Glide only managed to exploit it's toehold post Voodoo1, due to MS screwing the pooch with DX4 and not delivering the API cards were designed for, that made everyone cautious about DX5, and when that didn't get screwed up and was modest success, all piled in on DX6, then as DX7 released, Glide was opened up. Was that too little to late or a response to being in a losing position?

So had things gone other ways, MS not learning lesson and messing up DX5, glide might stay on top, and possibly get licensed out, staying closed maybe until well into noughts. Or if MS had not screwed up on DX4, they might have opened it sooner... meaning it might have picked up momentum from 3rd parties like S3... maybe SiS.. using it. So it could have gone different.

So yeah, in the forest of hardware, we find a stick, *swish swish* if it had broken off shorter it would be shorter, if it had broken off longer it would be longer, but that is the stick we find.

Even if Microsoft had continued botching Direct3D for longer, a device-neutral standard would have eventually won out.

At the time, MiniGL was really the closest to taking the crown. It started gaining traction early on thanks to Quake, which is why 3dfx made a Glide backend for it.

John Carmack refused to support Glide directly in Quake, because he was done supporting all these vendor-specific APIs. id Software had already burned their fingers on that by initially targeting Rendition's proprietary API while they were developing Quake, and they wanted no more of that.

Quake was considered the state of the art at the time, so naturally id Software had influence over the industry on the side of API adoption.

A clear game-oriented subset of OpenGL, call it MiniGL or whatever, with a clear specification and backing from id Software, would probably have made all the difference.

See also the "MiniGL Specification" thread.

I guess one "advantage" that you could confer on Glide over both OpenGL and Direct3D was that it also supported DOS. But the 3dfx Voodoo 1 came out in 1996, which was during the waning days of DOS gaming, so that became less and less relevant very quickly.

digger wrote on 2025-01-03, 22:44:

See also the "MiniGL Specification" thread.

Very interesting thread. I need to learn more about miniGL.

Thanks for the replies and the next thread will be a summary about 3dfx and its downfall.