Glide & NVidia...

Preacher

Preacher

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Statement: Recently, 3Dfx was bought out by NVidia. They acquired all the rights to 3Dfx's patents/properties, etc., in the process.

Question: I was wondering if anyone can tell me if "Glide" (3Dfx's proprietary API) has been worked on at all since the buyout. In other words, can anyone tell me if NVidia has released any drivers for THEIR boards that will allow them to work with Glide?...

I have a number of games that run/look best in Glide (like WCP), and was wondering if I can get them to work on a NVidia board by using Glide. (I'm gonna upgrade my system one of these months, and will probably trick it out w/ a GeForce 2 card). This would be a most tasty proposition, and it seems to me it would make a lotta sense for NVidia to DO so, as it would allow them to draw in a lotta old 3Dfx customers to their recent products, for wider appeal and more gaming satisfaction overall.

Anyone?...
 
I seriously doubt that nvivia will release anything of the sort. They would have to create a whole new card. Which they MIGHT do, but I doubt that too. What they are trying to do, is weed out the Glide system, so that their system, can become the true standard. Because, until recently, game developers have had to make two versions of their games, Glide, and OpenGL. Now, they only need to make one. (and then D3D too) It's just alot easier. But hey, who knows......................... Maybe the day they release a new 3dfx compatible board will be the day we see a new WC game!
 
I once heard (not a reliable source, so I don't know if it's true) that one of the reasons nVidia aquired 3DFX is because it allowed them to adapt Glide to their own cards (not the other way around).
I doubt that if such an effort would ever be made that it would be compatible with the old Glide versions though, so then you'd still need to use D3D for WCP.
 
If I remember correctly, Glide is a command set built into the processor. So, if your processor doesn't already have it, adding drivers to your system wont give you glide capability. You would have to change your hardware.
 
Then you remember incorrectly :) I mean hell Glide and OpenGl are apparently so similar that if nVidia so wished they could wrap the Glide commands onto OpenGl in no time
 
but you would have to get a new processor which means a new board which means another card. you can't software upgrade a hardware compnent unless it is flash upgradeable. and i don't thik graphics cards are software upgradeable.
 
Well they could create a wraper specificaly for there cards and add it to there detonator releases or you could hunt for a glide to opengl wraper yourself.
 
Glide and OpenGl are effectivley just programming languages telling the card what to do, not how to do it, a wrapper translates these commands, nothing difficult :)
If an effect is missing from the card it can't be wrapped otherwise there is no problem (and there are no effects missing in this case)
 
Wrapping is essentialy emulating Glide Commands, something voodoo 5 was already doing with old style glide commands.(it was phasing out glide itself, and leaving everything to new hardware commands, so as to use OpenGl, and D3D, in higher settings)
 
Glide always was a wrapper. A wrapper takes commands from one instruction set and converts them to the other. Glide takes function calls from applications and sends the appropriate hardware commands to the Voodoo card.
nVidia can, because they own Glide, just rewrite the Glide dll's to send the respective commands to their cards. There's no extra layer necessary.
 
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