3dfx vs Direct3D vs OpenGL
Which one is better? Are early 3dfx games better than D3D? At what point in time has D3D superseded it? When given the choice, which one you choose?
>le gen z wikipedia kid
>>3193808
>Comparing a brand with an API
>>3193808
>Are early 3dfx games better than D3D?
uW0Tm8
Software rendering all the way.
I only have onboard graphics.
Hijacking this thread by asking, what was your first 3D accelerator?
Pic related was my first, got it for Christmas in '98 and was stoked I could finally play Quake II without it looking like ass. Shit was so cash, even if I later found out that we got Jewed on all the games that were supposed to be included except for Incoming.
>>3193861
Riva TNT.
>mfw got NFSU2 to run on that shit /notretro
>>3193861
fuck yeah, my nug
got one of those for my birthday that year, but it was Diamond Multimedia branded
next year I traded it in for the 12MB version, and eventually saved money for a 2nd to do SLI
i pity the fools that missed out on glide/GL everything
>>3193808
D3D sucked as for a long time until around the time Nvidia came out with the the TNT2.
32bit color is what killed Glide.
>>3193861
Geforce 2 mx and it was a shitty card . Before that i had a s3 trio64
>>3193861
It was amazing how I could play decent looking games on a shitty Pentium with this one.
I even managed to get q3a running, somewhat, after some extreme cfg tweaking.
>>3193884
What do you mean by this? The Voodoo 5 supported 32bit color and its image quality was even better than the one of the GeForce 3 (but with the performance of a GeForce 256 DDR, that's what killed it).
>>3193861
First was the OG All-in-wonder followed shortly by a PowerVR card of some sort. Then I got a VooDoo2. I actually had all 3 in my system until I upgraded to a voodoo5 5500.
>>3193957
>The Voodoo 5...
Company was already dead by then, man.
>>3194184
Not really.
They were hoping people would want better graphics instead of faster. They were wrong though and couldnt recoup the money they spent on the voodoo5.
>>3193808
3DFX Glide was a subset of OpenGL commands. Essentially they would produce the same results; but early OpenGL games didn't always use it to their full potential. Glide was considered more optimized and often the texture filtering and gamma levels gave it a nicer/less harsh look. Gamma correction was a big issue in early games.
3DFX was quite a bit more advanced for its time, up until about the Voodoo 3 era when it was generally surpassed (32-bit color & large textures not withstanding!)
Asking if D3D or any API is superior/lesser is not really the right question because each version of the API exposed different hardware capabilities and the API's changed drastically over time. So in general one could come up with an abstraction like this:
Pre-DX7 < Glide 2.x/3.x < D3D 8
OpenGL 1/2 == Glide < D3D 8 < OpenGL 3 < D3D 9.
>>3194206
the big problem is that better graphics don't show up in benchmarks, and gaming journalism back then was as retarded as it is today. They have no clue beyond their number wank.
Is it underage if my first was a Geforce 2? I remember Viper Racing offered 1024x768 and my friend and his dad swore there was no such thing beyond 800x600 because they had a Voodoo.
>>3194359
later voodoos went to 1024x768 and I think higher as well. The pass-through cable was their weakest point. Outside of 3D acceleration resolutions well beyond 1600x1200 were common place
>>3194291
True.
>>3193870
Riva TNT for me as well.
>>3193861
Diamond Monster 3D, Voodoo 1. Accept no substitutes
>>3194369
The Voodoo 5 could run Quake 3 in 1600x1200 but it was too fucking slow (20fps without AA), the playable resolution was 1024x768
>>3194221
Voodoo cards had unmatched depth of field effects.
I remember how conflicted I was when I finally upgraded to a Geforce. While it was faster and supported 32bit color, it provided much worse depth perception in Tribes.
>>3194221
Isn't it more of an issue with raw hardware performance rather than API. AFAIR, Nvidia cards eventually beat the voodoo card in polygon processing power and memory, at a lower price too.
