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3dFX Glide support for non-3dFX cards


Joel Schultz
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In a way, this was inspired by some comments made in this thread.

With the demise of 3dFX, Glide support in games has gone the way of the dodo.

(Aside: Menchise, you don't have to worry about what happens if nVidia goes down because their interface is all through OpenGL and DirectX, which are standards controlled by other parties, unlike Glide which was proprietary to 3dFX. Worry instead about someone like Microsoft, who controls DirectX lock, stock and barrel, going under).

Now, I've also seen claims in various places that there are Glide "wrappers". Basically, all Glide is is a DLL that takes 3D graphics calls and shoots them to the hardware in a form the hardware understands. The wrappers are based on the idea that if you create a DLL that supports ALL the same function calls exactly, it looks like Glide to the game but it is doing something else entirely. Something useful...like translating Glide into equivalent DirectX or OpenGL calls. Of course this is slower than the direct Glide->3dFX hardware route since there's translation involved, but hey, we're running processors far and away faster than when Glide originally came out, not to mention modern graphics card speeds.

The most "famous" Glide wrapping attempt I know of was being done by Creative Labs, to enable drivers for their graphics cards (and their cards ONLY) to support Glide. I remember following it but lost interest and don't know how that ended up.

What I'm curious about is if anyone has tried any of these "underground" Glide wrappers, and with what success? I understand there's some considerable variation in the quality of the rendered graphics (no doubt due to quality of the translation layer). Has anyone tried them? Which are recommended?

And of course the ultimate question: has anyone gotten one to work with BC3K?

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I tried some of the glide wrappers and I could not get them too work with BC3k. And to make matters worse, my voodoo2 card isn't overly compatable with my GF3 so I have to run BC3k in software mode.

[ 08-13-2001: Message edited by: LordDavid ]

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quote:

Aside: Menchise, you don't have to worry about what happens if nVidia goes down

because their interface is all through OpenGL and DirectX, which are standards controlled by other parties, unlike Glide which was proprietary to 3dFX. Worry instead about someone like Microsoft, who controls DirectX lock, stock and barrel, going under

That's a relief.

I'm still annoyed by the way they've been marketed though (can't make everyone happy ).

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