customised the functions for all the major chipsets at the time (which is why many D3D games back then only supported TNT/PowerVR/Voodoo cards and won't work with newer ones). And even when they did have a generic D3D driver that worked with all cards, it was still missing effects that were present in the Glide modes (such as fog in Carmageddon 2). In the case of Diablo 2, they were origionally going to make it Glide-only, but when Nvidia cards became popular, they had to go through a bunch of extra trouble to get a D3D mode in the game. But even after they spent a much larger amount of time on the D3D version of it then they did on the Glide version, they still couldn't achive the same effects that were in Glide like colored lighting until many patches later. The only early game with decent non-glide accelerator support was Quake (which interestingly was one of the first, as well).

Anyway, it just irks me that so many people seem to have a thing against 3DFX when they're the ones that made 3d acceleration popular. Sure, there were accelerator cards that came before it, but the implimentation of D3D and the speed of those cards made them more like a 3d DEcelerator cards. What REALLY gets me mad though is when people with Creative soundcards start complaining about Glide. How hypocritical can you get: Creative killed Aureals VASTLY superior sound API leaving crappy EAX as the only choice, and yet everyone still buys their cards because they're the best availible. Of course they're the best availible, they killed all the competition and created a monopoly! And if anyone here complains about an old game only supporting A3d sound acceleration and that it should support EAX because it's standard, I'll flame you into submission :D

Oh, and Voodoo 5's AA is still really amazing. It's overall quality is only a little bit worse then ATI's current method (there are some things the V5 does better with, other things it does worse with), but what really annoyed me is the way back then reviewers only made minor mention of the AA and simply considered it "slightly better" the the AA in Geforce 2 cards. Yet nowadays if the same AA method would be reviewed, it would be getting tons of praise (as ATI is for their implimentation of AA). If someone did a compairision review between the 5950 and the 9800 but only said "ATI's AA and Aniso supposedly looks a bit better, but neither of those features aren't a big deal anyway so it won't factor into our review", wouldn't YOU get annoyed?

Anyway, that's the end of MY rant, bring on the flames :)

[ChrisRay]

Anyway, it just irks me that so many people seem to have a thing against 3DFX when they're the ones that made 3d acceleration popular. Sure, there were accelerator cards that came before it, but the implimentation of D3D and the speed of those cards made them more like a 3d DEcelerator cards. What REALLY gets me mad though is when people with Creative soundcards start complaining about Glide. How hypocritical can you get: Creative killed Aureals VASTLY superior sound API leaving crappy EAX as the only choice, and yet everyone still buys their cards because they're the best availible. Of course they're the best availible, they killed all the competition and created a monopoly! And if anyone here complains about an old game only supporting A3d sound acceleration and that it should support EAX because it's standard, I'll flame you into submission


This wouldnt have been an issue had Creative supported the Sound API. But they didnt. And No, I dont pay creative any respect at all. As I consider there monopoly to be a huge problem. But the difference between Creative Labs and 3dfx, Is Companies are allowed to support EAX in a limited way.

Hell my Nvidia Soundstorm and Santa Cruz Support EAX 1.0/2.0.


Early D3D and OGL games were disasters. Look at games like Carmageddon 2 or Trespasser, or Resident Evil 2, or Final Fantasy 7, or even Diablo 2. Back then there was no "standard" for anything, so instead of making a generic D3D driver they simply customised the functions for all the major chipsets at the time (which is why many D3D games back then only supported TNT/PowerVR/Voodoo cards and won't work with newer ones). And even when they did have a generic D3D driver that worked with all cards, it was still missing effects that were present in the Glide modes (such as fog in Carmageddon 2). In the case of Diablo 2, they were origionally going to make it Glide-only, but when Nvidia cards became popular, they had to go through a bunch of extra trouble to get a D3D mode in the game. But even after they spent a much larger amount of time on the D3D version of it then they did on the Glide version, they still couldn't achive the same effects that were in Glide like colored lighting until many patches later. The only early game with decent non-glide accelerator support was Quake (which interestingly was one of the first, as well).


Well. Wasnt Diablo 2 the last Glide came produced? When I think back , Diablo 2 didnt support much 3d acceleration anyway, So It couldnt have been a huge problem for Blizzard.

