Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the its-about-freaking-time dept.
bwoodring writes "Yahoo! Business News is reporting that 3dfx has been admitted to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board. This could be an indication that 3dfx plans to retire their proprietary 3D API Glide soon in favor of the more ubiquitous (and Linux friendly) OpenGL."
3dfx no longer supports glide, they've said this in the past. Not long after they opened up linux.3dfx.com and started releasing glide source, they announced that they would no longer be supporting it.
This is old news. Obviously they would go after one or more other APIs, and OpenGL is the only other choice after Direct3D, even though Direct3D is lightyears ahead of OpenGL.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Direct3D's development process is so much faster than OpenGL's. The core OpenGL spec hasn't changed in a long time. OpenGL 1.2 has been around forever.
Direct3D is constantly getting new functions, features, etc, that make common procedures faster. The Architectural Review Board seems to sit around and meddle over suggestions instead of making a decision and adding support.
In the graphic world, advantages, no matter how slight, are advantages, and as far behind as OpenGL is, Direct3D might as well be lightyears ahead.
If OpenGL was on par with Direct3D, there would be no question as to what I would use.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
That's partly because of the implementation...
by
Svartalf
·
· Score: 2
If you've got a RagePRO, it's merely a matter of adding a "Module" section with a 'Load "glx.so"' in it, copying/linking 4 files in the right places (Three files/links go to/usr/X11R6/lib- all the libGL* files. One file goes in/usr/X11R6/lib/modules- glx.so.) and you're good to go with Utah-GLX.
It is literally that simple.
Right now, I'm working with people with Alphas and PPC machines (I just got a loaner from a good friend of the Open Source community a couple of weeks back and I've just got around to putting SuSE on the box- PPC support is very likely to become a reality.) The Voodoo/Glide setup is notably harder and much twitchier- I know, I've GOT a Voodoo3; it's because of the implementation, not OpenGL/Mesa.
-- I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hardware OpenGL for Linux: Only Half the Solution
by
4of12
·
· Score: 2
From the standpoint of the technical computing market, the more industry support for OpenGL hardware in Linux, the better our options.
Between developments like this and some improvement in x86 memory bandwidth, you could start to see develop a tsunami of engineering desktop workstation choices migrate from the low volume, high end, high dollar RISC chips onto a more commoditized x86/Linux basis.
So far, those 2 items have kept many workplaces in the camps of Sun, SGI, HP, IBM and DEC(Compaq) where
Performance = log(Price)
remains as true as ever.
-- "Provided by the management for your protection."
Actually, glide is implemented well across platforms. It is also VERY fast. From what I've heard, it is also ridiculously easy to develop for, and that's what I was told by a GL developer.
Glide is one of the few proprietary products I don't mind supporting.
--
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Glide wrappers for OpenGL?
by
tjwhaynes
·
· Score: 2
When Glide became open-sourced I hoped to see wrappers appear to allow those of us with accelerated OpenGL to be able to make use of Glide-specific applications. In fact, I almost wondered whether 3dfx would go down this route themselves - Glide on top of OpenGL would not be as optimal as the native Voodoo acceleration, but it would expand the base of Glide-accelerated cards and thereby accelerate the adoption of Glide.
Has anyone seen anything like this on the Linux side? Many wrappers exist for Windows to provide this functionality (with varying degrees of success) but there appears to be little evidence of such a beast in Unix-land.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
-- Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
OpenGL ARB membership == voting rights
by
Performer+Guy
·
· Score: 4
I'm all for OpenGL but there are lots of pretty poorly informed posts in this thread which need to be corrected.
Glide had earlier and better support on Linux for 3Dfx hardware than OpenGL. Infact OpenGL under Mesa became available on Linux because Glide was already available to supply the hardware acceleration underneath it.
This is all old history because OpenGL has well and truly arrived on Linux and 3Dfx has already deprecated Glide, infact they did this a long time ago and it has nothing to do with ARB membership.
Some other comments suggest that 3Dfx were late to the OpenGL party but this again is highly misleading. 3Dfx were one of the first out with consumer card OpenGL drivers on Windows (a subset at least) which Carmack used to test his port of Quake. These matured into real drivers over time and 3Dfx even aggressively implemented extensions like multitexture and point parameters. They have been doing a great job on OpenGL.
The membership of the ARB merely gives them voting rights on future direction and extensions. This is a good thing and indicates OpenGL's importance to PC card manufacturers but it really doesn't say anything about 3Dfx's commitment to OpenGL which has been there all along. To commit to and implement OpenGL drivers on your hardware you don't need ARB membership and 3Dfx have been doing this for years now.
