by Zup » 2007-11-18 @ 21:58
I guess it's not exactly something in the hardware...
Glide is a propietary API, so only those who have the permission of 3Dfx may program a driver that supports glide for a given card. Back in time, 3Dfx used that to their advantage... the SDK was free so any company would make glide games, but if you wanted to play that games you had to buy a 3Dfx card.
On the other hand, any hardware manufacturer could do drivers with full Direct X and OpenGL support, so those two APIs spreaded more than 3Dfx. Later, nVidia bought 3Dfx, so only 3Dfx and nVidia cards would have glide drivers... but nVidia never was interested in supporting glide APIs.
Today, no new 3D cards have native glide support, but there are some glide emulators (dgVoodoo and Glidos for DOS games, and Openglide, eVoodoo and some others for Windows games).
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
I'm selling some stuff!