The most broken card by far is Alliance ProMotion AT3D.
But you asking about Open GL support. Video cards with official Direct 3D and Open GL support are generally support them properly. Early d3d cards mostly lacked OGL drivers and used mini GL libraries or Open GL to [some 3d API] wrappers.

This may be worth checking out, if you didn't already:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOeoPVvEK8 … jha40s4vWKrjRHk

The aT3D wasn't that broken and a 1997 accelerator, not really the first one at the end. Maybe the early ATi Rage was closer to it.

Do mobile chips count? Trident 9525 was a bad one. Some of the driver releases had D3D support disabled by default. Also, S3 Virge MX.

Hi,
Savage4 LT is also a contender
Unreal menu is not displayed correctly (DirectX mode)
The game itself looks good, other games, for example, Quake2 work without problems
Number Nine SR9 SD
Win98, driver ChroMetal45_9xme

Disclaimer: I was 8 years old when this happend.

The worst experience I had with 3D was Forsaken running on an unknown Soltek mainboard with K6-2 500 and a Riva 128ZX (or TNT?). Objects where stretched and displayed incorrectly.

So the PC went back to the store and my parents contribute more money and trade it for an Athlon 700 + TNT2 M64. The mainboard is a Gigabyte GA-7IXE.

Years later, it could be just a driver issue, since Forsaken just supports the card.

Still have that system, running stable.

(Knows this is about discrete cards/graphics. Cannot contain the emotional outrage. Posts OT anyway.)

At one point, I had an otherwise fantastic Thinkpad, that had good dos sound, and a nice LCD, but the fucking thing had a Neomagic Magicgraph video chipset, which had directx support, BUT NO 3D FEATURES AT ALL.

I had to cheese it with anything that wanted to render to a D3D interface using SwiftShader.

It was awful.

As for grunky 'actually 3d featured' cards, some of the cards from the 90s rendered with quads instead of triangles, and did real strange stuff when their preferred API was not called.

Postman5 wrote on 2024-11-15, 14:20:

Hi, Savage4 LT is also a contender Unreal menu is not displayed correctly (DirectX mode) The game itself looks good, other games […]
Show full quote

Hi,
Savage4 LT is also a contender
Unreal menu is not displayed correctly (DirectX mode)
The game itself looks good, other games, for example, Quake2 work without problems
Number Nine SR9 SD
Win98, driver ChroMetal45_9xme

its all the driver's fault that the savage4 didn't do well, s3 had never been able to develop proper 3d drivers from the start till the end. but other than that its a decent card, at least much better than the previous savage3, which in turn is far better than virge, and even the virge is probably still not at the bottom.

Probably the original S3 Virge 325

- perspective texturing is super slow
- no blending functions
- no alpha modulation
- very strange depth precision issues
- no stencil/depth ops (that i know of)
- no alphatests
- tries to dither alpha'd out texels 🤣

PD2JK wrote on 2024-11-15, 14:37:

Disclaimer: I was 8 years old when this happend. […]
Show full quote

Disclaimer: I was 8 years old when this happend.

The worst experience I had with 3D was Forsaken running on an unknown Soltek mainboard with K6-2 500 and a Riva 128ZX (or TNT?). Objects where stretched and displayed incorrectly.

So the PC went back to the store and my parents contribute more money and trade it for an Athlon 700 + TNT2 M64. The mainboard is a Gigabyte GA-7IXE.

Years later, it could be just a driver issue, since Forsaken just supports the card.

Still have that system, running stable.

cmon, riva128 is a cult card for me. not only that its nvidia's first successful card, it had also been the fastest card for a short while until voodoo2's release.
the riva128 is also the second fastest of all first generation 3d cards(those with single rendering pipeline), only behind the matrox g200 which was several months later and more expensive.

noshutdown wrote on 2024-11-15, 15:11:

PD2JK wrote on 2024-11-15, 14:37:

Disclaimer: I was 8 years old when this happend. […]
Show full quote

Disclaimer: I was 8 years old when this happend.

The worst experience I had with 3D was Forsaken running on an unknown Soltek mainboard with K6-2 500 and a Riva 128ZX (or TNT?). Objects where stretched and displayed incorrectly.

So the PC went back to the store and my parents contribute more money and trade it for an Athlon 700 + TNT2 M64. The mainboard is a Gigabyte GA-7IXE.

Years later, it could be just a driver issue, since Forsaken just supports the card.

Still have that system, running stable.

cmon, riva128 is a cult card for me. not only that its nvidia's first successful card, it had also been the fastest card for a short while until voodoo2's release.
the riva128 is also the second fastest of all first generation 3d cards(those with single rendering pipeline), only behind the matrox g200 which was several months later and more expensive.

Yeah sorry, maybe I was a bit off topic then. It wasn't the card. Just a bad experience which could've been solved with a newer driver.

