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3DFX Attacks on Glide Wrapper Authors Rage On
An anonymous reader writes "3dfx has
emailed several Glide
wrapper authors claiming that the wrappers were
developed using the Glide SDK and is an infringement on
their intellectual property. 3dfx even contacted the server
admins of some webservers to have the sites with the
wrappers taken down. " Mirror quickly.
A few games (like Independence War and Croc-something) use an old 3D library that does pretty well in software but had crippled Glide-only hardware support that never got fixed. In fact I only bought I-War because the authors got screwed on that and promise the next version will do D3D (and because the demo worked well enough in software).
"It is also illegal to create a work derived from the book without permission."
Where in copyright law does it say that? So I broke the law when I wrote book reports in school?
The Glide Underground people even said that themself..once the n64 emulator was out, EVERYBODY was interested in getting their hands on a glide wrapper so they wouldn't have to run out and get a 3dfx board. If anything, I can see this tactic caused by them fearing a loss of 3dfx based board sales or some nonsense like that.
Fightback by doing this.
Put the source and binarys to the wrapper libraryies on 1000000000 web sites, all your own personal websites, put alink in just about every other usefull page. Now if 1000000 people did this, what can 3dfx do? The cost alone in contacting these amount of people would outway any benefit from even removing the code from the net.
Power in numbers i said.
3dfx should endorse the api taht way, it can become more popular and a standard, otherwise people will drop it and use opengl/d3d only, and they will say, well fukc it, who needs glide if its anal!
Wakeup corp 3dfx, get your programmers to dictate policy not suit wearing lawyer investors.
Yes, but when he says 'why use Glide', he's not asking 'why would a user have it installed on thier system'. You always have Glide on your system if you have a 3dfx card.
He meant 'why would I program to Glide, and what advantages has it over programming to OpenGL'. Obviously, your OpenGL implementation is going to need to just call Glide a bunch of times. But if you write to OpenGL, you're not writing to Glide, despite the fact your OpenGL implementation may call Glide.
some utils/screen savers or games aer Glide only so wont work on TNT cards. So you have a wrapper and bingo the game works.
3dfx corp should just shut the fuck up, you cant stop this, they are clueless!!!
Matrox don't even support OpenGL under windows to date. I don't like the chances of getting acceleration under linux on those things.
fyi. Id and valve have never supported 3dfx. The quake engine only supports opengl (although you do get a 3dfx opengl mcd.) The only card specific version that id ever made was vquake, the first 3d accelerated version of quake for the rendition v1000 (and that might have been done by rendition).
I also have doubts whether glide is relevant to developers today. The only reason that any titles are coming out supporting glide these days is because they were started 2+ years ago. There is almost nothing that is new that supports glide only. I think it is more of an issue for older titles (or perhaps ultrahle).
Proprietary APIs and single-platform drivers ethically ought to be avoided, as they interfere with free market competition. There are also purely technical flaws in Winmodems (namely, they steal a boatload of cycles) such that cost is the only reason to even consider them.
The trick is thinking sufficiently long-term. Even if a product is currently best, we shouldn't buy it if doing so will later interfere with the creation of better products. Always encourage competition.
There is no "little guy" anymore. One of the most important things the internet (specifically the web) does is make it so that everyone is a big guy.
They are already doing this with the modified MLX driver untit for MESA (developed by SUSE for running Permedia2 boards on MESA/GL).. it would soon be out as a glx.. addon for Xfree86... making Permedia2 and G200 the only two boards worthy of playign Q3a
Actually, 32 bits are used, even though 24 bits are used to store color information. The other 8 bits *can* be use to store transparency info (alpha blending).
/dev/3dfx
Errr... then don't give just any user access to the device....
It's a bit like SVGALib programs - The hardware needs a-bangin' - it's not a good idea to let just anyone do it - (SUID - just say no!!!)
I must remind anyone who states from the Glide SDK license agreement that there was no such agreement included with the SDK used by the author(s) of the wrapper(s).
3Dfx even admits that for a "brief" period there was no license agreement included, a big mistake upon their part.
--CEIMASTER's two cents
Address
Lat: 37.794722
Long: -122.395426
or so... =)
Speaking of drivers, I wish all these companies got a clue and started releasing Xserver's for their graphics cards ASAP as the hardware is released, with in 4 weeks, not 6-12 FUKEN months, you have the $$$, spend damn $10,000 on a coder to make an Xserver that works with ur card.
Sometimes I wonder about Corp USA companies that spend 99% of their money on shit and not real development, but then again this is usa.
Maybe in 10 years, usa will be nothing in the software world and just a hardware player.
When this crap came out some last year, I was in the process of getting a new PC myself.
Once I saw what 3DFX put these guys through, there was no way in hell I was going to buy from them. They removed themselves from any consideration.
As for the Matrox, I've got a G200 and I'm *very* pleased with it.
John Waalkes
jwaalkes@edge.net
Sorry, I don't when, or who, or even how much they contributed.
When they stomp out the little guy for trying to develop on it, then I don't have a need for them.
I think you've missed the point. It's not what you've done *for* the Linux community, it"s what you've done *TO* them that matters.
John Waalkes
jwaalkes@edge.net
Quake3Arena uses OpenGL, and doesn't have any support seperately for Glide.
Quake2 was able to do both Glide and OpenGL.
Well yeah, Matrox does provide a nice framebuffer for running XF86 on.
My last machine had a Millenium II w/8M in it. my current machine has a Permedia2 w/8M, and I have to say that the Permedia2 is as good or better than the Matrox - imho of course.
I think things like Xi's upcoming OpenGL hardware accel server will make the Permedia/Glint chipsets more popular among Linux users.
Rendition Verité is used in the Diamond Stealth II (2100) and Herc Thriller (2200), which worked okay and had excellent bang/buck last year. But Rendition's full OpenGL ICD has been alpha for a loooong time.
whether or not Matrox supports anything in Windows in irrelevant.. with the specs to the chips people will make the G200 run accelerated Mesa on any OS.
This was mentioned and no one hid it.
They said this is the peak, and they said "we'll leave it up to the OEMs to decide the mhz speed depending onthe quality of their boards"
Ummm... Nvidia's chipsets are not 3d-only...
It seems to Europeans that middle class americans generally aspire to be well paid lawyers (Hey, blame your TV shows!). WIth so many lawyers around, they have to earn a living somehow, so many of them embark upon a quest to either bring down a successful (but possibly corrupt?) corporate like Microsoft, while others work for said corporates and bring down the little chap who is using any tools at his disposal to become successful.
I'm worried that this culture is starting to flutter across the Atlantic to England, pehaps our Queen can protect us?!!!
What i dont understand is why you think just because these companies go about it in the wrong way, they should lose the right to say what happens to their property. Just because they have lots of money doesnt mean that whatever they made sould be free all of a sudden. You all scream for free this, and open source that, but if it was your product, your money, and your livlihood on the line, you'd be singing a different tune.
I don't know what all the fuss is about, and I don't own a 3dfx card, but if you want the archive you'll find it here:
ftp://ftp.eso.org/users/jbarry/xgl20002j.zip
Enjoy.
jb
some guy yesterday, under the 'FSF new definition of free software'
topic, said that you cant sue someone over the particular 'use'
of a program, you can only sue them for violating
a copyright or a patent.
so what is correct? seems to me like this is exactly what
3dfx is doing. btw im never buying a 3dfx product due to this behavior.
Matrox' specs are allegedly either 2D-only, or maybe-some-3D-if-you-read-real-carefully. If you care about 3D, you should tell Matrox you're waiting until the Mesa hackers are certain they have enough info to accelerate G200.
considering the recent discussion on linux-kernel about /dev/3dfx (basically, any user with privilege to access the device can hang the machine by sending garbage data, due to hardware stupidity), I am not interested in buying any such cards.
permedia2 with mlx/Mesa can do this. ask SUSE, they did the drivers (which would be used for g200 port to glx/MESA)
2.
Oh, Get Real.
3dfx has a 16 bit framebuffer and that is it. Sure, they have some cute way of filtering the image so that you get less banding, but it is a 16 bit framebuffer. You get a 16 bit colour display, and you are going to suffer from worse quantisation errors when doing multipass rendering (vs.32bit.)
3.
Glide does NOT belong to 3dfx. It is an api. It is perfectly legal to reverse engineer an api (the same way that cygwin etc are doing with win32.) It may not be legal to use the glide sdk to do it, but that is another question entirely.