I dont see why DirectX 6.0 was so hard for people to adopt. By its existence there were still numerous glide games being produced (For Example. Everquest before it moved onto the DirectX 8.0 API)


I think most people are missing the point of Glide. Have you ever noticed that almost every game that supports Glide also supports software rendering? Or that many software rendering games had Glide added in a patch? The entire PURPOSE of Glide was to be able to easilly turn a software rendering game into a 3d accelerated game, and it was VERY simple to make a game that supported software mode into a Glide game. If Glide hadn't been around back then, the almost NO game would've supported 3d acceleration, and all the games that you're currently complaining about needing to use a Glide wrapper with wouldn't even have any 3d acceleration. Ironic if you think about it...you talk about how you hate 3dfx and that you hate having to find a glide wrapper to play a game with 3d acceleration, but without 3dfx the games probably wouldn't even be accelerated in the first place. And look at games like Unreal: they didn't even think of 3d acceleration back then, but then all the sudden 3d cards became really popular, so they quickly added a Glide mode which was both easy and VERY fast, but it took them YEARS to get a decent OGL/D3D driver for it, and even today many Unreal 1-based games have problems with non-Glide acceleration. UT2003 was the first release of the engine that really had a decent D3D renderer. Glide eased the market into 3d accleration.

It was good during the DirectX 5.0 era when it was introduced, But 3dfx went out of its way to ensure Glide was used well into the DirectX 6.0 era (Far past its usefulness). I mean why not? Glide looks good when only your 3d card supports it.

As a Matter of fact, 3dfx pushed this very fact to sell there cards, And guess who bought into it? Alot of us indeed. Who wanted to buy an Nvidia/ATI card when 3dfx had most of the API market @ the Voodoo3 era?

[ChrisW]

Originally posted by Edge
Anyway, it just irks me that so many people seem to have a thing against 3DFX when they're the ones that made 3d acceleration popular. Sure, there were accelerator cards that came before it, but the implimentation of D3D and the speed of those cards made them more like a 3d DEcelerator cards. What REALLY gets me mad though is when people with Creative soundcards start complaining about Glide. How hypocritical can you get: Creative killed Aureals VASTLY superior sound API leaving crappy EAX as the only choice, and yet everyone still buys their cards because they're the best availible. Of course they're the best availible, they killed all the competition and created a monopoly! And if anyone here complains about an old game only supporting A3d sound acceleration and that it should support EAX because it's standard, I'll flame you into submission :D
I agree. Aureal kept Creative on their toes and at the time, both companies were constantly innovating and trying to out-do each other. After Creative destroyed Aureal, they have done exactly jack squat to innovate things. They trashed A3D and the entire technology. Creative has done nothing but release the exact same card over and over since then with nothing more than some small software differences.

The Soundblaster Live was supposed to be a fully reprogrammable chip and they promised to release updates to it. After destroying Aureal, they ignored their promises.

[Edge]

And No, I dont pay creative any respect at all. As I consider there monopoly to be a huge problem.

Oh good, I'm glad we're both on the level there:)

Well. Wasnt Diablo 2 the last Glide came produced? When I think back , Diablo 2 didnt support much 3d acceleration anyway, So It couldnt have been a huge problem for Blizzard.

Yeah, it was one of the last, though I think Delta Force 3 or whatever it was called was the last game that supported glide, a year after D2 was released. And remember, Diablo 2 was origionally going to come out in 1998, and trying to put that much effort into adding a 3d mode to a predominantly software rendered game would've been wasteful. They mainly were adding the Glide mode to speed up the rendering of some effects, and for the Perspective view. The only reason they added it at all was because it was fairly simple to add and the benefits were worth it. But as the game got more and more delayed, they realised that many Nvidia card owners would be unhappy if they saw 3dfx card users get extra effects and speed, so they tried to tack on a D3D mode but it became a big hassle for them, so they had to cut many effects to ship the game on time. In the end it was actually faster to run the game in Software mode on many video cards, simply because D3D was much less efficient at rendering the screen then it was in pure Software mode.

