anyone know where i can get my hands on open source Glide for windows? yes i know it only works for 3dfx cards but i would like to take a look at the API. consider the GeForce 3 still uses mostly 3dfx core architecture(no i am not kidding) Glide apps would probably still run on that card down to any previous NVIDIA chip. anyway ive got an idea , if anyone is interested in possibly starting something let me know.
You’re confused. GLIDE is an API. Without a driver implementation which converts the API calls to a hardware you get nothing to draw ever, and there is none for GeForce. Everything else you find implemented might be a layer on top of OpenGL or Direct3D.
consider the GeForce 3 still uses mostly 3dfx core architecture(no i am not kidding)
I’m sure you’re not kidding. You’re wrong, but I think you believe the words you are saying.
The GeForce chips are made by nVidia, which has never supported Glide, an API defined by 3Dfx. Besides, Glide is horribly outdated, so you shouldn’t want to use it.
GeForce FX is the first nVidia product to contain 3Dfx technology.
Anyway Glide is an API, so it needs proper drivers to be supported, but it’s so outdated noone care supporting it.
speaking as a guy, who contributed to some parts of the glide-sourcecode(MAC), i have some comments. 
Glide was more a triangle-drawing-api than a 3D-api. It was purely desingned to setup and draw textured/blended triangles. Rotation/3d-2d-Projection/clipping-acutally any 3d-operation had to be done on the cpu.
Glide was also not only an API. it was also a low-level hardwaredriver for every 3dfx-card available. remember, glide was designed to run under DOS - an OS without any driver achitecture for 3d-graphics.
So the most of the glide-sources is special driver-code dedicated to every 3dfx-hw.
imagine lots of #ifdef commands in the source (sometimes more of them as the actual code). And the code is mostly some “magic” register coding using some strange named constants or direct HEX values written into fixed-address registers.
you can’t understand anything in this sources without sufficent knowledge of the voodoo-chipset and it’s registers. (believe me)
What ever you plan to do. It will not work this way.
If you still want to use glide to access new 3d-hardware (what is really pointless, but anyway) you should seach for the glide-directX wrapper, which was written to bring glide support for non-3dfx-users.
(but i don’t know where) or - in my opinion the easiest way - write your own wrapper. If you understand hown the glide-api works, it should be very easy. because glide is really a very very simple api.
[This message has been edited by AdrianD (edited 12-16-2003).]
About the hardest part of making a Glide 3 wrapper is getting the name mangling right in the Glide 3 dll you make.
Originally posted by DFrey:
About the hardest part of making a Glide 3 wrapper is getting the name mangling right in the Glide 3 dll you make.
You have no idea of what you’re talking about.
if NVIDIA is just now getting around to using the 3dfx technology, think about where 3dfx was in 1999 and where they wanted to go… about 3 - 4 years ahead of its time. the CineFX that is part of the new chip is part of the cinematic technology that was to be was the Rampage project but obviously never saw the light of day. The Voodoo5 line including the Voodoo5 6000 line gives off excellent framerates on benchmark tests that fall just shy of the GeForce Ti line and in some cases, well most cases , at higher resolutions and with a faster processor scream by the Radeon 7500 and the GeForce Ti series FPS. pretty impressive. Glide may not be much but 3dfx was the founder of 3d graphics as we know it.
i thought silicon graphics was
GeForce FX is the first nVidia product to contain 3Dfx technology.
What 3Dfx technology, in particular, does it contain? Or is this just speculation?
This is a wind up.
I’ve come away from reading it having learned one thing only - that AdrianD used to work for 3dfx. All respect to him for that.
How old are you cutting_crew?
one of the features GeForce FX line includes is the CineFX, cinematic quality gaming and precise FSAA, something that 3dfx was working on and in fact exists on the Voodoo 4’s and Voodoo 5’s. These 2 features were scheduled for the Rampage project – the next stage after Voodoo5 6000(which includes up to 8x FSAA @ 1024x768. and a very good framerate i might add). this is not speculation. the description of the GeForceFX line is on the NVIDIA site and they talk about a lot of features that include the 3dfx features that as we see were 2 - 3 years ahead of its time.
i can give you the links written in August of this year that examines the benchmarks of the voodoo line up to and including the Voodoo5 6000 against the likes of the Geforce2 , GeforceMX and some Radeons. let me know if you would like to see the links… if you are looking for a good read, this would be perfect for you. However to quickly note the Voodoo5 6000 had a robust 128 MB on it(costing $600 at the time) and is twice as big as the now GeForceFX and ATI Radeon cards.