Just a clarification. The Tale of Woe and Glide Undergorund people are the same people (or at least they seem to be). Nuke the lawyers anyways ===|=> ;-(
In a court case, wouldn't the burden of proof lie upon the plaintif,f in this case 3dfx? If so, and our friend can afford the legal fees, he'd be home free, wouldn't he?
OTOH if we demand drivers, we're less likely to get them (it's a lot more work than publishing specs they already have) and much less likely to get specs too, without which we can't really fix or port the drivers.
E.g., if someone would sue Microsoft over $10 million harm, I would not expect them to let me do $10 million harm to them just because I don't have a lot of money.
Before the Internet, and specifically the web, it was fairly hard for a little guy to do anything that would be noticable by the big companies.
For example, 20 years ago, if I had a bootleg tape made at a concert, I could share it with a few friends, and maybe sell or trade via some low visibility, low circulation publications. Now, that bootleg tape can easily become an MP3 on a web site and receive wide circulation, and greatly annoy large companies.
Anyone who enjoys the benefits of competition on a level field needs to develop the backbone to refuse to buy 3dfx-only software.
Hindering Linux developers and users is just going to compound their problems further. Don't they understand that their competition doesn't care about Glide?
Matrox recently released 3D specs for the G200; I assume G400 specs will be released as well. It looks like Matrox will continue to be the graphics board of choice for Linux users for the next 6 months, unless NVIDIA repents and does something wonderful. :-)
TedC
Sure, and when did 3dfx release a banshee patch/driver for X? huh!? just recently , not in Aug/1998.
And even then Daryll's Xserver for banshee is glic6 ONLY (fuk) and the source? well hes included all of X which is dumb to say the least!
43meg download, for gods sake, whats pathetic! get a clue, no one is gona download that
im not.
and licb5 isnt dead
G200 is fastest X accelerator right now. (In fact G200 with XFree86 is faster than Xi running on anything other than G200) With release of specs it will be the fastest 3D accelerator for Linux.
Some other 3D companies should take the opportunity to give them a bloody nose by releasing their specs and possibly helping to incorporate support for their cards into Mesa. I've got a system upgrade coming up Real Soon Now (Trying to wait for the K7 though) and will be in the market for a nice open 3D card. Maybe I'll buy a Matrox...
TNT2 Contest @ AGN3D - 5:48 P.M. EST
AGN3D had a chat with nVIDIA and is offering a chance to win a TNT2. You can watch the show in a stream instead of downloading it by clicking here.
www.3dfiles.com
I am a proud owner of one of the original Voodoo boards and was seriously considering getting a new Voodoo 3 for my new PC. However, this episode and their virtual refusal to support OpenGL ICDs has convinced me to wait till I can find a good stable NVIDIA based board.
------
3dfx is working on a FULL openGL icd, and it's pretty good, although it's still in beta. I read some comments that brian hook (id software) wrote, and he has gone from being a big "3dfx sucks, they need an opengl icd" to "this is pretty good, good job 3dfx"
they'll have an ICD out soon.
jm3
jmm5@acpub.duke.edu
I love the fact that the Matrox cards support sync-on-green, dammit! (I have a lot of old 19" workstation monitors)
Huh ? 3DFx are long time supporters of linux, and are still the only company that offer a 3d card that will work with linux. I aren't that happy with their proprietry nature either, but I don't think they're that much worse than anybody else.
I've owned a Rage Pro for over a year, and have been mildly happy with it (not a bad purchase at the time; I wanted an integrated 2d/3d card w/ AGP support). But the drivers have always been crap; I waited a long time to get a half-decent mini-GL, and the ICD is still problematic IMO. So, even thought the Rage 128 Fury Pro (whatever else they are calling it now) has nice nice hardware features, I won't buy it because I do NOT want to deal with crappy drivers, and endless waiting for fixes, again.
And when I bought it, I ignored the warnings about ATI's poor reputation at writing drivers. Seems it was no secret... So, caveat emptor
I'll probably get the Voodoo3 in the next month or two. The TNT2 looks real nice, but the Voodoo has Glide(!), and I like 'Unreal' and Linux. Case closed.
The 24 bit internal rendering (16 bit output) should be an image quality improvement as well, even if it doesn't approach full TrueColor output of TNT2 or Rage Fury. (32 bit rendering is a misnomer, only 24 bits of color are really used)
But having a useable stencil buffer would be nice...
V2 image suffers when your doing a lot of blending. i.e. blending in fog. but in quake2 which uses 16 bit textures, and doesn't do a lot of layering, V2 looks much better than the TNTs' orange look. TNT bleeds way to much into the whites on this game as well. Look its a white health pack with orange bleeding into it.
But like you said in games that use a lot of blending and 24-32 bit colors the TNT will look better. So will the matrox G200, of course that is if can survive the 2fps..
permedia2 and matrox g200 are supported using SUSE's mlx MESA drivers and the development done on glx by g200 developers.
Making an OSS corporation would only give them a single target to lock in NDAs and other things like that. If John Doe thinks he can agree with a given NDA, I do not want to be locked by it.
Instead of creating a single target to those greedy evil entities, we should make no target available to them, i.e., hide under aliases and use cypherpunk remailers and SSL-enabled anonymizers.
I know this is like returning to the 'bad old days of 0-day warez el33t ftp sites', but it seems to be the better way to do things that the corporations, the Big Brother and the Free World won't let us do - like a free Windoze clone made using reverse engineering.
--
"If the laws are evil, ignore the law. You will always find something better inside of you" -- Anonymous Coward.
Dave screwed up and posted a Sony BIOS (Playstation?). They had right on their side (this time), but they could have been nicer about it. The big game companies are taking every chance they get to make examples of people. They have been acting like RIAA jerks of late.
TK
I wish those hackers spent their time on projects with a better chance of survival. It's their time to waste, but I hope they've learned something.
Hmm...
...but employees can be held legally liable for their actions as individuals... (read: corporate officers sacked/jailed for financial crimes).
People are legally punished by association all the time, even if it's not official.
If you feel like you're persecuted by your local law enforcement agents, you probably would agree with this 100%...
Corporations should have far fewer rights as individual human beings. It is still not clear to me whether in the US they should even fall under the Constitution, and the protections it has. At least in some areas of the Constitution, corporations do have more limited rights than individuals (i.e., corporate vs. individual free speech).
The problem is that most people will embed the coporate/individual duality into themselves completely. Take the corporate president/CEO who takes it personally that the corporation is getting negative press, etc., which is a totally different view than most of his worker peons to whom the corporation merely pays their paycheck.
And, of course, this duality is totally used by the people for their own maximal benefit. Company does wrong? Can't sue me, can only sue the corporation (even though you told the company to do the bad things). Even shareholders can only do so much, and that is only on things related to the value of the stock.
The group of nuns trying to force Occidental Oil Corporation to change a development plan in Columbia by a proxy action are facing some roadblocks legally as well...
If you're only targetting 3dfx hardware (which made sense 2 years ago, belive it or not), then Glide is the best way to go. Depressingly, there are still games that ship with only Glide support (Starsiege Tribes, Unreal, anyone?), and these represent Big Wins for 3dfx in a buisness sense.
If someone were to take this advantage away from them, well, they wouldn't like it.
Glide as an API isn't terribly special. It's very lightweight, because it can make assumptions about the underlying hardware that something Real like OpenGL or D3D doesn't have the freedom to do.
In this day and age, though, Glide an option for the stupid and lazy. There is too much mind and marketshare in other chipsets for it to be a wise decision any more, so 3DFX is, like corprations generally do when they sense they are loosing control, legally panicing.
Why not boycott 3Dfx? Honestly.. there are a great many readers of /. from what I have seen we tend to be very annoyed by this sort of thing. Are we annoyed enough to boycott this company? If so it could have a pretty serious effect on thier bottom line, and THAT is what they will *feel*.
Think about it.. Quake III is comming out any day now.. Time to upgrade for some. It would be very funny to see all other 3d card makers' sales jump BUT 3Dfx.
There are specs for 3D rendering in there. Not full specs, but enough to get decent 3D, I think.
What is missing is specs for the WARP Engine, which is some sort of processor for doing geometry setup and stuff. Or that's what it sounds like.
I have heard it said before that if software comes with no explicit license then the legal default is that the user has no rights to use the software.
