1.no doesnt sound as good and only a vortex 2 will do a3d 2.0
2. depends on the game
3. opengl games generally look identicle to glide games
4. 3dfx used a mingl they didnt support all the opengl commands, but enough of them for games

rumbadumba wrote:

- what's the relationship between glide and opengl? Is/was glide a subset of opengl (or am I getting confused by the opengl32.dll from 3dfx)?

3dfx's OpenGL implementation (MiniGL) was a very thin wrapper around Glide (it didn't implement all calls, MiniGL basically was a subset of OpenGL used by GLQuake).

rumbadumba wrote:

Some things have been puzzling me, I wondered if someone more knowledgeable could help (I think I maybe knew the answers once upon a time):

- do modern sound cards with A3D support do basically what an Aureal Vortex 2 would do?

Modern sound cards doesn't support A3D 2.0 while Aureal Vortex 2 does, so it all depends on the game. If the game demands A3D 2.0, it will definitely sound better on an Aureal Vortex 2.

On the other hand, I don't think there are too many games demand A3D 2.0. I wish there's some sort of list out there.

rumbadumba wrote:

- my perception was that glide rendering often looked better than directx rendering (eg. diablo 2). Does that make sense? Does it depend on the game? What about opengl vs glide?

If the game support both Direct3D and GLide, usually the GLide version looks better.

In Diablo 2's case, 3d cards at the time had slow texture caching/upload for Direct3D and voodoo hardware was still popular to use in 2000, plus there's the fact that Diablo 2 was in development since 1997 so Glide technology adoption was quite early and more mature than their own whatever-late-in-development Direct3D renderer implementation

The Unreal engine games hardly made a difference between Glide and D3D.

Though one really strong difference performancewise is Tribes. Tribes was really slow in OpenGL at lightmap texture uploads even on very good hardware

Does Diablo 2 use A3D 2.0? Can't tell from web searches - all I have found is that Aureal said it would before it was released, but all the actual software says is that it supports Aureal 3D.