Creative ports Glide

Taliesin writes "From this ZDNN article: The new technology, dubbed Unified, will allow games written to run on 3dfx graphics accelerators to also run on competing boards made by Creative Technology Ltd. ... Creative's new technology basically acts as a phrase book, allowing Microsoft's DirectX programming interface to understand Glide commands. DirectX, in turn, accesses the accelerated features of Nvidia's TNT family of chips. "

Comments

TNT has different bottlenecks

[Sludge]

I am assuming at this point that the performance will be quite different on the TNT. When the OpenGL renderer for Tribes was being designed, one of the main things that held it up was the fact that the engine works by downloading textures to the card when the player even just starts to turn his head around when he is outside.

The first generation 3Dfx could handle that. The TNT could not. The 3Dfx and TNT have different bottlenecks. Although these bottlenecks still apply for OpenGL games, there is the fact that games written with GLide are not designed for other cards, regardless or not of whether they work with them. This has been like that for all of the past titles, and will most likely be like that for a while in the future, even if GLide is now to catch on as a standard.

Speaking of standards, Microsoft has no qualms about adding very high-level features to the HEL of Direct3D. I saw some info about DX7 having the ability to stream light through a window and have it radiate through. With features like that and NURBs, it will be the API to fear if cards try to move its features from the HEL to the HAL. Nonstandard features and proprietary. Carmack mentioned something about proprietary NURB APIs being A Bad Thing.

Re:TNT has different bottlenecks

[dracosystems]

Hmmm. Our system is being used by a game company to try out a new idea, but it's also already the basis of a commercial app that does surgical training simulation for Drs. One of the main reasons we use openGL is that we can do things "correctly", i.e. the patient model lighting we provide is basically a crude approximation of what the Doc will see when they stick a needle in a real patient, albeit real patients aren't see through.
John Carmack at id uses openGL to do things we wouldn't dare, such as the lightmaps, as his needs are different than ours, and nobody is going to put dead demons or players on the operating room table. But openGL satisfies us both.
DX on the other hand has many of these "clever tricks" to do things like streaming light through windows, but places much less thought and emphasis on the general issues of rendering realistic images for a wide variety of tasks. Do you want to be operated on by a Doc who got any of his training on something optimized to do gore and explosions ? And even in the submarket they court, there are some knowledgable people, e.g. Carmack, who still tell them to stuff it.
What amazes me about the DX product are two specific issues.
1) The mantra at Microsoft is framerate,framerate,framerate. Good mantra. Unfortunately, they feel this justifies them in adding internal logic to deliberately degrade the geometries they have been given in order to maintain framerate. Thats the deal in their new focus on curves, to maintain framerate, __not to increase visual quality__. Lessee, we have apps for Docs, soldiers, and others who really really really don't need this. And I'm sure id isn't thrilled about having many ducats invested in their artwork, and loosing control over the tradeoffs on responsiveness against visual quality. Hey, we're supposed to know what we are doing. If msft wants to sell tutorial aids, thats fine, but some of us carry high development expenses specifically because we wish to make those decisions ourselves. Hence we tend to like openGL.
2) MSFT went out and hired Jim Blinn (making obligatory obiesiance now to the great Blinn), and put him in their advanced R&D area (I think). Last summer he talks about the 10 things still undone in CG, and delivers a pretty specific complaint about clever but narrow and unstable tricks used to improve visual realism in a narrow range of applications. He even gently points the finger at 3D games. Does Microsoft seem to pay any attention to him. No! I personally find that disgusting.
Summarizing, I guess I'm saying that as long as msft puts their efforts into stupid optimizations like this, to paraphrase the cryptogeeks, you can have my openGL libs when you pry them from my cold dead mind. It does seem some daze that msft is willing to go to that length, WGL is apparently doomed now.

Um, yeah?

[johnus]

Sure, the Glide UnderGround people do this, and they got lawyers sicc'ed on them hard, and it doesn't make any press. But now that Creative does it and its all okay?
Thats real funny.

Where are 3dfx's lawyers? Oh yeah, they're all too busy fighting a bunch of college kids that had this idea first to take on another company that can actually fight back...

Good Thing or Bad Thing

[Cysgod]

It's good that users of other cards will be able to run 3dfx games. There is a risk however that this will encourage game developers to be lazy and just develop for 3dfx and assume that everyone can just patch their way into making it work for them. Making 3dfx a defacto standard. That would be a Bad Thing.

However the momentum behind OpenGL currently should hopefully fix everything for anyone by providing an open standard that everyone can participate in. That would be a Good Thing. Compatibility is great, but people must more fervently pressure game developers to avoid 3dfx and their proprietary nastyness.

-- Cysgod