![]() If there's problems with connector standards, software side of things, multithreading making it require third-party complexity, then that's a problem of those connector standards, the software, things like the LCD monitors themselves trying to be too smart and add delay, etc. ![]() We could write to buffers at 60 Hz effortlessly with computers from 1999, speeds have increased more than enough to write to buffers at 120 Hz and more, even with 16x more pixels.ġ/120th of a second is a huge amount of time in CPU/GPU clock ticks, more than enough to compute a frame and write it to a double buffer to swap, and more threads should make that easier to do, not harder: more threads can compute pixels so pixels can be put in the buffer faster. I don't buy that it has to be this complex. I mainly game using Wine/Proton on Linux now by the way. I've always seen D3D and OpenGL existing side by side, performing very similarly in most games I played, and supporting the same cards, with GeForce cards etc that came later. Note that by OpenGL here I meant OpenGL using the Riva TNT (I assume the Voodoo card drivers must have been called Glide or 3DFx in the settings). Maybe being 1999 it was just a little bit too late to still fully appreciate 3dfx and modern day D3D and OpenGL took over around that time, so I just missed the proper Voodoo era by a hair. when choosing in the game options, the D3D or OpenGL options had less glitches, better looking translucency in Unreal, etc., than the options that used the voodoo card), and in addition the Riva TNT supported 32-bit color while the Voodoo 2 only had 16-bit color and had this awkward passthrough. I found the Riva TNT to work much better than the Voodoo 2 for the main games I played (e.g. The main games I played were Half Life and Unreal 1 (in addition to various games that came bundled with hardware like Monster truck madness and Urban Assault). One of the places "Open Source" could make a huge impact on the world would be in "standards." It isn't quite there yet but I can see inklings of people who are coming around to that point of view.Īround 1999 we had a PC with both a Riva TNT and a Voodoo 2. This is an old lesson (think Rail Gauge standards as a means of preferentially making one company's locomotives the "right" one to buy) and we see it repeated often. Microsoft created a system whereby not only could a GPU vendor create a new feature in their GPU, they could get Microsoft to make it part of the "standard" (See the discussion of the GeForce drivers elsewhere) and that incentivizes the manufacturers to both continue to write drivers for Microsoft's standard, and to push developers to use that standard which keeps their product in demand. The lesson though, is that APIs "succeed", no matter what the quality, based on how many engineers are invested in having them succeed. Microsoft pushed D3D to support their own self interest (which is totally an expected/okay thing for them to do), the way they evolved it made it both Windows only and ultimately incredibly complex (a lot of underlying GPU design leaks through the API into user code (or it did, I haven't written D3D code since DX10). I see it a bit differently, but there is a lesson in here. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. ![]() ![]() In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it. My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap.
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