rarely has a company rested so hard on their laurels as 3dFX

Whatever, Glide was amazing! So much so that Nvidia bought them.

I remember what a huge difference it was having a dedicated 3D card capable of fast 2D and 3D vs the software rasterizer. Yes, NovaLogic games ran better. Yes, you can play Doom at decent FPS. Yes, SpecOps ran at full monitor resolution. They had a LOT to brag about.

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Sohcahtoa82 a day ago | parent [-]

Glide is precisely what made me hate 3dfx and was glad they died.

As a developer, I'm sure Glide was great.

But as a kid that really wanted a 3dfx Voodoo card for Christmas so I could play all the sweet 3D games that only supported Glide, I was upset when my dad got me a Rendition Verite 2200. But I didn't want to seem ungrateful, so my frustration was pointed to 3dfx for releasing a proprietary API.

I was glad that Direct3D and OpenGL quickly surpassed Glide's popularity.

But yeah, then 3dfx failed to innovate. IIRC, they lagged behind in 32-bit color rendering support as well as letting themselves get caught with their pants down when NVIDIA released the GeForce and introduced hardware transform which allowed the GPU to be more than just a texturing engine. I think that was the nail in 3dfx's coffin.

	▲	reactordev a day ago \| parent [-]
		lol, agreed. Today, Glide feels like a predecessor to OpenGL. At the time it was awesome but as soon as DirectX came around along with OpenGL it was over. 1999 was the beginning of the NVidia train. Thanks for the laugh about your disappointment with your dad. I had a similar thing happen with mine when I asked for Doom and him being a Mac guy, he came back with Bungie’s Marathon. I was upset until I played Marathon… I then realized how wise my father was.