In reality, missing license files usually mean the software's author doesn't care what happens to the code, but reality and legality are often quite divorced.
-Brett.
Posted by hOdGy:
I find 3dfx making attacks on PC glide wrappers inadequate, and if they do such a thing, they should also be cancelling PC emulators for the Mac. They are infringing by emulating the Voodoo chipset for the emulator...
Just a thought.
Posted by djfisty:
a hardware company can make all of the proprietary and substandard products they want, but if the software companies don't go along with it, the products will fail. 3dfx isn't forcing Glide down anyone's throat; no one *has* to use it to get 3dfx graphics on their computers. the fact, then, that some games rely on Glide does not make 3dfx evil. indeed, the game companies have the free will to completely ignore 3dfx altogether. simply because they have not done so, 3dfx is not guilty of any great crime against humanity. it stands to reason, then, that the game companies are at fault for the implementation of such bad design.
DJ
Posted by Scott Francis[Mechaman]:
He didn't "screw up", he's had the assorted BIOSs for a long time, including the Neo Geo one. However, Sony apparently decided to get pissy all of a sudden and shut him down for it. Which is strange, as the only emulator needing the PSX BIOS is PSEmuPro which is far from being a replacement for a PSX. The Bleem team might have looked at a decompilation of the BIOS, but Bleem(which is more of a "threat" than PSEmuPro) doesn't use any part of the BIOS.
Another G200 driver project can be found at:
f o/g200-dev
http://lists.on.openprojects.net/mailman/listin
Government of the people, by the corporations, for the corporations.
Probably at least some of these wrappers were legally developed, but thanks to the hard, innovative work of 3dfx, they have been rewarded with enough money to bypass any law they feel like by throwing lawyers at someone!
Ain't capitalism great? Makes me proud to live here...
</sasrcasm>
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Well, I have downloaded the G200 graphics specs, not looked at them, but other people that checked them found no 3D chip level programming information, and calls to Matrox only gave a run-around. If you can submit a link showing their intention to do this, please do, otherwise, please don't propagate 'grapevine' misinformation (like I have done too).
Sorry, problem with this is that currently none of the PC emulators have native support for any hardware on your PCI bus OTHER than a Voodoo card... this means that even though your Mac has a RAGE 128 chipset VirtualPC isn't writing to it directly, but rather to VirtualPCs emulated video card, which in turn writes to the MacOSs video subsystem... if you tried to run the GLIDE wrappers under VirtualPC I wouldnt be suprised if they worked (VPC is quite a stable bugger), but they sure as hell won't be any faster than VirtualPC already is, and I image really quite a bit slower. Both Connectix and Insignia, plus the new BlueLabel Power Emulator, all plan more native hardware support in their emus, a la the 3dfx support implemented in recent months/year... BLPE seems to have the head start with its totally modular design, basically allowing (or soon, when the sdk is out) coders to develop x86 drivers for hardware in your Mac, meaning unloading a HUGE load off the emulator (and therefore your CPU) and bringing emulated x86 ever closer to realtime...
NVIDIA has been very quiet about Linux, but I have information about their support (and recent good news from the riva-liberty mailing list).
:)
NVIDIA now has 3 people working on the Linux drivers (GLX/Mesa for XFree86 4.0). There is the original Linux developer, a new guy (their "best driver guy") that used to be working on the Microsoft drivers, and another part-time engineer. All Riva chips will have 3D support. No word yet on if it will be open source.
Does anyone know when XF86 4.0 should be out? The XFree86 group seems to not like giving ETA's. I don't care if the date turns out to be wrong, it'd be nice to know when it might be out.
Another interesting piece of info from riva-liberty is that NVIDIA is moving all of their code control over to PerForce and Linux.
I've also been told to check their website from time to time for any other info.
As for me, I'm getting a TNT2, not just because Linux support is on the horizon, but because it seems to be the better card anyway.
1. NVIDIA now has 3 people working on GLX/Mesa for XFree86 4.0. That doesn't sound like "bugger off" to me. (Anyone know when XF86 4.0 is predicted to be out?) I've been told that all Riva chips will be 3D accelerated at that time.
2. Not lying. All of the information I've read says boards will be clocked at many different speeds, and that there will be 175/200 boards.
The situation's not changed yet- but this is not because Id's chosen this situation. It's because of the following fact: There is no other card that currently supports acceleration of Mesa. That's right, if you want 3D acceleration today, you need Voodoo, Banshee, or Voodoo2. Thankfully, this is changing- we've got specs for Matrox' Millenium and G200, and we've got specs for SiS' AGP offering. What's heartening is that we've got the community working on the problem- and shortly, 3DfX will not be the only player in the field. Don't be surprised if Matrox' sales jump through the roof this year.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
But there's several groups working at rectifying that omission...
My advice... Get the G200 card now- it's supported under X already and the 3D support's coming soon.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The chipset specs are out for the G200 and the SiS AGP chipset (It doesn't perform anywhere near as good as the G200, but it's a lot cheaper than the G200 ($30-40US) and many of the cards based on the SiS chipset are opting for the hardware MPEG2 accel option- it's concieveable to see DVD under Linux possibly happening with this adapter...).
If Matrox and SiS isn't supported for 3D acceleration under XFree86 4.0, you can expect a large crowd working on seeing to it that the omission of the same is quickly rectified.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Scherer recently said to me "3Dfx should wake up and leave the wrapper guys alone. Nothing benafits 3Dfx more than having everybody running Glide games on slow, crufty wrappers for other boards. That way, 3Dfx's boards always appear way faster"
/. about it maybe....
Makes sense to me.
...
I don't really think anyone will read this. Sometime I'll do an article on
WARNING: blatant plug coming.
Go check out our new linux demo w/sound and stuff.
singularity-software.com.
from someone who's been dealing with 3D card manufacturers on a professional basis for some time now.
:). They should just release it and get over it.
:). But it's a fair tradeoff for fill rate: image quality on the Voodoo2/3 is very good, esp. w/multitexture (I can personally guarantee from experience on my personal computer right here in front of me that the Voodoo2 looks as good or better than the TNT).
As I mentioned above, I've played with basically everything that's out now. I even hope to have a TNT2 and a G400 fairly soon (matter of weeks).
I'd like to dispel some of the myths/FUD (yes, I dare say it) that's been going around.
1. Yes, it's silly for card manufacturers to protect their hardware to the paranoid extent they do
People end up reverse engineering it anyhow. Granted, 3D cards are pretty complicated beasts to reverse engineer, AFAIK no one's actually done it. But it does come under Fair Use, it's perfectly legal (I'm not a lawyer
2. I don't wanna here any more of this nonsense about 3Dfx not being 32 bit
They have some crazy filtering in the rendering pipeline that makes what the Voodoo2 actually displays quite different from what you see in the framebuffer from your code. We never figured it out. We asked 3Dfx how it works. I don't know that they'll ever tell us
3. Glide belongs to 3Dfx. The wrappers break the law. 3Dfx is perfectly within their rights
That's just the way it is. If a game is written for Glide alone, it's 'cos the developers intended it to be that way.
4. The only reason game developers fail to support other API's is...well...there are some good reasons
It's easy to call programmers lazy. And we support both Glide and D3D, so maybe the guys who only do Glide are lazy. But
- Glide is way easier to write than D3D. Trust me, I just got back from a several hours of dealing w/DX6. Yuck.
- Glide is faster anyhow (and was especially faster than DX5).
- 3Dfx does a very convincing job of buying programmers' souls with toys and love. What can I say, they're cool guys. They've always taken care of us.
The Free Software Foundation is incorporated as a non-profit. You may not like RMS personally, but he knows what he's doing.
All you need to do to receive the protection afforded a corporation is work out an assignment of copyright with RMS. Assuming your work is clean, which some GLIDE wrappers appear not to be, I'm sure he could work something out.
And yes, I am too lazy to cut-n-paste! So it is appreciated (if done right ;-)
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
... for all the good it'll do. Still, I won't be
buying 3Dfx or recommending it to friends, family,
etc. Besides, IIRC I want 32MB/DVD/S-video on my
card, and I won't be in the market for a vid
upgrade for some time yet (next target is the C1x)
I got what you want....I got what you need!
This is what you're advocating.
We're better off developing something on our own.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Here's the 10 cent explanation of what a wrapper is.
Wrapper:A small program that intercepts API calls from a program (like the Glide API calls for Quake2) and executes an equivallent function in another API (like D3D or OpenGL).