Re:3dfx is doing this a little too late.
by
wowbagger
·
· Score: 2
kinda creepy knowing that the framework of a 3d scene is NEVER actually standing still.
Actually, neither is ANYTHING you see: your eyes are constantly twitching back and forth at about 70 Hz. This jitter allows your brain to interpolate the data from the retina, thus increasing the effective resolution. Kinda funny how hardware imitates life.
What the hell does this statement mean? Glide was the only way to get Unreal Tournament running on Linux at *all*. Glide has been on Linux since forever.
If anything, Glide has also been easier to set up and configure than Mesa/OpenGL is currently (I've spent the last week attempting to get XFree86 4.0.1 to talk to my GeForce2 GTS, and it's been a bit of a hassle, to say the least).
I think you're after the words "Open" or "Free", but only in a philosophical sense is OpenGL more "Linux Friendly" than Glide.
(Something that also factors into this equation, is that Glide is no longer supported under Linux on the Voodoo 4/5/6 - and it looks like it never will be. I bought the Voodoo5 5500 and returned it the next day in favour of the GeForce2 - the V5500 was a pain.)
--
Isn't Glide opensource now?
by
GauteL
·
· Score: 3
This story seems to be very poorly though through.
If you look at this slashdot-story you can see that
Glide is now Open Source, that is, not proprietary.
Being truly OpenGL-commited is a good thing though. In the past, (and still), all their OpenGL-drivers seems to be some kind of wrapper for Glide. That is, uses Glide to respond to the OpenGL-calls.
Could anyone enlighten me as to wether this really changes that position for 3dfx?
Well, when the Glide wrappers first started to come out, 3dfx slammed down hard on them, modified the SDK lisencing agreement, etc, so not much inroads could be made into the field. But if you remember, Creative did come out with a driver for their nVida board that would support Glide, allthough at a less than stellar performance. 3dfx sued them too, if memory serves me right.
Now imagine if that had not happened. Because it is an added feature, it's possible that other manufacturers would get on the bandwagon as well, and a Glide driver could have become just as much a standard for any new 3D hardware as an OpenGL one is. I'm sure the simlicity of the API, and its relatively broad distribution would make Glide a more popular platform than it currently is.
And because cards other than Voodoo would have this support in the software layer, whereas 3dfx has theirs built into the hardware, they'd win out on performance for any Glide title.
-- Ñ'
3dfx is doing this a little too late.
by
AFCArchvile
·
· Score: 2
Seriously, NVidia has been on ARB ever since their early days (NVidia, not ARB). I've had the GL_ARB_MULTITEXTURE extension in my original GeForce ever since I first got it (I upgraded to the GF2 sometime around April). 3dfx should at least be castigated for their 8-bit texture compression scheme. Who the hell wants Q2-style texturing in Quake 3?
Also, since 3dfx refuses to adapt dot-product bump mapping (also known as dot-3 bump mapping) and still refuses to update to cube environment mapping, their position in the 3d market has dropped further. Even ATI is ahead of them in the feature list right now. All that 3dfx has right now is a FSAA routine that jitters the tris; kinda creepy knowing that the framework of a 3d scene is NEVER actually standing still.
-- "Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Right idea, wrong API...
by
Millennium
·
· Score: 2
The API which OpenGL obsoleted on the Mac was QuickDraw 3D, not QuickTime VR.
Then again, there are people moving to create an Open-Source implementation of QD3D now, too. Check the Quesa Website for more info on that. They're pretty far along in it, too.
I always thought Apple made a mistake in obsoleting QD3D. Relatively easy to work with (easier than OpenGL), an open standard file format, and the capability to do some seriously cool stuff besides. Ever used TextureEyes to map a running MPEG onto a 3D model with three mouseclicks? What Apple should have done was offered OpenGL as a low-level API, with QD3D as a higher-level option. Maybe Quesa can fulfill that one. ----------
Re:Good to see these things come full circle
by
gfxguy
·
· Score: 3
Turning point for OpenGL? There was never a "turning point" for OpenGL.
OpenGL has always been the cross platform 3D graphics toolkit of choice, for going on 10 years now. It was here before Glide. It was here before Direct3D. It was here before Quicktime VR.
Not only that, but it had about 10 years of experience from IrisGL put into it. It doesn't matter if Apple never adopted it (there would be third party versions, with acceleration, like Mesa, coming along), or SUN, or Microsoft - it's now available for just about every platform in existence. MS doesn't understand that that's why Direct3D will never "win". Apple finally accepted it - they moved to Unix and more standardized libraries, and it will only benefit them.
