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API
Glide is based on the basic geometry and "world view" of OpenGL. OpenGL is a very large library with about 250 calls in the API, many of which are of limited use. Glide was an effort to select those features that were truly useful for gaming, leaving the rest out. The result was an API that was small enough to be implemented entirely in hardware. That hardware was 3dfx's own Voodoo cards. This led to several odd limitations in Glide — for instance, it only supported 16-bit color.
Use in games
The combination of the Voodoo's raw performance and Glide's easy-to-use API resulted in Voodoo cards generally dominating the gaming market from the mid to late 1990s. The name Glide was chosen to be indicative of the GL underpinnings, while being different enough to avoid trademark problems. 3dfx also supported a low-level MiniGL driver, making their cards particularly popular for players of the various Quake-derived games. MiniGL was essentially a "different Glide" with a wider selection of OpenGL calls and lacking the dedication to a single hardware platform. Due to the Voodoo's "GL-like" hardware, MiniGL on Voodoo was very "thin" and ran almost as well as Glide.
Demise
As new cards entered the market, 3dfx managed to hold the performance crown for a short time, based largely on the tight integration between Glide and their hardware. This allowed them to be somewhat lax in hardware terms, which was important as the small gamer-only market 3dfx sold into wasn't large enough to support a large development effort. It was not long before offerings from nVidia were able to outperform the latest Voodoo cards using standard APIs. 3dfx responded by releasing Glide as an open source API, but it was too late. By late 1999 they announced that almost all games had moved to Direct3D, and to a lesser extent, OpenGL.
Wrappers and emulators
Today, some old games supporting Glide can be run on modern graphics cards using one of many available Glide wrappers, with various degrees of performance. For example, see the two screen shots for Need for Speed II SE to the right of this article. The first is non-glide and the second is using a Glide wrapper (dgvoodoo).
dgVoodoo
- dgVoodoo (uses Direct3D for rendering, DOSGlide support)
zeckensack's wrapper
Wrapper emulates the Glide 2.4 API and a beefed up Voodoo I card. It uses OpenGL for rendering and supports SSE and 3DNow! optimizations. Wrapper has also preliminary support for the Glide 3 API. To work, it needs a GeForce or Radeon graphics card. However, based on the hardware used, wrapper will work in one of three fidelity modes, where tier 3 is the most accurate.
Glidos
External links