Kinda acts like a translator in a discussion where neither of the involved parties speaks the other's language.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This way anyone can document what they are beginning. Still, the burden of proof is upon the developer, yet this could a clearinghouse of information as well as a piece of evidence.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Will they ever learn? Who intents to earn money by fiddling with the glide interface? It will lead to more programs use the Voodoo cards. Trying to sue the developers is just braindead, IMHO.
.sig: SEGV
So go ahead and complain about the lack of support from 3dfx , but don't forget to complain about ALL of the other guys.
Oh, btw, they didn't JUST release the 2d spec for the Banshee. THey released the glide source code and the vodoo / voodoo2 drivers. Which is a tad more than any other 3d card maker has done ...
On the contrary, I just purchased a PC with linux pre installed, because I insist on good treatment. I agree that we should demand support from hardware companies, and moreover they should write the drivers for us. Just releasing the specs isn't good enough.
The others are just as bad if not worse. But that doesen't mean 3dfx is good for our community.
I wasn't endorsing them. Just pointing out that it's unfair to single them out for criticism. Oh, btw, my new machine has a TNT ;-)
There is no way that the V2 produces images that look as good as the TNT or my G200.
When it comes to multitexturing the multipass rendering suffers on the v2 because the blending is done AT 16 bit (go read their docs). This means that when layering images (to achieve certain textures and transparencies) the V2 falls way short in visual quality.
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
But doesn't QuakeIII use OpenGL? Are there OpenGL drivers under Linux for other cards than 3Dfx? I sure hope so, as I would really like to put a Matrox in the new box I'm building...
i agree. and i disagree. if they do market studies, they may not REALIZE why people are ditching their products because the as word travels, the story can change many times over... i still think that well constructed criticism of their policies is in order just to send the message as clearly as possible... Peter
Many Americans become lawyers just because they still don't know what to do with themselves when they graduate from college. "Hmm, I have this BA, which overcomes the main barrier to employment, but I still have no practical skills, and I sure don't want to be a high school teacher or an academic. I don't want to be a secretary or work in advertising, either. Medical school is too hard, and I'm not old enough for business school. Hmm, maybe I'll just try to get into law school and put off the decision for two more years."
You're right, 3dfx doesnt give a rat's ass about linux, all they did is nod their heads yes when the open source thing came around for the xserver, before that the big D was working under NDA's. Lets get real, 3dfx could have had all thier product line (including V3 and banshee) wholly operating in glide and X in linux -last year-, they have the manpower and the money, but they just dont give a crap. I dont see other companies offering this level of cooperation either, and I'm getting tired of rebooting to Window95 (singular, not plural) just to play games, since I too own a banshee.
Trust me- you don't want to be on the other side of the matrix- it takes a lot of disturbing stuff for it to even be visible in this world, man. Did anybody get a chance to mirror the stuff?
Allowing criminal prosecution for a corporation becomes dangerous, because then "innocent" employees and their familes are affected by the actions of others. We can't legally punish someone simply by association. But I agree w/ the corporate bill of rights. corporations shouldn't have all the rights plus some that a flesh and blood citizen has. But, perhaps we can use this to our advantage. The other idea I had was that time spent programming, donating the work to "OpenSource, Inc." could be considered charity and therefore tax deductable..
Good thoughts,
Matt
Well, the proposed corporation could have control over the signing of NDA's and whatnot. if someone wants to develop something under NDA, great, fine, go ahead. but not under OpenSource, Inc. basically it would be a minimalist approach. a corporation that has no capital, no income, no expenditures, but exists to bring all under it's umbrella together as a single entity. Of course, this does introduce the possibiliy that with some legal manuevering someone could screw us all en masse. It's just an offhand idea though, perhaps someone with more legal knowledge than myself can take the base premise and turn it into a workable idea.
I am informed that the company responsible for shutting down Dave's Classics is Sony.
To be fair, this doesn't hinder Linux developers at all. These are OpenGL and Direct3D wrappers, and the only hardware that works with OpenGL (well, Mesa) in Linux is 3dfx hardware working with an Glide->OpenGL wrapper!
Glide is supposedly (don't know, haven't used it) MUCH easier to write to than OpenGL or Direct3D, plus it works better on 3dfx hardware than OpenGL or Direct3d does, to the disadvantage that it doesn't work on other cards (though awhile ago, there effectively weren't any other cards). Plus it works on Linux!
One of the guys who made the things mentioned that he originally downloaded the Glide SDK, read the EULA, and decided that 3dfx would be able to sue him if he made something using that, so he deleted it. Then, instead, he just read all the 3rd-party Glide programming examples on the web, which freed him from the shackles of the EULA. But does 3dfx care? No, they'll still sue him (more likely just scare him into taking it down). What good do cleanroom tactics do if the burden of proof will be on us?
He would, but I doubt he has the legal fees. He's a high school student. And 3dfx has a lot to lose by not going after him, so they probably will, and he'll just give up.
I know people have mentioned how this is a stupid thing for 3DFX to do, cracking down on these coders. I definitely agree with this line of thinking, but not for the same reason.
I think that emulators are a great way for people to get a good look at something they don't normally have access to. People with high-end Voodoo-equivalent cards wouldn't buy a brand new video card anyways, and people with low-end cards get to see what these GLide-programs look like, which gives 3DFX some easy exposure. None of the wrappers are production-quality enough to really give the real thing a run for it's money.
In summary, the people at 3DFX are probably going to get more negative publicity than positive publicity by this move from their prospective consumers. Their hardcore gamer audience probably won't notice the difference. And anyone with an interest in shooting 3DFX down, or keeping the video card people on equal ground, is gonna badmouth them well into the year 2000.
Fork
ATi hardware has an OpenGL ICD available for the Rage Pro. Even though it's still a beta version, I've been using it since before January, with no ill effects.
http://www.atitech.com/betadrv/index.html
Also, ATi's Rage Pro has broken DirectX support, as any DirectX author will tell you. If you've ever played Shogo on a Rage Pro-equipped card, you can tell this right away. (Ditto Grim Fandango, where the Z-buffering doesn't work correctly.)
I don't know about the ATi Rage 128, though.
Fork
According to id, for Quake III, you want a TNT, or a TNT2 when they come out. nvidia has released a full GL driver for win32, and its pretty well optimized. Now they just need to see the light about everything other than win32.
Exactly what I feel too. Someone should create a web-site dedicated to logging hardware- and software-company screw-ups (and "hostile" policies, etc) so we can check that site before buying something to know which products to boycot, and maybe monitor that site to see which stocks are going to drop soon ;)
Think about it....
In America at least (I'm not sure about over here in the UK, but what's that got to do with it?), there is precedent that emulators are legal. Nintendo and Sony can't be both wrong
3D/FX are making a big mistake if they think that this will, in any way help their market share. They have mde all the wrong decisions since the Banshee.
I was certain that I was gonna upgrade to a VooDoo3 but now I'm not at all certain.
ATI Rage Fury actually has some very good OpenGL; better than 3dfx, not quite as good as nVidia. Getting better each week, however =)
Don't forget Permedia, with its P2 chip, fairly good at D3d and very good at OpenGL, though the P2 isn't a consumer game board.
Also you forgot the Matrox G200, which have worse OpenGL than 3dfx, but very good D3d and excellent image quality.
Then there is S3's Savage3d, which is cheap, good at D3d, and has the Metal API.
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Looks like 3dfx cards are to video what winmodems are to communications. Not an option.
:-)
(OpenGL rules!
--The more you know, the less you know.
Umm... I still tend to use Windows for my games.
When a corporation commits an actual crime, it is not the whole corporation who did it. The corporation figures out which of its employees committed the crime and vomits them forth, along with incriminatory eveidence, for the justi^H^H^H^H^Hlegal system to devour. So the DA gets a scapegoat, the stockholders get their business.
For example, you say we dumped toxins in your front lawn? Here, it wasn't us, it was this manager and these two truck drivers. Here's a memo to prove it, and oh, by the way, here is our policy (ignore that wet ink!) that expressly forbids such behavior. It's not our fault, they were disobeying orders!
You're talking about a contractual agreement between 3DFX and developers. If there is no agreement, no EULA, not even a legal notification of what they can and cannot do, then contract law can do nothing. However, intellectual property law could still hang them out to dry. Most books don't come with any sort of legal notice (except a copyright notice, which is legally completely unnecessary). It is still illegal to photocopy the whole thing without permission. It is also illegal to create a work derived from the book without permission.