----------
-- Stupid sexy Flanders.
Re: Glad to see someone else who hates Mesa.
by
AFCArchvile
·
· Score: 2
"If anything, Glide has also been easier to set up and configure than Mesa/OpenGL is currently (I've spent the last week attempting to get XFree86 4.0.1 to talk to my GeForce2 GTS, and it's been a bit of a hassle, to say the least)."
You think that's bad, in Quake 2 on my dual voodoo2 setup, I saw rainbow-colored light bursts whenever the shotgun fired. Now that's messed up. Also, in GLQUAKE the rendering speed was really bogged down (sub-25 FPS, should be at least 35 on a single V2). I'm starting to wonder if Mesa is coded in Java, cause that's the only explanation for the loading lag. My GeForce2 on my Win2k machine runs beautifully; anything that wants OpenGL (even the Microsoft screensavers!) gets the hardware drivers.
I applaud you in returning the Voodoo5 - it is truly a folly of a 3d accelerator. 3dfx is staying with a 128-bit 2D accelerator when the world has moved onto 256-bit. Alex Leupp should really take his blinders off sometime; he would probably pee his pants once he saw how far behind 3dfx really is.
-- "Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Since when? Direct 3D has traditionally sucked in a big way. Although I
haven't seem them myself, apparently the newer versions have
improved dramatically, and in places edged ahead of OpenGL.
But light years ahead? I think that's overstating things a bit.
-- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
.. however I personally couldn't care less.
While DirectX is important for game support under Windows, DirectX is highly proprietary and only
available for Windows.
How about someone writing DirectX -wrappers for
OpenGL/OpenAL?
If only they had done this 2 years ago!
by
Steveftoth
·
· Score: 2
If they had only embraced OpenGL 2 years ago they wouldn't be in the the terriable situation they are in now. Kinda sucks for them. The Voodoo 1 and 2 were good cards at the time. I think that they still have some use as co-processors of some kind. Anyone want to try and get them to puch numbers? And not to the screen. I know that you could use them to render (slowly, the memory transfer was bad) to the screen. Maybe if you got whole programs running on them....
Another way of helping out thier faltering technology? 3Dfx is already lagging behind in raw performance, maybe this is thier way of using thier name to expand further into the *NIX gaming market to help boost what may soon be sagging sales.
-- You say you want a revolution....
I don't know what they think, but...
by
Wolfier
·
· Score: 2
Having a "native" API for the hardware is always a good thing - say, 3 years from now nobody uses OpenGL - then you can just write a wrapper around your native driver to that new API and voila - you've got a preliminary driver.
A marvellous arcade game that uses Glide is Rush2049. Admittedly tho, using OpenGL would make it easier to port.
.. but only 3dfx boards currently support Glide, apart from the non-perfect unified drivers from Creative.
Glide on all boards, and support for all games, wouldn't be bad though. That would mean a competitor to DirectX.
OpenGL is however better positioned to take over that role.
Re: Microsoft & SGI / OpenGL - AKA Farenheit
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
I believe that Microsoft was added at the point when Farenheit was the "last best hope" for a unified graphics API. Unfortunately, the project fragmented when SGI bailed. Last I heard, MS has continued the project in its own vision, but I haven't heard much of it lately.
For any who don't know, Farenheit was supposed to be the fusing of DirectX/Direct3D and OpenGL.
Good to see these things come full circle
by
Froid
·
· Score: 2
I'd definitely have to say the turning point for opengl in its march to dominance of glide was when Apple adopted opengl as its primary 3d-graphics library a couple years ago (obsoleting the venerable Quicktime VR standard). As Apple succinctly states:
OpenGL for Macintosh will do for games what the invention of gunpowder did for warfare. In effect, it changes the rules of the game to make Mac gaming titles more real, more powerful, and more fun.
Slashdot Mirror
3dfx no longer supports glide, they've said this in the past. Not long after they opened up linux.3dfx.com and started releasing glide source, they announced that they would no longer be supporting it.
This is old news. Obviously they would go after one or more other APIs, and OpenGL is the only other choice after Direct3D, even though Direct3D is lightyears ahead of OpenGL.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Direct3D's development process is so much faster than OpenGL's. The core OpenGL spec hasn't changed in a long time. OpenGL 1.2 has been around forever.
Direct3D is constantly getting new functions, features, etc, that make common procedures faster. The Architectural Review Board seems to sit around and meddle over suggestions instead of making a decision and adding support.
In the graphic world, advantages, no matter how slight, are advantages, and as far behind as OpenGL is, Direct3D might as well be lightyears ahead.
