leileilol wrote:
And yes, 3dfx's rise is something that needs context to understand. When Voodoo launched, the 3d accelerator market did not quite live up to the name 'accelerator' 😀
Yup, Verite and RRedline really slowed down 3D opertions. What was nice about Voodoo was that Glide was a subset of GL, using only the real-time effective operations, and that subset ended up being small enough to implement completely in hardware. That was also the source of later limitations in the API (16 bit color, and small texture sizes among them).
I still think it's crazy that Sega *almost* went with Voodoo2 as the graphic subsystem for the Dreamcast. The US team wanted 3dfx, JP team wanted NECs PowerVR CLX2. What really scotched the deal with 3dfx was that they let the deal with Sega slip in an SEC filing, and that *pissed* SOJ off badly.
In hindsight, I'm glad they went with NEC. Compare arcade games based on Naomi/Naomi2/Hikaru to the ones that used Voodoo2s, and it's pretty clear that SOJ made the right choice.
/Did any arcade games use the Quantum3D Obsidian Bricks? I don't think I've seen any of those first-hand. I vaguely remember talk of using them in rendering /visualization, like Sony did when they gang-banged multiple EE+GS boards into a box, ostenably for render farm work.