IANAL (obviously), but if a developer downloads 3DFX's intellectal property, and uses it to create another product, I think that 3DFX could have a case for halting distribution. Not that it's right, or even smart, to pursue it.
When the PC BIOS was cloned, they had a pretty clever way of doing it. It was like this.
You divide your programmers into Group A and Group B and follow this process.
1. Group B studies an IBM BIOS function and determines its specifications.
2. Group B slides the specification under the door to Group A.
3. Group A codes a function to the given specs. 4. Group A stuffs the code under the door to Group B.
4. Group B compares the code from the IBM BIOS and the code from Group A. If there is any similarity, they slide a message under the door that says "Do it again, but do it differently!" (back to step 3)
5. If there is no similarity, they go on to the next function.
In this way, all Group A ever saw was what amounted to an API. Group B existed to make sure that they wrote code that was different from the original, and to serve as a buffer so that Group A could legitimately claime that they were not remotely influenced by the original code, and that their code was therefore not a derived work.
This would likely not have been defensible in court if IBM had patented its BIOS; we would just now be seeing the beginning of a clone market - if, that is, anyone wanted to clone 17-year-old PCs. I understand they make pretty good text terminals...
I wrote this around a month ago in response to some 3dfx reccomendation/defense that was going on on slashdot a month or so ago. It is a repost, but since I posted it late (so nobody read it) I think it is worthwhile to repost, and not spam. Here goes:
3dfx seems to do the same kind of thing that pisses everyone off about Microsoft. That is, they invent something non-standard and substandard -- the glide library -- and force developers to use it if they want valid performance from 3dfx chipsets. And since they have a huge userbase, as they were the only realistic choice for 3d acceleration just a few years ago, they can do it with impudence and a self-assured snigger directed to users of other accelerators.
Sense a pattern here, Slashdotters? That's right, they've embraced modern 3D technology (to the extent that you can call their brain-damaged color depth limit and other bad design 'modern'), and extended it to the point where you have to buy their trash to get said technology in some games. They are, therefore, evil.
As even more proof, take into account this latest thing where they are assaulting makers of Glide wrappers. Remember, these wrapper libraries would only be used by people who ALREADY HAD a 3D accelerator, and therefore wouldn't have affected 3dfx's market share one whit.
This, when combined with the 30% share of slashdot that uses 3dfx trash (via a slashdot poll some months in the past), goes to show how how hypocritical some people can be about issues like "open/free design" and "unfair business practices."
Just something to think about, 3dfx supporters.
A good argument, but remember the fact that 3dfx's glide implementation is 100% faster than their Direct3D implementation, and their OpenGL ICD is nonexistant. That means that for any company that wants to really support 3dfx -- and every company should as 3dfx has ~50% of the hardcore gaming market -- must use glide to get realistic performance. This amounts to shoving glide down their throats, as they have no other means of getting fast and nice 3D to 50% of their audience than glide.
:-)
Of course, a counter argument would be id software, who were powerful enough to make 3dfx write a wrapper to map certain OpenGL calls onto glide. Counter counter argument is easy: many many developers aren't as powerful as id, and couldn't do such a thing. Even if they could, if 3dfx weren't evil they wouldn't have to
And who can forget the genius scheme of putting "3Dfx required" stickers on games that didn't even use Glide... panicing... hell, they're pissing their pants.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
Is there a server anywhere in the world where you can put up stuff and it's immune to legal challenges? Any country that either has no lawsuits or even laws?
www.openglide.antilles anyone?
Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May
Four Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111-4106
USA
nkoenig@chrm.com
415-659-6792
Sincerely,
Nathan Koenig
Same scum for both the tale of woe and the stuff on the underground site. Somebody find me lat/lon coords and ill get a tactical nuke out there post haste.
I wish those hackers spent their time on projects with a better chance of survival. It's their time to waste, but I hope they've learned something.
I disagree. This is not a waste of effort. I hope all you would be coders and hackers emulate this. Code what you feel is intersting and fun. If you get sued, leak your source as quickly and as widely as you can. DON'T HIDE YOUR CODE. Companies and corporations are tied strongly to controlling the movement of material goods. Show them they have no control over what you think and the information you create. Spread everything far and wide. That is why information is fundamentally different from a car, or a house, or a TV.
The whole point of open development is to keep companies like 3dfx from fucking you over when they feel threatened. Every time a corporation hides their inability to compete with marketing and legal wrangling is evidence of a chink in the armor. Don't let them shore up their defenses.
Go for the jugular.
What 3dfx has done is they have dealt with the free software community in a method that destroys the inherent parallelism in the development model. Yes, we have glide for linux, but it is consistently behind what is available for windows. If you are willing to accept that kind of second rate treatment because it's the best that has been offered to you, then go ahead, be my guest. But the sad reality is that they feel that they don't have to deal with our community any more than they already have because they have Daryll working in his free time writing drivers for them.
We cannot let the industry think that this kind of treatment is acceptable. I realize things are changing, but they will only change insofar as we show companies that we are a viable market and deserve the same treatment as other market segments. Even companies that have 'supported' linux for a long time (like id) still release their linux ports many months after their windows ports, and they're still buggy as hell and don't work right for quite some time after that (and yes I know this will be different for quake 3, but that still doesen't change the fact that we've gotten the shaft up until now)
You are right here. The others are just as bad if not worse. But that doesen't mean 3dfx is good for our community.
I'd sure like to see where the glide source code has been released to. Daryll's got it. But if I want to see how they handle something specific, I can't even ask him. It does do us some good, but progress is painfully slow. And if you're thinking that them posting Daryll's port of glide on their website constitutes releasing it, you've got something coming. I think you need to listen to what you're saying, you're starting to sound like one of their marketing drones.
Agreed! Can't be supporting the bad guys, even if it would be the cheap way to get good Quake performance. We'll just have to wait and see for sure what other manufacturers are supported by QIII when it ships.
Why are Glide wrappers important in the first place? Is Glide superior to other 3D standards such as OpenGL or Direct3D? Does it have wider support from application developers?
i say just get a card with GL support.. screw glide, screw all the other API's.. GL was invented for a reason, it covers all the necessary aspects of graphics for gaming, and it can obviously be accelerated very quickly and for a very affordable price.. while i have a 3dfx card, i am looking to dump it for dvd/2d/3d support all in one, as i can't stand waisting 3 slots for what one agp board can do..
What are you talking about? Corporations are fined all the time for breaking the law. In extreme cases a corporate charter can be revoked. Secondly, corporations already do not enjoy the same rights as "people" or "citizens" or whatever. Corporations cannot vote. Corporations can not be drafted, serve time in jail, run for public office, etc... It is true that the Bill of Rights ddoes not apply to corportations, but it doesn't apply to you or me either, only the Federal Government. Corportations = citizen only as a "legal fiction" I believe the law states. Remember, this allows you to sue a corporation as well as the other way around. Of course, I'm sure you wish this was only a one-way street. Sue them all you want, but God forbid a corporation attempt to protect its property.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Saw that one coming. Rob even warned us. So...anyone have a mirror?
This is only about one thing: 3dfx lost their leading position on the hardware side. Before TNT 3dfx had one very distinct advantage over its competitors: speed. Now that the future in this respect doesn't look very pretty for 3dfx (Voodoo 3 is dissappointing, TNT2 is above expectation) 3dfx has only one thing left that separates it from its competitors: a proprietary API. This is an advantage if software companies keep developing titles that are 3dfx-only. Ergo, there are two things that threaten their position:
1 Software developers not supporting 3dfx (Which is not very likely in the near future, as mentioned above, some developers seem to prefer this API and there are quite a lot of 3dfx boards out there)
2 Non 3dfx chipsets working with Glide, because this would lose them their only present advantage over the competition
beauty is only a light switch away
I don't know what all the fuss is about, and I don't own a 3dfx card...
That's actually the whole point. For those who don't own 3DFX hardware, a wrapper allows them to run software targeted to the 3DFX-only Glide API.
This is a handy little capability, since there are lots of people who don't want to buy their hardware for either political or performance reasons, yet would like access to the fairly substantial library of titles which sport only Glide as their 3D hardware interface.