[This message has been edited by cutting_crew (edited 12-17-2003).]
Originally posted by cutting_crew:
if NVIDIA is just now getting around to using the 3dfx technology, think about where 3dfx was in 1999 and where they wanted to
go… about 3 - 4 years ahead of its time.
at this time 3dfx was losing against nvidia. because 3dfx did only improve the fillrate of their hardware without any real technical improvement to the original voodoo1 design.
(same featureset, faster, but still the same. the only new stuff was texture compression & FSAA)
and remember, it was about the same time, as nivida released the geforce256. the first consumer-accelerator that was capable of hardware-transform&lighting, register combiners, new blending modes, dotproduct lighting and texture compression.
so i don’t know where 3dfx was supposed to go, but i know for sure it was allready far behind the level where nvidia allready was.
[…]
Glide may not be much but 3dfx was the founder of 3d graphics as we know it.
i disagree.
- at the time, glide was designed, openGL was allready implemented and in use (SGI)
- 3dfx was founded by some guys who worked for SGI in the hardware-development deparment. btw. nvidia was also founded about the same time by some other guys from SGI!
so, if some company or API really deserves the title “founder of 3d graphics as we know”, than it is SGI and OpenGL.
but actually, i would give this credits to a bunch of guys like phong, gouraud, blinn, perlin, bresenham, torrance, cook, heckbert, crow, everitt, kilgard, hope, lesseter, heidrich, Seidel, Catmull, sutherland, carmack…(i do not have enough time to finish this list).
no to a single company or API.
[This message has been edited by AdrianD (edited 12-17-2003).]
well i guess i was trying to figure out where the cards would have gone to. look at what people (including myself) are playing on their voodoo2 SLI’s , voodoo3’s, 4’s and 5’s, most new games on all win OS’s and most without problems. sure you wont get 60 FPS but its playable. and this is just from 3rd party people that make drivers, imagine if there was still a 3dfx crew to continue to make 3dfx cards and supply drivers with them? it stands logical 3dfx would be competitive with Ndivia and ATI, especially if project RAMPAGE would have gone through.
–a quick question or two…i wonder why 3dfx had trouble getting parts for their cards? this seems to be the partly why the newer voodoos didnt ship on time. i just feel that if they would have been on time, also the voodoo5 6000, things would have been different…besides 3dfx was in the middle of a lawsuit with NVIDIA and was winning b4 they ran out of money. so sad.
Originally posted by cutting_crew:
[b]one of the features GeForce FX line includes is the CineFX, cinematic quality gaming and precise FSAA, something that 3dfx was working on and in fact exists on the Voodoo 4’s and Voodoo 5’s.[b]
Is there anything except marketing babble behind the terms “cinematic” and “precise”?
The correct terms for an acceptable discussion here would be programmable shaders and multisampling …
These 2 features were scheduled for the Rampage project – the next stage after Voodoo5 6000(which includes up to 8x FSAA @ 1024x768. and a very good framerate i might add). this is not speculation.
You mean the framerate sucks, otherwise yeah, why not.
the description of the GeForceFX line is on the NVIDIA site and they talk about a lot of features that include the 3dfx features that as we see were 2 - 3 years ahead of its time.
So by that same logic ATI has 3dfx technology incorporated into their designs, too. Add 3DLabs and Matrox, heck, add S3 Graphics and XGI. They all ship (or plan to ship soonish) chips with both AA of some sort and programmable shading hardware.
<…>
However to quickly note the Voodoo5 6000 had a robust 128 MB on it(costing $600 at the time) and is twice as big as the now GeForceFX and ATI Radeon cards.
