Hoping wrote on 2024-04-23, 22:33:
So in the end GLide had no relevance for the future because the APIs that lasted didn't take advantage of anything from Glide, I'm a little disappointed considering how much people talk about the wonders of GLide, what made GLide different from other APIs proprietary features of the time was the union of good features, good performance and more exclusive games.
But in the end it was nothing more than another proprietary API that remained in the past because they wanted to monopolize the market even though there were bigger players, especially Microsoft, which promoted D3D very strongly, being a more open API, and OpenGL, which was also more open and had a strong professional market; while only 3dfx cards could use GLide, although I don't know if 3dfx would allow others to manufacture chips that could use GLide, I imagine not, since with the purchase of STB their path was completely the opposite, they only thought of a monopoly that was only in his dreams in light of what happened.
I just realized I've never thought about it this way, and now I find it disappointing, how 3dfx couldn't see where things were going when Nvidia released TNT.
I think you are approaching this from the wrong perspective.
DirectX/3D was a platform-dependant, hardware-indepedent attempt to forward MS interests in an all encompasing development environment for Windows and Windows only. Games being a part of the ever growing multi-media experience was a big selling point and a pivotal component of Windows then.
OpenGL was/is a platform-independent, hardware independent specification that vendors could create hardware for, and developers write against. It was governed by a collective (OpenGL ARB), of which Microsoft was actually a member in the early days. It's remit, was to provide an industry directed specification for 3rd party vendors to implement which has to cater to all disciplines and industries, not just 3D 'multi-media'/games.
GLide was a hardware-dependant, platform-independent API for 3dfx hardware only. 3dfx came up with the hardware, and in order for 3rd parties to use it there needs to be an API. Originally 3dfx did license GLide hardware for the original Voodoos (hence all the difference Voodoo 1/2 manufacturers), but then for whatever reason decided to take all hardware manufacturing 'in-house' via the STB acquisition. So all along, GLide was designed to be tighly coupled to 3dfx hardware, not to be some all encomposing industry standard API... it just became 'industry standard' briefly due to the popularity of the Voodoo.
Also, it's probably relevent to remember how and why 3dfx came about... it was founded by ex-SGI engineers (who already had experience and knowledge of IrisGL and OpenGL so knew exactly what "TnL" was), they spotted a gap in the market for cut-down hardware focusing on texturing and rasterisation which could be optimised for low-poly, high-fillrate, fast, textured graphics (aka games). The hardware processing of the SGI's Geometry Engine (which traditionally performed 'hardware' transform), was something to be rid of in the pipeline because it's expensive silicon which, while helpful for pushing large vertex sets and meshes (required in CAD/CAM/Simulation etc), was overkill for low-poly scenarios. What gamers wanted was "high res" (relatively speaking), good looking, repsonsive polys on the screen so things like texture filtering, multi-texturing and fog effects are suddenly a lot more important. This started pushing API's and hardware in a slightly different direction to the all encompasing, complex, expensive hardware to satisfy the OpenGL spec.
Later, some developers wanted to break out of this GLide/DirectX vendor lock-in so decided to use OpenGL, however given the reasons above, most of the features of GL were not required so "MiniGL's" could implement the limited OpenGL calls and features that some games used. This allowed hardware vendors to support OpenGL games without having to provide a full/complex OpenGL spec ICD (hardware and software).
I will also add that all this hardwrae TnL pantomine is a by-product of the PC/DirectX world. As mentioned the "Geometry Engine" was a dedicated hardware subsystem which performed MVP operations on 'grouped' vertex sets (display lists) from almost day 1 on SGI machines. Arcade hardware such as Sega's Model 1 and Namco system 21 also did this in hardware via their custom ASIC's (but had very specific requirments and closed development environments).
OpenGL being a specification, doesn't mandate what should be hardware accelerated or not. The implementation is left for hardware vendors to implement and provide via their ICD. Also being an open, industry lead specificiation, it attempts to satisfy requirements from many different disciplines and so not only it was very difficult to provide entire full-spec OpenGL implmenetations, in doing so there was a lot of baggage with a full-spec OpenGL ICD, so the API design became a limiting factor in performance for games.
As with everything though, processes mature and requirements evolve... this also happened with games suddenly wanting more detailed meshes, higher vertex counts and better control on a per-pixel basis (shaders) which meant that hardware TnL and programmable stages suddenly became, not only cheaper to implement in silicon, but acutally mandatory. This kinda was the opposite of 3dfx's initial strategy, and if anything meant that consumer gaming hardware design was now converging on the original principles that 3dfx circumvented in order to grasp it's original market.