No, there is a concept called fair usage. IANAL, but it basically defines certian activities that you can do without infringing on copy rights. One of those is short excerpts, and theres some other stuff covered for other academic purposes I think. So no, book reports are no violation (so as you don't copy the whole book in the report :)
A copyright does not equate to ownership of the underlying concepts. You can freely use any information contained in copyrighted materials (assuming, of course, that the information isn't protected by other I.P. laws).
"Derivative work" is very carefully defined under copyright law. It mostly applies to fiction, especially the re-use of characters and settings (this seems to be one of few examples where copyright protects anything but direct word-for-word quotes).
"Fair use" generally applies to small portions of directly quoted materials used for reasonable purposes (for use in reviews, rebuttals, and references) and the re-use of fictional characters and settings in parody (for some odd reason, parody is sacred under copyright law, but non-parody fanfic isn't; most fanfic is copyright violation). Note that "fair use" is different from merely using ideas expressed in a copyrighted document (which are not protected by copyright under any circumstances).
I'm guessing but I think XF864 will probably be out in a few months. I can't wait :>
I think one of the other problems with glide wrappers is that they are being used in Nintendo 64 emulation. Perhaps Nintendo is putting pressure on 3Dfx to remove these things, whether they were created legally or not. Whatever the case, this is just another example of the "mean old corporation" trying to cover its assets
These GLIDE wrappers have been around for a bit, and serve the purpose of allowing non-3DFX hardware to run GLIDE-only apps. The January release of the very functional GLIDE-only Nintendo64 emulator caused an influx in GLIDE wrapper creation and distribution.
Most of these wrappers are crap - only a few are worth using. However, if they were developed with the SDK, then the autors are SOL legally; I quote, from the license:
"You may not:
...
3. Use the Materials for for any platform or products other than 3Dfx products;
..."
---
aaron barnes
part-time dork
---
aaron barnes
part-time dork
"I like cheese. Yum."
Methinkseth the priviliges invested in us by the logical, natural, and physical separation of powers that we know as User, Producer, Judge(same as User) must be exercised. Specifically don't get mad at "it", don't get even with "it", move on and let "it" rot.
How bout spinning off a Hardware Interface GPL?
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
voodoo is not 3d only anymore ...
As subjects states, I'm not sure what glide wrappers are but if it is the same as a driver, I'm wondering if it can be compiled to work on linux ppc?
Thanks for any info.
-- remove NOSPAM for actual email address -- Things are not as square as they may seem
G200 on mesa? Is it hardware accelerated? Where do i get it?
The problem with doing this, is that most of the wrappers are not translating Glide to hardware protocol, but Glide to DirectX, DirectX then does the hardware interaction.
That's an idealist viewpoint. When confronted by a corporation, the "little guy" generally does not have the resources, time, or ambition to stand his rights. There are usually more pressing concerns such as the next month's paycheck. Corporations, however, have oodles of money stored away in investments. I heard once that the GM company has more than $20 billion dollars in various places. For these reasons, if a company has to fight a legal battle against the "little guy" it can usually either scare the opponent away, or bleed the unfortunate person dry.
In my opinion, the American government and economy simply sucks. Thomas Jefferson said that when a government started to do things that the people were against, it was time to get a new government. It was this attitude that led him to the American Revolution, and he totally advocated just the same action if the nation he helped found ever lost it's integrity. I support this premise 110%. Unfortunately, I'm just one faceless "little guy" without the resources, time, or ambition to change anything.
===================================== "Better Living Through Hypocrisy, It's The New Opiate" -- Absolute0, on a slogan
The is the only way to change the mentality
of companies like this is to by buy another
product that more seats your needs. If you feel
stongly about this issue, then don't buy a 3dfx product. Nuff said.
Capitalism is a great thing both for the producer and the consumer.
See subject line for more information. :)
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
AFAIK the only board that will initially be supported for Linux Q3 is the 3dfx Voodoo series. I read this in an interview with Zoid (id programmer) about 4-6 weeks ago. Anyone have more up to date info?
TedC
Hindering Linux developers and users is just going to compound their problems further. Don't they understand that their competition doesn't care about Glide?
Matrox recently released 3D specs for the G200; I assume G400 specs will be released as well. It looks like Matrox will continue to be the graphics board of choice for Linux users for the next 6 months, unless NVIDIA repents and does something wonderful. :-)
TedC
dang it, I keep forgetting to log in...
Here's a link to a Matrox G200 project, but it doesn't look like they've really gotten started yet.
reality.sgi.com/ripperda_ engr/glx/matrox_news.html
TedC
While I certainly agree that the way 3dfx
is unsupportive of anything but Glide(R), etc.,
the programs as listed at glideunderground.com
do go against the EULA of the Glide SDK, and this
is illegal. As I read this site, I get the impression that the author's own efforts with
clide, which is a clean room implementation
of Glide, was done because he didn't want to
get in trouble for breaking the EULA.
So 3dfx has every right to request the removal
of those files. And just because a company
acts unethically as 3dfx appears to have done
with this situation, it does not give anyone
else the right to break legal contracts in order
to acheive better goals.
The better solution for those bothered by this
would be to have petitioned 3dfx to be more open,
or contact the makes of big games (id, Valve, etc)
and petition them to *not* support 3dfx unless
they become more open, and to possibly contact
the bigger press at large to alert them to these
issues. 3dfx's financal and market position is
very fragile right now, and a bit of bad press
such as the propriatary nature of 3dfx Glide(R)
can be bad -- and can possibly cause a quick
change of heart at 3dfx.
IMO & IANAL.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
There's a shift in 3Dfx focus from being a tech company into one that depends heavily on marketing. A few years ago, they started the whole cheap 3D accelerator market and they are now getting fierce competitions from nVidia, S3, and ATI.
It seems clear to us now that 3Dfx has responded by pouring more money into their marketing instead of the R&D dept. There was an article on tom's hardware about marketing programs that rewards hardware review sites for pushing 3Dfx products. Also the recent announcement of their support for linux which was purely a media stunt.
This latest move of shutting down the underground site is quite moronic, IMHO. I own a TNT but I was able to dabble with Glide precisely because there's a wrapper available. Since 3Dfx is already losing their market share, this move will assure they'll lose more mindshare.
Heh.. at least it'll be easier to choose between TNT2 and V3. Well, it actually depends on who would have a linux driver available first... which is not hard to guess.
try Jack's Chipset Comparison Guide. Personally, I have a i740, so I don't know much about the high end stuff. (It was the cheapest way to get OpenGL ICD support (on Windows) and has a fairly decent closed source driver for XFree86, so I'm not complaining.
What kind of contortions did we all end up going through just to get Riva support for X? Have we seen a single thing from them for Mesa yet- other than "we're working on something..."? Well, they've been working on "something" for nearly a year and a half now (That's when they told me that same thing....).
Matrox, even though they took their sweet time to get it out to us, kept their promises and released the register level specs to their chips in the G200 family. There's work right now from several groups to make 3D support from the G200 possible under Linux.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'll give it a shot, and discuss some other things.
.35, much overclocked, etc.). :). Our main man Omar at Matrox tells us the G400 is 3x as fast as a G200. That would be pretty frikkin' fast. I'm not sure if there are mini/full-GL's for these boards. :). We never heard from S3 nor saw a Savage3D again. Now they're back with the S4. It's supposed to have bump I think, but I have never actually tested either board. D3D at least, I don't know what else. G200 Xserver is out there.
Cards 1st:
3Dfx Voodoo/Voodoo2/Voodoo3: Glide and D3D. Linux support via Glide. And there is a mini-(quake)-GL for playing GLquake, both under linux and win32. Voodoo2/3 support dual texturing. Voodoo3 is really just overclocked SLI'd Voodoo2's on the same board. We measure the exact same speed with a V3-2000 against 2 Voodoo2's, except that the V3 can do 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, which the SLI'd V2's can't.
