I'm no expert but aren't the other hardware components important as well, especially back then? CPU, pci-bus-speed, ram etc?

I think the other components are well up to spec. BX board, 900 MHz PIII, 512 megs, 98SE. It's really just those few D3D titles that made me notice those lag bouts.

Multitexturing extensions in particular

Ii also remember GPolice running smoothly even on PCX2

G-Police unplayable? It came bundled with the Creative Voodoo 2 card and from how I remember it ran well even on my Pentium 166MMX with Voodoo2.

I think he's saying that G-Police was unplayable in Direct3D on the Voodoo 3. Glide is a different story.

Hmm well I gave the two games a quick try on my V5 5500 in single-chip mode. They ran well... certainly better than what I remember from V3. Pretty mysterious...

Same system?

delete me

Yeah, same system. I think I have to correct myself about running in 640x480 though, I was probably doing 1024x768 in G-Police... been a while since I tried this. Also I have DX9 installed on that computer, but I don't think that has anything to do with bad Direct3D performance just on V3 😀

Also OpenGL wasn't really present with acceleration for gaming until GLQuake came in Jan/March 97. Direct3D at least had some exposure with Hellbender in mid-96.

The G-Police slowdown problem i'm betting has nothing to do with the resolution. A Voodoo2 can handle it smoohtly, it was one of the first games I saw on that card running full speed

Well if no one can replicate that issue I'll file it under my memory playing tricks on me then 🤣 ...at least until I try these games on V3 again.

D3D was pretty sad initially. It was extremely painful to program. D3D 5 was the first version that was reasonable, because of the DrawPrimitive API.

I think OpenGL really started to die with Direct3D 6.0. Direct3D 5.0 was good, but most people were doing Glide back then. With Direct3D 6.0 you had much more mature cards like the Riva TNT, Rage 128 (correct if I'm wrong on this one), G200 so devs started to support DirectX a lot more than before.

opengl was ported from professional SGI graphics workstations, so no doubt its far better than direct3d in their early days. however there were also some major drawbacks that eventually edged it out:
1. it was not designed to be a game oriented 3d api.
2. most consumer video cards failed to provide good driver support for it, maybe except nvidia, and ati took a long time to improve their drivers.
3. its far behind d3d in updating new 3d features.
d3d started as a crappy api but kept improving, and by the time of d3d9 it was good enough to edge opengl out.

In my experience, OpenGL is still superior even much later. Those few games that didn't use Direct3D after the rise of the Xbox seem very optimized compared to Direct3D games with similar graphical fidelity. A good example is Chronicles of Riddick against FEAR.

Well, I did some further testing on this with later D3D6 applications. The applications are some fairly obscure but not demanding games (for a V5), of which the most notable is perhaps Turok 2.

The symptoms are comparable to what I described for G-Police on V3: The games run with decent framerates, but while moving or turning it just slightly stutters. This behavior is far more noticeable on higher resolutions; in plain language, that means that getting some ancient D3D games in 640x480 to work without hitches is no big problem, but contemporary D3D6 programs in 800x600/1024x768 (some also even in 640x480) just suck. It doesn't "feel right", if that's a comprehensible category.

This is all in relation to Glide gameplay, where I get far more coherent (and of course overall much higher) framerates even in games such as Unreal. With "too" demanding settings/resolutions (lots of FSAA etc.), it just plays with a lower framerate, but in a somewhat more uniform fashion; still far more enjoyable than the D3D stuttering. To sum it up, Glide really "just works". OpenGL was generally no problem too, I played through Quake II and Hexen II on V3@1024x768 with the ICD and had nothing to complain about. Didn't test any more OpenGL stuff besides that though.

On a further note, Turok 2 in D3D6 had noticeable glitches, which were absent in Glide, but that's more of an individual game thing I reckon. Generally speaking, the Direct3D image in any title that also supports Glide looks bright and washed out in comparison to that.

From my testing I can only conclude that there are four possibilities:

1.) D3D performance on 3dfx cards sucks in relation to its competitors from the time which were rather more dependent on the API, and I would not get any of these problems with, say, a TNT2 Ultra.

2.) Early D3D just generally sucks with contemporary cards and I would see all of this on just any card from that time.

3.) It's related to my monitor or something arbitrary like that. I don't see how this could be when all Glide titles are running fine. Maybe due to being able to set the appropriate refresh rate with Glide contarily to D3D...

4.) The cause for this is my DX9.0c installation, and, say, default Win98SE DX6.1 or DX7 would work fine. Well, I may give it a try with DXBuster when I ever feel like it. Fortunately I'm not really after Direct3D titles which are better played with Glide anyway, it's just more of a curiosity type of thing...

I would not call d3d6 an early one. This is such kind of issue that can be deep in a driver. Voodoos needed gamma correction, their default was quite above others. I recall d3d refresh setting in 3dfx control panels- at least some of them.

Direct3D 6 was probably the first Direct3D version that was actually good. Even Direct3D 5 was amazingly primitive compared to 6.

No refresh settings in the panel. Just "Refresh Optimization", which did nothing. Latest stock drivers for either cards. Refresh rate is ususally set in the individual game, only for Glide.

Well the issues described here are just from my personal testing and may not apply for anyone I reckon. I'm quite sensitive to unnatural stuttering etc. as that ruins the game for me, but others may not notice it 😀

Also note that the issues are so far mostly in games that have different renderers to choose from. D3D only games do not seem to have these problems quite as much so far.