It's only needed for the 3dfx cards before the V3, because those are secondary video devices that need an explicit minidriver to work, and minidrivers were the only GL drivers 3dfx had ready until later on by Banshee and V3.

miniGL was a mini-subset of OpenGL functions, the bare minimum to make Quake engine play. That was for a time when consumer video cards didn't have a complete OpenGL support, so making a partial implementation with only the functions needed for games made sense.

So, if you card have true OpenGL support you don't need nor want to install a miniGL driver.

OTOH, Quake was sometimes shipped with miniGL or 3Dfx DLLs. To make sure that Quake is using your card OpenGL and/or Glide DLLs, go into Quake folder and rename/delete opengl32.dll and glide*.dll (only the ones that are into Quake folder, not the system wide ones!).

That clears up a lot, thank you both for replying!

You need them to run OpenGL games on Voodoo 1/Rush/2.

MiniGL is technically still the fastest option for any Voodoo. Although image quality is worse.

With regards to the Voodoo 3, I did some testing on this rig using Quake 2 + official patch v3.20 running at 640x480 with and without MiniGL 1.49. Results:

• default OpenGL selected under Video options (no MiniGL) - 80.6 FPS
• 3Dfx OpenGL selected under Video options (using MiniGL 1.49) - 103.3 FPS

I ran each test three times in a row and recorded the highest score. That's a fairly big difference in favor of MiniGL on the Voodoo 3. That said, I did notice that the image seems brighter and the colors look more "washed out" when using MiniGL. Are there other visual differences between the two options besides this?

Are there other visual differences between the two options besides this?

Particles are filtered differently.

MiniGL looks substantially worse to me.. It is probably cutting corners in the filtering department.

- Washed out gamma
- Particle filtering
- Mipmaps are more blurry

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-12-27, 23:00:

- Washed out gamma
- Particle filtering
- Mipmaps are more blurry

Not to mention scan lines with V2SLI. The way it's supposed to be 😁

Scan lines are irrelevant, because V2 is working with Vsyns on by default.

Not those scan lines...

kolderman wrote on 2020-12-28, 01:26:

Not those scan lines...

I never really noticed them while gaming to be honest.