Note: these boards are so fast that the limitation on poly count is floating point power of the CPU. Those V3's can fill something like 60fps in 1600x1200. The only limitation is how many poly's you can set up with your CPU. My celeron450a doesn't come close to the limit on my SLI'd V2's. I'm not sure what I can say on 3Dfx's next generation board, Napalm, except that it'll be really cool. Now if Glide/Linux worked on the Alphas, that would be far out. Anyone ever try it?
nVidia RivaTNT/TNT2:D3D, tho X servers exist (you can use them as 2D cards in Linux, as I'm doing now). The TNT is about as fast as a Voodoo2 running D3D. But Glide is twice as fast as D3D, so the Voodoo's still have an advantage. QuakeGL's exist for these as well as for the older Riva128 (about as fast as a Voodoo1). TNT2 has received favorable reviews, showing it's about exactly as fast as a Voodoo3 in D3D (at least the one I saw). There remains some debate. I hope to get a TNT2 in a few weeks and answer the questions for myself. BTW "TNT" stands for TwiNTexel, i.e. dual texturing. My understanding is that the TNT2 is a TNT on steroids (.25u process instead of
ATI Rage128: pretty fast, I'm waiting for mine to arrive so I don't know how fast. Is now standard issue for PowerMacs. D3D, QuakeGL, and a couple of Mac-specific API's no one cares about (what, me, biased?). Will continue to be a very important board, since ATI has key OEM deals. You can expect this board to be pretty much standard issue with low-end PC's, much as the old RagePro was.
3DLabs Permidia3: Unknown quantity. Will support D3D and presumably a full GL since 3DLabs really makes high-end GL boards. The Permidia2 was originally like the FireGL 1000 from Diamond or something.
Matrox G200, G400: The G200 is a respectable D3D board, about 70% as fast as a Voodoo2 by our measurements. The G400 will rock, and have crazy bumpmapping features. We're trying to get a G400 before E3 (www.e3expo.com), and we have to promise Matrox that we'll write bump mapping support by E3
S3 Savage3D, S4: The Savage3D seemed like a decent board when we saw it at E3 last year, but we could only run about 5 frames of Fire and Darkness before it locked up. Alpha silicon, kinda buggy
Rendition V2200: Saw this at E3 last May. Supports D3D and RedLine, Rendition's own API. But they disappeared completely and we have heard nothing from them.
I think that's everything important.
Now: why Glide? And why do I think 3Dfx has a case here? Because 3Dfx didn't intend Glide to be an API for everyone else. Glide was their weapon against the bloat of D3D. And those developers who chose only to write for Glide made a decision about their software that these wrappers violate.
D3D is crufty. D3D is slow. The tiny subsets of GL supported to run Quake are not enough to do every game, and due to M$'s attempt to fsck GL on win32, they really link on top of D3D, so they're extra special slow.
Glide is not the answer, IMHO. GL is supposed to be the standard. Blasphemous as it is, To blatantly steal a line from Scherer, I really criticize id and Carmack for this one: id had the leadership position to demand that full, fast GL's be written for all major hardware and platforms. Instead, they chose to ask for a crufty, id-specific quasi-GL blob, useless to anyone except them.
No wonder developers choose to write for nice, clean Glide. It's easy, relatively friendly (or at least straightforward, since it's very low level), and literally 2x as fast as D3D.
But how much would it take for these companies to put a few coders on writing full GL's for win32 and linux? Look how much good it's done 3Dfx -- they're way out front as far as developer loyalty. And they've now got their own in-house guys doing Glide/Linux. In this case, trusting M$ when they say "oh don't worry, we'll take care of the API" is a really bad idea.
#1
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Are glide wrappers available natively for the Mac and Linux?
Some Mac games only supported the choices of 3Dfx or no 3D acceleration. The ATI card used in the new G3's is an excellent card, but unless the game takes advantage of RAVE3D, QuickDraw3D, or OpenGL once the beta drivers ship.. naturally I want these cool effects enabled for games that only did 3Dfx modes.
#2
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Regarding the Win32 Glide wrappers, and gameplay under VirtualPC.. does anyone know if there would be an advantage to it under VirtualPC for the Mac?
If you hve a "real" 3Dfx card in a Mac, and you run a 3dfx-enabled game under the emulator, the video calls are remapped directly to the Mac driver instead of being emulated. It's supposed to give much better performance for things like Quake II.
If I understand this correctly:
1) Glide wrappers redirect 3dfx calls to non-3dfx hardware, essentially "fooling" software to thinking you have a real 3dfx card so you can enable "3dfx-only" features.
2) The Glide wrappers support the ATI Rage 128 at least on the PC.
3) Does this make sense where I am going? I can test this myself but are there any toold to "detect" if you have 3Dfx? I could always eyeball a game to see if it looks faster but this is not accurate.
3dfx are LONG TIME supporters of linux. I guess you guys would rather support the windows-only crowd.
Maybe 3dfx has commited a sin, but among the card manufacturers, they are probably the LEAST deserving of a boycott from linux users. It seems ridiculous for us to boycott the only 3d card maker that supports us.
1. No Linux 3D driver, No sale for me. 3dfx has provided drivers (albeit proprietary) for Linux for a _long_ time now. They even pay a guy to write 3d drivers. NVidia just says "bugger off" on the 3d part.
.25 micron, really, this time).
2. Recent reports on the hardware sites tell of NVidia lying _again_ about the TNT2's processor clock speed. It seems Tom and the rest of the bunch got overclocked boards. The actual clock speed of the TNT2 will be 125Mhz, not 150Mhz. They pulled the same stunt with the first TNT. At least this time they aren't lying about the fabrication process,too(
The whole 3D accelerator industry is cutthroat and crooked. One must choose between which company stomps all over ethics the least and provides what you, the consumer, desire in a product. For most Linux users wishing to play Quake under Linux, the only choice has been 3dfx. And that is why I'll look beyond the Glide wrapper thing,( which has UltraHLE written all over it, check dejanews and see why people _really_ want Glide wrappers ) and get my Voodoo3 as soon as they arrive at buycomp. ( Daryll's said that the new server shouldwork with Voodoo3, nothing like a trial by fire-the source is out there!)
Sorry, 3dfx. Your days are OVER.
I was considering buying a 3500 (I use an SLI rig) but not anymore. Glide is no longer worth the investment as good game designers realize writing for one driver is not beneficial to the bottom line.
So you attack the developers of third party wrappers because YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW your upcoming product is INFERIOR to the competition in regards to visual quality.
32 bit won, and your still playing in a 16 bit world, beating on people who can help promote Glide but instead you sick your 2 bit lawyers on them.
Get real. You're out of my system when TNT2 comes out.
//
. * Did aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
I think, under certain circumstances, the officers of a corporation can go to jail when the corporation loses a court case. Maybe they have to be explicitly named in a suit for this to happen.
At my last employer, my boss was named the new V.P. of IT and specifically declined to be made CIO. He was worried that the company could get sued (there was already at least one lawsuit in progress against it) and he could get named as a co-defendent and be made officially liable for something.
Personally, I'd like to see more corporate officers behave more those in Japan and take more personal responsibility for the actions of the company; after all, they are the ones setting corporate policy. When their (Japanese) company screws up big time, they resign... publicly... at a big new conference... and in tears.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
- They haven't learned that the more of your APIs people adopt, the better.
- Their packages claim OpenGL compatibility, but they have never delivered on many of their products.
- Their strategy for the next generation 3Dfx chipset seems a bit greedy, too.
- There are better chips around these days.
If 3dfx were the only game in town, this might be worth fighting. It might not be all that hard either: it seems pretty questionable to me whether they have a legal leg to stand on (in particular in Europe, where the ability to re-implement APIs is actually considered a right).But there are a lot of other good 3D graphics board vendors out there. If 3Dfx doesn't want more developers and users of their APIs, let's just buy different boards and use more standard APIs.
The thing that troubles me about this mess is, you're not supposed to be able to stop anyone from interpreting your language! Oh, yeah, IANAL. As, I recall, this was all hashed out in the early '90s during the great Look 'n' Feel lawsuits. In the Lotus 123/Borland Quattro suit, the court ruled that you cannot sue your competitor for making a product that responds to your command language, even if you invented it. IIRC.
This 3dfx bullshit (that's what it is, so sue me if my language singes your virgin ears (oops, there I go again)) looks to me like exactly the same situation. They may restrict people from using their SDK, but going after "Clide" or any other totally reverse-engineered interpreter is crossing the line.
This one solution, but I don't think it would give all the benefits provided by a corporation specifially for protecting Open Source Programmers. Especially if it were incorporated in another country. I imagine many companies would just start ignoring the little people if they had to bring a lawsuit against a foreign corporation.
Also, as far as legal defence, imagine if we could get 1000 people to donate 50$ each (tax deductable, of course. I think there is precedent for donating money to a charity that will turn around and use that money in your legal defence if needed.) to OpenSource, Inc.. 50k$ for legal defence. perhaps per year. Add into that lawyers who are willing to work at substantially reduced prices for non-profit corps. and we've got a very robust solution. A disclaimer. I make no claim that I know anything about this. it's just some random cruft off the top of my head, but it may have potential..