And it behaved like anywhere between 32 and 64 MB, more like 32 MB, because the textures had to be duplicated for each chip.
well i guess i was trying to figure out where the cards would have gone to. look at what people (including myself) are playing on their voodoo2 SLI’s , voodoo3’s, 4’s and 5’s, most new games on all win OS’s and most without problems. sure you wont get 60 FPS but its playable.
You meant to write “sure it performs like crap but I’m amazed that it works at all”.
and this is just from 3rd party people that make drivers, imagine if there was still a 3dfx crew to continue to make 3dfx cards and supply drivers with them? it stands logical 3dfx would be competitive with Ndivia and ATI, especially if project RAMPAGE would have gone through.
I would rock, had I managed to ship an R300 last spring in quantity. I didn’t. Duh.
Let the dead rest, dude.
I actually used the Voodo 4000-5000 on a test system way back. Anyways, they were far behind the curve when they were introduced and I am astonished people still bring them up as some master engineering.
Voodoo is the same company
which only supported 16 bit color almost into 2000. By comparisons sake both ATI and Nvidia were shipping for a good bit of time full 32 bit color graphics cards. Voodoo cards used sdram up until and including 6000. Not only did they suck back then, but now are useless if you run any game which makes decent use of bandwith.
Add to that they failed to make their cards work with Pentium 4 systems and you have a company which was in ruins financially and technologically for a good bit of time.
Get an ATI or Nvidia card for 30 bucks or shut up. Voodoo sucked and is dead! Let them rest in piece.
Rampage, although impressive, was nothing compared to Bitboys Oy’s Glaze3D chip. As someone wrote: “It will be more powerful than Jesus Christ”, and it would use “technology we’ve recovered from UFO crash site nearby”.
i was just commenting that after seeing benchmark results on failry new games the Voodoo5 series without updated drivers ran pretty well and they were sleak with the new updated drivers…that at least gives us the potential that the card had/has. When you are playing GTA Vice City, Warcraft 3, Quake 3 , UT 2003 etc etc on everything but the Voodoo 1, to say that it is playable at all was a bit a shock to me and impressive.
but make no mistake… i have a GeForceFX 5900 w/256 DDR RAM also on my new machine and its a powerful piece of architecture, incorporting finally a good bit of the 3dfx features on the drawing board that i described above nearly 3 years ago and of course new features from NVIDIA. i am proud and happy to have this card 
i wasnt trying to flame newer cards i was simply wanted to talk about the possibilities with 3dfx. anyway flame on if you must and i hope you wont hold this thread against me in the future if i have a question regarding openGL. thanks for your time
[This message has been edited by cutting_crew (edited 12-17-2003).]
Originally posted by knackered:
[…] AdrianD used to work for 3dfx.
just to set things right:
this is not true (3dfx used to cooperate with other companies.) read my last post form this thread, if you want to know what i exactly did: http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/ubb/Forum3/HTML/011121.html
oh ok well that sets it straight…i still love 3dfx cards, voodoo and GLIDE i will admit…Still to this day there is not a video card available on the market that can match 3dfx’s style of rotated-grid super-sampled FSAA. The Voodoo5 6000 was the most powerful card in 3dfx’s arsenal, and it could not only boast 2x and 4x sampled AA, but was the ONLY card that could do 8x.
i got a score of 3435 for my 3D Mark(of course for 3dfx cards this isnt a reliable benchmark) from my Voodoo5. i also have updated patches for it that enhance playability for games like Blood Rayne which use the T&L shaders and pixel shader hardware features. the company might be dead but the hardware is not as drivers continue to be built. i just got an offer to work on updated drivers for these cards and i accepted as i will also be coding in openGL doing my regular thing, at work and in working on my game. PEACE
P4 2.4 Ghz
WINXP w/Direct X 9.0
Voodoo5 5500 w/AGP166 @ 193Mhz
P4 Alienware 3.0 Ghz
WINXP w/DirectX 9.0
geForce FX 5900 256 MB DDR RAM
[This message has been edited by cutting_crew (edited 12-17-2003).]