If OpenGL was on par with Direct3D, there would be no question as to what I would use.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
If you've got a RagePRO, it's merely a matter of adding a "Module" section with a 'Load "glx.so"' in it, copying/linking 4 files in the right places (Three files/links go to /usr/X11R6/lib- all the libGL* files. One file goes in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules- glx.so.) and you're good to go with Utah-GLX.
It is literally that simple.
Right now, I'm working with people with Alphas and PPC machines (I just got a loaner from a good friend of the Open Source community a couple of weeks back and I've just got around to putting SuSE on the box- PPC support is very likely to become a reality.) The Voodoo/Glide setup is notably harder and much twitchier- I know, I've GOT a Voodoo3; it's because of the implementation, not OpenGL/Mesa.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
From the standpoint of the technical computing market, the more industry support for OpenGL hardware in Linux, the better our options.
Between developments like this and some improvement in x86 memory bandwidth, you could start to see develop a tsunami of engineering desktop workstation choices migrate from the low volume, high end, high dollar RISC chips onto a more commoditized x86/Linux basis.
So far, those 2 items have kept many workplaces in the camps of Sun, SGI, HP, IBM and DEC(Compaq) where
remains as true as ever."Provided by the management for your protection."
Actually, glide is implemented well across platforms. It is also VERY fast. From what I've heard, it is also ridiculously easy to develop for, and that's what I was told by a GL developer.
Glide is one of the few proprietary products I don't mind supporting.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
When Glide became open-sourced I hoped to see wrappers appear to allow those of us with accelerated OpenGL to be able to make use of Glide-specific applications. In fact, I almost wondered whether 3dfx would go down this route themselves - Glide on top of OpenGL would not be as optimal as the native Voodoo acceleration, but it would expand the base of Glide-accelerated cards and thereby accelerate the adoption of Glide.
Has anyone seen anything like this on the Linux side? Many wrappers exist for Windows to provide this functionality (with varying degrees of success) but there appears to be little evidence of such a beast in Unix-land.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I'm all for OpenGL but there are lots of pretty poorly informed posts in this thread which need to be corrected.
Glide had earlier and better support on Linux for 3Dfx hardware than OpenGL. Infact OpenGL under Mesa became available on Linux because Glide was already available to supply the hardware acceleration underneath it.
This is all old history because OpenGL has well and truly arrived on Linux and 3Dfx has already deprecated Glide, infact they did this a long time ago and it has nothing to do with ARB membership.
Some other comments suggest that 3Dfx were late to the OpenGL party but this again is highly misleading. 3Dfx were one of the first out with consumer card OpenGL drivers on Windows (a subset at least) which Carmack used to test his port of Quake. These matured into real drivers over time and 3Dfx even aggressively implemented extensions like multitexture and point parameters. They have been doing a great job on OpenGL.
The membership of the ARB merely gives them voting rights on future direction and extensions. This is a good thing and indicates OpenGL's importance to PC card manufacturers but it really doesn't say anything about 3Dfx's commitment to OpenGL which has been there all along. To commit to and implement OpenGL drivers on your hardware you don't need ARB membership and 3Dfx have been doing this for years now.
Actually, neither is ANYTHING you see: your eyes are constantly twitching back and forth at about 70 Hz. This jitter allows your brain to interpolate the data from the retina, thus increasing the effective resolution. Kinda funny how hardware imitates life.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"... (and Linux friendly) OpenGL."
What the hell does this statement mean? Glide was the only way to get Unreal Tournament running on Linux at *all*. Glide has been on Linux since forever.
If anything, Glide has also been easier to set up and configure than Mesa/OpenGL is currently (I've spent the last week attempting to get XFree86 4.0.1 to talk to my GeForce2 GTS, and it's been a bit of a hassle, to say the least).
I think you're after the words "Open" or "Free", but only in a philosophical sense is OpenGL more "Linux Friendly" than Glide.
(Something that also factors into this equation, is that Glide is no longer supported under Linux on the Voodoo 4/5/6 - and it looks like it never will be. I bought the Voodoo5 5500 and returned it the next day in favour of the GeForce2 - the V5500 was a pain.)
--
This story seems to be very poorly though through. If you look at this slashdot-story you can see that Glide is now Open Source, that is, not proprietary.
Being truly OpenGL-commited is a good thing though. In the past, (and still), all their OpenGL-drivers seems to be some kind of wrapper for Glide. That is, uses Glide to respond to the OpenGL-calls.
Could anyone enlighten me as to wether this really changes that position for 3dfx?
