3dfx Glide Coming to Linux with Support for Modern GPUs

erek

erek

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https://www.tomshardware.com/news/3dfx-glide-linux-gaming

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wonder how much work it would take to get running on Windows or if you could just emulate a Voodoo5 at this point in software
 
Elios said:
wonder how much work it would take to get running on Windows or if you could just emulate a Voodoo5 at this point in software
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There are (or were) windows wrappers for Glide... don't know if they're maintained anymore, or if they even work now - but they did exist for a while.
 
lopoetve said:
There are (or were) windows wrappers for Glide... don't know if they're maintained anymore, or if they even work now - but they did exist for a while.
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nGlide is still actively maintained. Works well in most instances.

What we really need is something to emulate Rendition graphics. I'm frankly surprised nothing for it has been developed yet. Is it that difficult to figure out?
 
This seems absolutely pointless. I don't remember any 3D game back in the day requiring Glide support to run. People who ran early VooDoo cards probably never ran these titles on anything else that could do so at a decent frame rate. Glide tended to impact image quality negatively. If I could have gotten the same or nearly the same frame rates on my FireGL 1000 Pro, I would have run that instead. It could do 30FPS where the Glide/VooDoo combo would do 60+, but the image quality favored the FireGL massively.

Modern cards are powerful enough to brute force these games so long as Glide isn't required. If you want that vasoline smearing look on your textures than I guess Glide is for you, but I don't know why anyone would want this.
 
There was a small space where glide only titles lived in, generally during the era of the Voodoo1 when not only was 3D accelerated gaming in its infancy, but the developers themselves didn't know where things were going. Most of these early titles (which you could count on both hands) were either glorified tech demos and probably never really made it as a commercial success, so they never got the proper 3D treatment. And most likely these obscure titles were never later ported to direct3d/opengl or even open sourced for the community to do it for them. I've never even heard of Pandemonium, and I lived through that era, so there you go.

I don't recall any of them being 3D only, given no developer was crazy enough to not offer a software renderer option. So it's not like it was glide or bust back then. Until the Voodoo1 came along, all 3D graphics accelerators were literally decelerators - meaning, the reference software renderer ran better. So while glide was considered a stigma of sorts, it was the glide-using-hardware that really helped developers embrace the whole 3D accelerated concept.

So essentially what happened is that certain early titles got the 3dfx treatment, but never got the direct3d or opengl treatment or did much later on. Descent 2 for the longest time could only be played 3D accelerated using glide, in DOS no less. Oh yeah, did you know that back in 1997 developers could write a 3D accelerated title in DOS? Even in a post-3dfx era, glide wrappers only worked with the win32 apps. So it was almost a decade later before Descent 2 got a proper non-glide port, but only because it was open sourced and had an active community.

In fact, I bought Mechwarrior 2 twice. The first time for the glide version (which was DOS based). The second time for the more versatile Direct3D version. Yeah, the DOS version wasn't upgradable. I paid the early 3D adopter tax so you didn't have to.

So while titles like Unreal Tournament and Quake got the royal 3D treatment (perhaps not all at once) and went on to become huge commerical successes, some lesser titles faded into obscurity. So maybe this exists for them?

That said, I would state that a glide wrapper like this one only exists for historical accuracy purposes. The community of which is rather small.
 
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Armenius said:
nGlide is still actively maintained. Works well in most instances.

What we really need is something to emulate Rendition graphics. I'm frankly surprised nothing for it has been developed yet. Is it that difficult to figure out?
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There were only a hand full of Speedy3D or RRedline games out there that didn't also have a release with a different accelerator... And it was, sadly, a relatively minor footnote in the grand scheme of things compared to Glide (much like asking why the PowerVR stuff never got ported) :(

I miss my V1000 and V2100.
 
Absalom said:
There was a small space where glide only titles lived in, generally during the era of the Voodoo1 when not only was 3D accelerated gaming in its infancy, but the developers themselves didn't know where things were going. Most of these early titles (which you could count on both hands) were either glorified tech demos and probably never really made it as a commercial success, so they never got the proper 3D treatment. And most likely these obscure titles were never later ported to direct3d/opengl or even open sourced for the community to do it for them. I've never even heard of Pandemonium, and I lived through that era, so there you go.

I don't recall any of them being 3D only, given no developer was crazy enough to not offer a software renderer option. So it's not like it was glide or bust back then. Until the Voodoo1 came along, all 3D graphics accelerators were literally decelerators - meaning, the reference software renderer ran better. So while glide was considered a stigma of sorts, it was the glide-using-hardware that really helped developers embrace the whole 3D accelerated concept.

So essentially what happened is that certain early titles got the 3dfx treatment, but never got the direct3d or opengl treatment or did much later on. Descent 2 for the longest time could only be played 3D accelerated using glide, in DOS no less. Oh yeah, did you know that back in 1997 developers could write a 3D accelerated title in DOS? Even in a post-3dfx era, glide wrappers only worked with the win32 apps. So it was almost a decade later before Descent 2 got a proper non-glide port, but only because it was open sourced and had an active community.

In fact, I bought Mechwarrior 2 twice. The first time for the glide version (which was DOS based). The second time for the more versatile Direct3D version. Yeah, the DOS version wasn't upgradable. I paid the early 3D adopter tax so you didn't have to.

So while titles like Unreal Tournament and Quake got the royal 3D treatment (perhaps not all at once) and went on to become huge commerical successes, some lesser titles faded into obscurity. So maybe this exists for them?

That said, I would state that a glide wrapper like this one only exists for historical accuracy purposes. The community of which is rather small.
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there some games that only ran at 1024x768 in glide mode too like Diablo 2 (not that doesnt matter as much) and others where they had extra stuff like Need For Speed had full car dash and wheel in Glide that did not have in DX mode a long with higher res options in Glide mode
 
I was trying to find a list of these early 3D games opting for proprietary APIs and found this:

3D accelerated PC games matrix

Some of them I recognize such as Terminal Velocity, which only got S3 ViRGE support. The version on Steam is the software renderer. But to be honest, the S3 ViRGE experience would be something like 20 fps at 640x480 and it might have added some crude form of bilinear filtering. It's been 25 years, the ViRGE hardware is long gone, so memory doesn't serve me anymore. Blah, there are some nostalgic things you just don't miss.
 
Dan_D said:
This seems absolutely pointless. I don't remember any 3D game back in the day requiring Glide support to run. People who ran early VooDoo cards probably never ran these titles on anything else that could do so at a decent frame rate. Glide tended to impact image quality negatively. If I could have gotten the same or nearly the same frame rates on my FireGL 1000 Pro, I would have run that instead. It could do 30FPS where the Glide/VooDoo combo would do 60+, but the image quality favored the FireGL massively.

Modern cards are powerful enough to brute force these games so long as Glide isn't required. If you want that vasoline smearing look on your textures than I guess Glide is for you, but I don't know why anyone would want this.
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There were probably 10-12 games that only had glide 3 d acceleration - iirc all of them had software fallback so not unplayable on modern hardware, but gilde would add some basic texture filtering and lighting. A lot ended up getting OGL renderers later on, so there might be a couple left that only had glide for 3d acceleration. NFS2:SE is the only one I can think of off hand that only had Glide for 3d and never got another render path, and it was a pretty sweet game at the time.
 
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