I dont see why DirectX 6.0 was so hard for people to adopt. By its existence there were still numerous glide games being produced (For Example. Everquest before it moved onto the DirectX 8.0 API)

As I mentioned, it was very hard to add a D3D renderer to a software-based game. Many effects had to be re-written, and some things simply didn't work the same. When the team was making Trespasser, they said they didn't expect 3d accleration to become as popular as it did, and they had a hell of a time adding a D3D mode into the game. In fact for Trespasser in "D3D" mode many effects are still rendered in software because many of the effects they used couldn't be replicated using D3D (for example the dinosaurs are ALWAYS rendered in software because it used bumpmapping which was unavailible on 3d cards back then). OpenGL was a little easier to convert a software game to, but OpenGL rendering was far less commonplace in cards back then so few games supported it (especially a problem with intigrated graphics).

It was good during the DirectX 5.0 era when it was introduced, But 3dfx went out of its way to ensure Glide was used well into the DirectX 6.0 era (Far past its usefulness). I mean why not? Glide looks good when only your 3d card supports it.

Well, even in the DX6 era, there was on real advantage to using D3D over Glide, except for a few effects that were mainly video hardware dependant (for example Bump-mapping on Geforce cards). It wasn't until the Radeon/GF2 period that the hardware availible was wide-stream enough to actually use it. In fact, weren't the first bump-mapped games availible over a year after the GF1 was released? Hardware T&L was a bit more commonplace, but it didn't offer that big of a performence boost usually (though for slower CPUs it did make a noticable difference). And even then, you still had the problem of many games being designed around software and having 3d acceleration added on later, which was a major pain without Glide.

As a Matter of fact, 3dfx pushed this very fact to sell there cards, And guess who bought into it? Alot of us indeed. Who wanted to buy an Nvidia/ATI card when 3dfx had most of the API market @ the Voodoo3 era?

That I do agree with, the main reason I picked a Voodoo 3 over a TNT2 back then was because most of the games I had were Glide-only. However it wasn't such a bad thing, after the Voodoo 5 3dfx was going to make an all-new chipset anyway, and when they did that they'd have probably been a bit less critical of Glide (since they'd probably keep glide compatability in but be able to compete speed-wise with the Geforce and Radeon series). But I honestly don't think D3D was ready for widespread implimentation until DirectX7, since that's when developers were able to really use the full features of most video cards, and could develop their games fully for D3D without worrying as much about performance issues. But I honestly wouldn't have minded it if Glide survived until 2001. I didn't get a card that was decently faster then my Voodoo 3 until then anyway, and if 3dfx was still alive I probably would've gotten their new cards anyway, since I was one of the few back then that really like Anti-aliasing. And there really weren't any games that were developed as Glide-only after 1998, almost all that supported Glide also supported Software rendering and D3D. Even when 3DFX was pushing Glide, D3D was still an option in almost all the newer games (even if it's implimentation was lackluster). In fact, were there ever an Glide-ONLY games (as in no software renderer)? It's odd that around 1998 was when we were first seeing "3d accelerator required" games, yet they all seemed to require OpenGL or D3D rather then Glide.

[ChrisRay]

Well, even in the DX6 era, there was on real advantage to using D3D over Glide, except for a few effects that were mainly video hardware dependant (for example Bump-mapping on Geforce cards). It wasn't until the Radeon/GF2 period that the hardware availible was wide-stream enough to actually use it. In fact, weren't the first bump-mapped games availible over a year after the GF1 was released? Hardware T&L was a bit more commonplace, but it didn't offer that big of a performence boost usually (though for slower CPUs it did make a noticable difference). And even then, you still had the problem of many games being designed around software and having 3d acceleration added on later, which was a major pain without Glide.

Bump Mapping or Enviromental Bump Mapping? IIRC the Geforce 3 was the first Nvidia GPU to support EBM.