Now imagine if that had not happened. Because it is an added feature, it's possible that other manufacturers would get on the bandwagon as well, and a Glide driver could have become just as much a standard for any new 3D hardware as an OpenGL one is. I'm sure the simlicity of the API, and its relatively broad distribution would make Glide a more popular platform than it currently is.
And because cards other than Voodoo would have this support in the software layer, whereas 3dfx has theirs built into the hardware, they'd win out on performance for any Glide title.
Ñ'
Also, since 3dfx refuses to adapt dot-product bump mapping (also known as dot-3 bump mapping) and still refuses to update to cube environment mapping, their position in the 3d market has dropped further. Even ATI is ahead of them in the feature list right now. All that 3dfx has right now is a FSAA routine that jitters the tris; kinda creepy knowing that the framework of a 3d scene is NEVER actually standing still.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The API which OpenGL obsoleted on the Mac was QuickDraw 3D, not QuickTime VR.
Then again, there are people moving to create an Open-Source implementation of QD3D now, too. Check the Quesa Website for more info on that. They're pretty far along in it, too.
I always thought Apple made a mistake in obsoleting QD3D. Relatively easy to work with (easier than OpenGL), an open standard file format, and the capability to do some seriously cool stuff besides. Ever used TextureEyes to map a running MPEG onto a 3D model with three mouseclicks? What Apple should have done was offered OpenGL as a low-level API, with QD3D as a higher-level option. Maybe Quesa can fulfill that one.
----------
OpenGL has always been the cross platform 3D graphics toolkit of choice, for going on 10 years now. It was here before Glide. It was here before Direct3D. It was here before Quicktime VR.
Not only that, but it had about 10 years of experience from IrisGL put into it. It doesn't matter if Apple never adopted it (there would be third party versions, with acceleration, like Mesa, coming along), or SUN, or Microsoft - it's now available for just about every platform in existence. MS doesn't understand that that's why Direct3D will never "win". Apple finally accepted it - they moved to Unix and more standardized libraries, and it will only benefit them.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You think that's bad, in Quake 2 on my dual voodoo2 setup, I saw rainbow-colored light bursts whenever the shotgun fired. Now that's messed up. Also, in GLQUAKE the rendering speed was really bogged down (sub-25 FPS, should be at least 35 on a single V2). I'm starting to wonder if Mesa is coded in Java, cause that's the only explanation for the loading lag. My GeForce2 on my Win2k machine runs beautifully; anything that wants OpenGL (even the Microsoft screensavers!) gets the hardware drivers.
I applaud you in returning the Voodoo5 - it is truly a folly of a 3d accelerator. 3dfx is staying with a 128-bit 2D accelerator when the world has moved onto 256-bit. Alex Leupp should really take his blinders off sometime; he would probably pee his pants once he saw how far behind 3dfx really is.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Since when? Direct 3D has traditionally sucked in a big way. Although I haven't seem them myself, apparently the newer versions have improved dramatically, and in places edged ahead of OpenGL. But light years ahead? I think that's overstating things a bit.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
.. however I personally couldn't care less.
While DirectX is important for game support under Windows, DirectX is highly proprietary and only
available for Windows.
How about someone writing DirectX -wrappers for
OpenGL/OpenAL?
If they had only embraced OpenGL 2 years ago they wouldn't be in the the terriable situation they are in now. Kinda sucks for them. The Voodoo 1 and 2 were good cards at the time. I think that they still have some use as co-processors of some kind. Anyone want to try and get them to puch numbers? And not to the screen. I know that you could use them to render (slowly, the memory transfer was bad) to the screen. Maybe if you got whole programs running on them....
Another way of helping out thier faltering technology? 3Dfx is already lagging behind in raw performance, maybe this is thier way of using thier name to expand further into the *NIX gaming market to help boost what may soon be sagging sales.
You say you want a revolution....
Having a "native" API for the hardware is always a good thing - say, 3 years from now nobody uses OpenGL - then you can just write a wrapper around your native driver to that new API and voila - you've got a preliminary driver.
A marvellous arcade game that uses Glide is Rush2049. Admittedly tho, using OpenGL would make it easier to port.
.. but only 3dfx boards currently support Glide, apart from the non-perfect unified drivers from Creative.
Glide on all boards, and support for all games, wouldn't be bad though. That would mean a competitor to DirectX.
OpenGL is however better positioned to take over that role.
I believe that Microsoft was added at the point when Farenheit was the "last best hope" for a unified graphics API. Unfortunately, the project fragmented when SGI bailed. Last I heard, MS has continued the project in its own vision, but I haven't heard much of it lately. For any who don't know, Farenheit was supposed to be the fusing of DirectX/Direct3D and OpenGL.