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."
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.
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.)
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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?
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
"... (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?
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.
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Stupid sexy Flanders.