Yeah, it was one of the last, though I think Delta Force 3 or whatever it was called was the last game that supported glide, a year after D2 was released. And remember, Diablo 2 was origionally going to come out in 1998, and trying to put that much effort into adding a 3d mode to a predominantly software rendered game would've been wasteful. They mainly were adding the Glide mode to speed up the rendering of some effects, and for the Perspective view. The only reason they added it at all was because it was fairly simple to add and the benefits were worth it. But as the game got more and more delayed, they realised that many Nvidia card owners would be unhappy if they saw 3dfx card users get extra effects and speed, so they tried to tack on a D3D mode but it became a big hassle for them, so they had to cut many effects to ship the game on time. In the end it was actually faster to run the game in Software mode on many video cards, simply because D3D was much less efficient at rendering the screen then it was in pure Software mode.


Well the big difference between Software and Glide Mode back then was pretty much The Use of Billinear Filtering. I mean Billinear filtering was a huge step above software rendering, Which was impractical for CPU at the time because it created a ton of overhead (IE unusable)

Anywho. I think the 3d acceleration feature of Diablo 2 to be kinda cute. As it's not overly useful :)


That I do agree with, the main reason I picked a Voodoo 3 over a TNT2 back then was because most of the games I had were Glide-only. However it wasn't such a bad thing, after the Voodoo 5 3dfx was going to make an all-new chipset anyway, and when they did that they'd have probably been a bit less critical of Glide (since they'd probably keep glide compatability in but be able to compete speed-wise with the Geforce and Radeon series). But I honestly don't think D3D was ready for widespread implimentation until DirectX7, since that's when developers were able to really use the full features of most video cards, and could develop their games fully for D3D without worrying as much about performance issues. But I honestly wouldn't have minded it if Glide survived until 2001. I didn't get a card that was decently faster then my Voodoo 3 until then anyway, and if 3dfx was still alive I probably would've gotten their new cards anyway, since I was one of the few back then that really like Anti-aliasing. And there really weren't any games that were developed as Glide-only after 1998, almost all that supported Glide also supported Software rendering and D3D. Even when 3DFX was pushing Glide, D3D was still an option in almost all the newer games (even if it's implimentation was lackluster). In fact, were there ever an Glide-ONLY games (as in no software renderer)? It's odd that around 1998 was when we were first seeing "3d accelerator required" games, yet they all seemed to require OpenGL or D3D rather then Glide.

Here's my question for you, What if nvidia "had" Supported glide and pushed it onto the industry. Now. Nvidia owners would have glide support. But IMO it would have just simply killed the evolution of the PC industry. It's been suggested that Nvidia shoulda supported Glide. Imagine the world today. With a Glidex6x supporting Nvidia Propietary 2.0 shaders. heh :|

Anywho.

It's odd that around 1998 was when we were first seeing "3d accelerator required" games, yet they all seemed to require OpenGL or D3D rather then Glide.

Heh thats on my Everquest box. Which I played in Glide mode. It wasnt Until Everquest moved onto the DirectX API Did I finally move away from 3dfx,

With credit given to developers. By that time. Most computers came standard with some sort of 3d acceleration.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Sledge
My Riva128 supported OpenGL. I'm fairly sure the Rage3D chip also supported OpenGL because I used CAD/solid modeling software on a computer with an ATI card.

The Riva128 did not ship with an OGL ICD. At least reviewer samples did not. I'm pretty sure the first retail Riva128 cards didn't come with OGL ICDs either.

Which is not the point, at the time other IHVs did not have OGL ICDs, let alone good ones. ATI's OGL drivers sucked. Matrox did not have an OGL ICD either. Etc, etc. Even 3dfx did not have an OGL ICD for the longest time. All they had was a MCD.

[saturnotaku]

The main reason I stuck it out with 3dfx was because their drivers were far more solid than NVIDIA's at the time. The first sets of drivers for the TNT/TNT2 were awful. That and most of the games I played were Glide (Carmageddon 2, NFS, etc).

But 3dfx was its own worst enemy. They were the ones primarily responsible for doing themselves in. Anyone who blames NVIDIA for the fall of 3dfx ain't right in the head.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by saturnotaku
But 3dfx was its own worst enemy. They were the ones primarily responsible for doing themselves in. Anyone who blames NVIDIA for the fall of 3dfx ain't right in the head.

On that note, are there any figures for how many resources 3dfx used up in their legal battles against NVIDIA?

Which IMO is 3dfx's own fault...they sued NVIDIA and if memory serves correctly NVIDIA just sued them back :p