Matt
a) A letter posted on tomshardware.com indicates the following... In addition, we will favor sites that provide "integration" with our banner efforts . http://www4.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990226/ index1.html
b) They have been consistantly loosing out the reviews against NVIDIA's TNT2 based boards. Again a review posted on Tom's site can be seen on http://www4.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990312/ index.html
I am a proud owner of one of the original Voodoo boards and was seriously considering getting a new Voodoo 3 for my new PC. However, this episode and their virtual refusal to support OpenGL ICDs has convinced me to wait till I can find a good stable NVIDIA based board.
Time to start shorting their stock :->
Shri
It may be a stretch, but I'm wondering if some sort of class action lawsuit against 3dfx might be possible in this case. There are a lot of people out there who are, from a legal POV, being damaged by 3dfx's policy. Last time I checked, there were some pretty definitive legal precedents (e.g. the legal battle between IBM and PC clone manufacturers who had to reproduce the functionality of the BIOS) that held that APIs are not proprietary and are not intellectual property. 3dfx's SDK certainly is their IP, but that's not the issue.
It's obviously possible to develop a glide wrapper without using their SDK. Their legal ground seems to be pretty shaky on this one to me. The problem is, how can high school or college students afford to fight them in court? I say either a class action lawsuit by the potential users of the wrappers, or maybe look to the EFF for help. How about emailing their Director of Legal Services.
Randy Weems
Since when has 3dfx supported linux?
3dfx has never as much lifted a finger to our benefit. All the glide porting and such was done _independently_ by Daryll Strauss in his free time. Under and NDA I might add. Apparently they think their intelectual property is more important than our freedom and ability to use their hardware.
You might say that they are good because they release specs to their hardware. I say bullshit because the only specs they've released are those to the 2D chipset in the voodoo banshee, and only _after_ Daryll had ported XFree to it. Still nothing else.
If they did actually release specs when they were useful, then we would have glide running on the voodoo banshee. But as it is, the only person able to do that is Daryll. I have this little theory that if 3dfx knew what was good for them (which they obvoiously don't) they would have hired people in house to do this long ago, and we would all be running voodoo banshees for 3d modeling and such. But no, they've got their collective head rammed so far up their ass that it's not possible for them to see the light.
When all else fails... Litigate
Well I know one vendors whose products I won't be
buying for a very very long time.
Alan
OK, so is there a list of which graphics cards use which technologies and the characteristics of them?
Unfortunately, GLIDE is just about the only game
in town (presently) for support of 3D hardware
on Linux. Other projects are being worked on,
but are not *production ready* yet. Personally,
I am keeping a close eye on GGI3D. Mesa, an
OpenGL clone, is available for Linux but has
limited hardware acceleration support (mainly
using GLIDE). Direct3D is availble only on
Windows and is a poor imitation of OpenGL anyway.
The Bolachek Journals
It's getting worse. One of the major points of MAI, I believe--I know it was in a treaty, I just don't remember which one--would have allowed corporations to sue national governments for perceived loss of revenue through such actions as protection of the environment or protection of the citizenry of the host country.
--
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
There's hints that it was a hardware manufacturer that closed them down.
:-/
Freedom is dead. We're all workers for the queen bee now. Reality sucks - can I join the Matrix?
Methinks one of the main reasons for the World Bank is to open up countries to the influence of rotten corporations like Microsoft, 3Dfx and so on.
a copyright or a patent.
Not strictly true, I think. An "End User License Agreement" is exactly that - a contract that the user has to agree to before they're allowed to use the software. Because the user is "voluntarily" accepting the terms of the contract, software companies can put pretty much anything they want in there, and it will be binding. If the customer doesn't like it, they can use a competitor's software instead.
AFAIK.
Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)
We (alt.software inc.) released an OpenGL-to-D3D wrapper based on Mesa code fairly recently (with source etc.). This should allow any card that supports hardware D3D acceleration to accelerate OpenGL applications. YMMV, but from what I've seen it works reasonably well.
You can find it at
http://www.altsoftware.com
(click on "OpenGL"), or read about it at
a href=
"http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.ht
http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.htm
(look for 2/23/99 under the "Developer" section).
And yes, I am too lazy to cut-n-paste! So it is appreciated (if done right
Thanks. I feel very silly now. I think that's 3 out of 3 times that I've made a typo while mentioning something that our company has done. Let's see how long I can keep this streak going O:).
http://www.opengl.org/News/Archives99/Feb99.html
(look for 2/23/99 under the "Developer" section).
I find that the recent trend of Corporations suing the "little guy" to be deeply disturbing. For all of it's potential, the American legal system has fallen quite far from the nest of individual freedom and liberty that it was founded on. Let's not forget that many of our laws and freedoms were in direct response the heavy handed monarchy that we escaped from. How is our current situation any better? Instead of the king of england, we now have faceless corporations, supposed to be a single legal entity under law (just as _any_ citizen is supposed to be) rising to power and using their near-limitless resources to stop the actions of those, who, in many circumstances, are promoting their brand name and public awareness without asking for a single dime in return. A corporation is (to my understanding) A way to insulate owners and employees from damages resulting from the actions of the corporation as a whole. This should not be a get out of jail free card. this concept does not sit well with a lassaiz-faire (sp?) economy. It basically allows and corporation to break the law (or at least bend it, and abuse it) and face little or no consequences, because, as we all know, it's bad for government to interfere in the private sector. Perhaps the Open Source community should band together and form a non-profit corporation under which programmers can "officially" volunteer their time and skills for the corporation, then, and legal challenges would go up against that entity, and it would insulate the individual from legal damages, as well as making it much harder for the "unenlightened" companies to continue their behaviour as of late.
/dev/null.
Sorry for rambling, this just really jerks my chain. Contructive criticism always welcomed, flames to
If you're referring to APIs, here's a quick scoop:
3DFX users have: Glide, Direct3D (mostly), and OpenGL (partially)
NVIDIA users have: Direct3D, OpenGL (mostly) and Glide (with a wrapper)
Rendition users get: Direct3D, OpenGL, and RRedline. (There's also an old broken Glide->RRedline wrapper)
ATI hardware runs: Direct3D.
Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)
Everything else in the consumer space is pretty much beneath radar.
Something I never understood. Companies are regarded as legal entities--essentially people--for most legal purposes. They get the rights guaranteed for "the people", and in most civil law are considered as people. Why, then, are they immune to criminal prosecution? Why can a company get a fine for something that you or I would get 20 in the pokey for? Why does a corporation enjoy more legal rights and priveleges than a flesh-and-blood citizen? There are two ways to resolve this one. The first is to declare that a corporation is a citizen, and can be tried, convicted, and punished for felonies and misdemeanors. When a company commits a crime, it literally does the time--perhaps with a shutdown. A seven-year sentence gets split between the employees and served as time that the company cannot engage in business. The inability to sell product for a month or so is an excellent deterrant in most cases. The second remedy is to specifically state that a company is not a person, and does not enjoy the same rights and priveleges as a "person". That is, the Bill of Rights and similar documents do not apply to corporations. Perhaps another bill of corporate rights needs to be made; perhaps not. Of course, the problem with this is the nature of that bill of corporate rights. I'd be waiting for "Congress shall pass no law exposing a corporation to civil action from a person"...
--The basis of all love is respect
I've been following some of those projects for awhile. Early on some of the authors noted that at least one of the SDK downloads didn't come with the legal docs, essentially not binding them to any sort of legal red tape. As I recall 3DFX was notified of this but never changed the download. Now these authors are having lawyers call upon them? It would seem to me that if 3DFX did indeed allow an SDK to be downloaded without including any sort of legal notice that they've given up any ability to go after these guys - assuming that's the SDK that was used for their project.
I'm a big 3DFX fan and have really enjoyed my last two VooDoo purchases but if 3DFX isn't careful they're going to aggravate customers such as myself and lose their competitive edge. I believe it's time they opened up the GLIDE API and supported wrappers. This way the API would continue to be supported by software manufacturers and would likely have a speed edge on their hardware over emulated hardware.
Does 3DFX really think in this competitive environment that they can act like a bull in a china shop? Oh yeah, they did sort of cut off Diamond and the other companies didn't they - I guess they do feel that way.... (sigh)
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