3dfx Voodoo Graphics Gets Windows XP x64 Support

ryszards writes, "GlideXP author Ryan 'Colourless' Nunn has turned his insanity up a notch with a driver that allows running the 32-bit NT Glide .dlls for a Voodoo Graphics board on Windows XP x64. Already supporting Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 on 32-bit Windows XP, adding XP x64 to the mix lets even more folks reminisce about the good old early days of consumer 3D acceleration hardware. Any excuse to fire up GLQuake one more time!"

Comments

Much better choises than GLQuake available

[inio]

Really, GLQuake? you want quake-glide - it talks glide natively instead of through the OpenGL Wrapper. Or better yet Unreal/Unreal Tourment. Those games never looked better than when they were running on a Voodoo 2.

Re:Much better choises than GLQuake available

[c0l0]

They did, on a Voodoo 3 or, better yet, Voodoo 5 ;)

The Voodoo 2 totally lacked 32bit rendering (what was less of a problem back then, given that the other cards' performance numbers were not high enough to render anything at 32bit reliably anyway), and the Voodoo 3 "only" boasted a so-called "22bit post-filter", which provided a MUCH better visual experience at negligible framerate losses. However, (at least european) gaming mags went rabid about the fact that "Voodoo 3 still does not support 32bit color depth!1" (which, again, was nothing to really care about, given other cards' performance at True Color settings!), and until today I'm sure that this kind of hype (and pushing of NVIDIA's TNT2-Chip along with it) did a great deal to sink 3DFX in the end.

Voodoo 5 supported True Color rendering from the beginning, but the market (or rather the marketing machinery) had moved on to the next hot subject, namely "T&L", by then (which, again, had virtually no real impact on anything that truly mattered for real world games), and due to lack of sales and the high costs 3DFX burdened itself with by acquiring STB, one of the greatest computer graphics companies ever went out of business. Just sad. :(

Re:Good old glide... RIP

[VGPowerlord]

How about Quake in software mode and then in GLQuake?

Which, of course, brings up the biggest problem with 3dfx cards prior to the Voodoo 4: OpenGL support. OpenGL was implemented for GLQuake, Quake 2, Half-life, Hexen 2, Heretic 2, and Sin using special "MiniGL" drivers that changed specific OpenGL instructions to their Glide equivalents.

Re:Speaking of Glide

[Atman Binstock]

Has anyone bothered to make a Glide Emulator for some of those games that only supported Glide. There's got to be 1 or 2 Montezuma's Return fans out there :/

Dunno about that...

Last time I saw it running on Glide under a recent Windows, there seemed to be a bug where it didn't wait for vsync properly and the CPU got way ahead of the graphics, leading to really ugly control latency. I probably screwed up somewhere :(
The win32 software renderer didn't have this problem.

-lead programmer of Montezuma's Return

3dfx lost their way

[Namarrgon]

32bit colour and T&L may not have set the world on fire when they were released, but that's hardly surprising. Since the hardware was new, no software yet took full advantage of them.

It's different today. Try running modern games without T&L today, even on a modern CPU, and watch your game crawl - if it plays at all. And see if you can get a gamer to play in 16 bit without noticing the difference (and complaining). The TNT and GeForce chips set the scene for modern graphics, just like the Voodoo & Voodoo 2 did in their time with real 3D acceleration, dedicated texture units, SLI etc.

3dfx made many mistakes, which resulted in them simply being out-innovated and out-executed by the competition while they struggled with their consequences of their poor business decisions. They showed the way, but Voodoo 5/6's multichip approach was never the right direction for the mainstream future.