>>3195208
Except OP was asking about the API?
i remember being so amazed by playing shogo on my friend's shitty compaq with an onboard rage128 card with 4mb ram. now, i dont think i can be impressed unless a game is basically indistinguishable from real life
>>3193821
Is that Sam?
>>3193808
3DFX Glide™ is the best. I swear it looked even better than OpenGL. Direct3D on the other hand always looked like shit and games that used it would always be crashy shit.
>>3195526
OpenGL mostly worked on 3dfx cards by converting it to Glide.
What is a graphics API? It's basically a codified set of commands to interface with a graphic card. For a graphic card to be compatible with an API it must predictably give the results set by the standard set by the API. One of the reasons N64 (HLE) emulation is so difficult is because the GPU has a large feature-set doesn't behave in the ways expected by OpenGL or DirectX (the PS1 which has a much smaller feature-set is easier to get under control).
The earlier versions of DirectX and OpenGL were very conservative in what they expected graphic cards to be capable of. This is because when they were designed (mid to late 90s) it was after a tumultuous time in GPU technology where there were dozens of completely different designs. Hence many GPUs had features that could not be 'activated' by DirectX or OpenGL.
Glide was specifically designed to interface with the full 3dfx Voodoo hardware. There are a few features on the Voodoo that are not in the DirectX or OpenGL standards - like color combiner units. Without Glide these features can't be turned on in games on Voodoo.
Eventually DirectX and OpenGL got more elaborate but they still never supported the kind of color combiners that the Voodoo used. The Gamecube's pixel shader technology was based on a color combiner technology called TEV - the reason the original PC version of RE4 had completely fucked up lighting is because there was no equivalent on PC hardware to replicate it (and Capcom were too lazy to program a different lighting system).
>>3193880
you got a second card and did WHAT
>>3195558
>Glide was specifically designed to interface with the full 3dfx Voodoo hardware
Glide was made by 3dfx. You strongly implied it already, just to clarify. It's only natural that your homemade API supports all the features of your own hardware. Was the only hardware-vendor-specific API that actually was widely used/successful, wasn't it? D3D is made by a software giant and OpenGL by everyone. And I think most of the other custom APIs saw a handful of usages at best.
>>3195560
SLI, short for Scan-Line-Interleave. It was 3dfx' approach to improve 3D graphics if you're made of money. You'd put two 3D accelerator cards in your machine and connect them with an SLI cable. Now the two cards would work together to produce the image. Each card would render half the screen. One the odd lines, one the even lines. Then their output would get combined to produce one total picture. Do not confuse this with interlacing, these are not alternative fields but full frames being rendered by two cards at once.
When nvidia bought 3dfx they also got the rights to SLI. They retconned the meaning to be Scalable Link Interface. nvidia's SLI does not render half the frame per card any longer, but instead uses SLI to share the work load in any way it sees fit, and across more than two cards.
>>3195574
And for Voodoo 2 SLI, it not only increased performance but also increased the maximum resolution to 1024x768.
>>3195568
>Was the only hardware-vendor-specific API that actually was widely used/successful, wasn't it?
Yes it certainly was. There were even APIs for things like S3 Virge. But not a great deal of use. Here's a complete list of games that used APIs that were not DX/GL/Glide.
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=33483
> D3D is made by a software giant and OpenGL by everyone
OpenGL started out as SGI's API Iris GL but with all of the propriety stuff cut out. Which was basically everything. If that hadn't happened N64 emulation at the HLE level would quite possibly be a lot easier.
>>3195583
>S3 Virge
known for being the world's first graphics deccelerator
>>3195587
To be fair only a handful of other weird cards like the Rendition Verite were better.
>>3195413
That's pretty sad, because even playing games like Grand Meme Auto V I still get more amazed by a 90's because of their unique design and the effort they used to put in details, now we are all blinded by pretty boring generic textures.