Direct3D is easy, choose any of the following: ATI Rage, Number Nine Imagine 128-II, Matrox Millennium. They all claim Direct3D support, but are missing critical features (no Z-buffering for the ATI Rage, no texturing for Imagine 128-II and Millennium). At least for the ATI Rage it has about 30 games out of the ~200 or so I tested from 1996-1998 that function to some extent where it's borderline playable, while the other two can run 25 and 19 games respectively and have a unique exception: Independence Day and Moto Racer 2 fall back to software HAL emulation that I cannot replicate on 2D accelerators or any other 3D accelerators. I've been meaning to post a thread about these cards, but other projects are getting in the way. S3 Virge 325/Alliance AT3D/Trident 3dImage975/Cirrus GD5464 are not even in the same league.

3DFX has one of the most disappointing OpenGL ICDs that I've ever seen for anything up to Voodoo 3. You'd think ex-SGI devs would know what they're doing for OpenGL 1.1 compliance, but the amount of corners they cut is absurd when you go outside the boundaries of the same four benchmarks of Quake 1/2/3/Unreal that everyone does and actually do proper unit testing (protip: FOSS games with Win98 builds are excellent for this). The Voodoo 1/Rush/2 "ICD" is a complete joke and always requires copying the ICD as opengl32.dll to game folders to get it to even do something, if it doesn't shit the bed. I don't own a Voodoo 4/5 so I can't comment on those.

The SiS6326 ICDs (the "Java" beta and AOpen driver) are unique for two reasons - The Java beta reports itself as OpenGL 1.0 according to Minetest, while the AOpen driver reports itself as being OpenGL 1270-compliant, I never knew there were that many revisions of the OpenGL spec! Compatibility is marginally worse compared to Voodoo Banshee/3 with the AOpen driver, I haven't fully tested the Java ICD in detail.

3DLabs Wildcat cards are the only OpenGL cards with >1.1 compliance that has overall terrible support when it comes to games - it falls outside the scope of being primitive, but it's an amusing thing to note as the Matrox G200 ICD runs rings around it.

DEAT wrote on 2024-11-29, 04:33:

3DFX has one of the most disappointing OpenGL ICDs that I've ever seen for anything up to Voodoo 3. You'd think ex-SGI devs would know what they're doing for OpenGL 1.1 compliance, but the amount of corners they cut is absurd when you go outside the boundaries of the same four benchmarks of Quake 1/2/3/Unreal that everyone does and actually do proper unit testing (protip: FOSS games with Win98 builds are excellent for this). The Voodoo 1/Rush/2 "ICD" is a complete joke and always requires copying the ICD as opengl32.dll to game folders to get it to even do something, if it doesn't shit the bed. I don't own a Voodoo 4/5 so I can't comment on those.

according to brian hook, the situation with V1/V2 is because these are add-on boards and shipping with an ICD would "hose the system's primary display device's ICD", as he put it. when your main card might also come with its own ICD, copying over the file to use the voodoo seems like a sane solution. and Q3 lets you switch in the settings menu anyway.

then supposedly, their ICD is a wrapper to glide3, so maybe they had to cut those corners to get overhead to a reasonable level. i don't know of any other game before Q3 that used OGL but had no miniGL support, and CAD type stuff was out of the question for V1/V2 because they didn't support rendering in a window. the miniGL reduced overhead so that's what you wanted anyway for games, which is easy to forget now when everyone uses these cards with 1ghz+ setups.

finally, the FOSS games you refer to are probably from the mid-2000s. with something ~5 years later like that you might have better luck with using the mesafx ICD. with games of its time, i've never noticed any issues with the V3-V5 ICD, besides obviously higher CPU overhead. IMO, what's much more worthy of calling out are the completely broken 9x drivers that nvidia put out across their product range - for instance, i once went through every major gf2 gts driver and none of them is able to render ut2004 to reference, despite that being essentially a d3d7-class game. or the benchmark cheating stunts that ati pulled with the 8500.

The only terribly broken i've noticed about 3dfx's ICD are in the handling of clipping areas. Some versions of the ICD had busted clamping. There's also the required behavior of forcing the window to the top so it doesn't render partially

FOSS games tend to ignore the v1/v2 icd because SDL doesn't care!!!! (SDL actually has the functionality but no one ever uses it.). A custom SDL build that goes to 3dfxVGL.dll and forcing the window at 0x0 would probably solve a bunch of issues (though not the issues of the lack of optimization and tech art mistakes in contributor free-for-all matters of videogame - the ABA games are probably the safest bets to try as far as the hardware this thread is concerned.)

auron wrote on 2024-11-29, 21:39:

i don't know of any other game before Q3 that used OGL but had no miniGL support

Return Fire II, Starsiege Tribes, WWII Fighters, Descent 3