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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.
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
----------------
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
---------------------
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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