Wow! This really is excellent news!

Do they have a homepage yet?

yes, a good new, I can´t wait for the new drivers. 8)

Any idea when will the first-beta-not-public-yet driver set be out?
I'm fairly intrested in seeing how does colourless' and koolsmokey's glides work as one.. should be neat.

Last thing I've heard is that Kool is very busy at it...

But I haven't heard anything of a Release Date (which is actually good, since 3dHQ did show the Announcements are practically not the way to go)

I bet new stuff will just be released when it's done...

http://pub43.ezboard.com/fx3dfxfrm1.showMessage?topicID=14660.topic

wrote on 26.04.03 at 05:51:04:

The new Glide files, I'm working on it with other members of Glide SourceForge. Be patient and give us some space to breath. You must understand it takes time to create something new. regards, KoolSmoky

Here is also something:
http://pub43.ezboard.com/fx3dfxfrm1.showMessageRange?topicID=14690.topic&start=1&stop=20

Wonders never cease (Although it's not my quote...).
First question: will anyone think to solve the problems of the Voodoo Banshee? Especially in D3d. Also a good help for all the Voodoo users would be to design an independent set of d3d to glide wrapper. This would give the best quality on any voodoo. And even more the support for all cards to have a little help from CPU, if the CPU is not fully used. Agp texturing, even in the form of a simple driver part to lie on texture memory available and do this by using part ram part vram to store the textures... most of the insuficient texture space problems would dissapear.


Here it begins a little more tech stuff:

Remember, one of the big problem with how it looks in games is mostly related to the maximum texture size of 256x256. And this leads to washed-up textures and some of them looking better than others.
For example Quake3. This game is using a large amount of texture memory, which leads to some textures on the wall to look extremely well, in contrast with some of the floor tiles or the places where animation is already done (hole in floor where a blue light appears to shift from left to right).
I conducted a major set of experiments with the problem on texture memory usage, and speed. The biggest test was with NFS5 running in glide (for an unknown odd reason all of the voodoo cards, except for Rush and Voodoo1 are using normally the d3d. And their crappy explanation like it looks better on d3d for voodoo cards, good joke), and there the texture memory usage was begining to show up.
I changed the texture memory allocation from 4Mb to 12 Mb. At 4Mb, good speed and no visual problems. As doing test after test and hitting the 12Mb, problems start to show up. Even if speed was not lower with more than 15% compared to 4Mb texture memory, some polygons wouldn't have a texture on them, and most noticeable, all the effects like alpha-blending where looking horrible.
So 11Mb was the maximum quality that can be achieved on the Banshee (Voodoo3 falls in the same cathegory with the texture memory limits, for those with 16Mb). Also, of interest is that I tested more versions of glide, and discovered that a specific version was showing the best quality possible, and all seemed very clear and crisp.
The test showed up that for a game in 2000, even in glide, 16Mb texture memory is a problem. And all the boards, including the Vooodoo4 and Voodoo5 are limited to the problem with displaying on screen only things that are on the local video memory.
So, I would like you and others to understand that most of the problems with games after 1999 is texture memory. And no voodoo card can do AGP texturing. The solution to most of the problems with voodoo's would be to design a sort of swapping driver that can be totally transparent to programs, and fool them that they have 32Mb of texture whereas it's 16Mb Video Ram and 16Mb system Ram, and allow for maximum speed for textures to be transferred. I know this is not impossible, I heard of a special mini Opengl builded for Quake1GL that could make the game to play at more than 18 frames/second on a Voodoo graphics (voodoo1) with just 2Mb of VideoRam. And this is amazing.
Also, another problem would be to implement on the little driver that would interface to both Directx and OpenGl, a method on how to fast compress textures on System Ram when they are loaded, and then let the video board carry on with calculations and show them as they are, compressed. Even more I would go to the chance that the driver should be able to track all the textures the video card is receiving and store them in a file on disk. Then a program should be able to compress the textures in there if necessary, or mostly important to let them all come into the system memory and be rightly available for the video card to pick them up, avoiding the problems related to where they should be, and how they are accessed. The program should be able to transform each texture stored in the file on disk, to standard formats like 256x256 or less or more, as it is possible. The video card when getting rid of these calculation (which takes the most time) would be able to work very close to how it worked in it's good years.

Long live the good things. Could ever imagine that even now I keep as a proof of good computer technology a well maintained Zx-Spectrum? It's 2003, and the computer it's from 1991. Even more, the same thing will happend to my super socket 7 AMD K6-2 450Mhz with Voodoo Banshee. And luckly, I still use the Zx. The Banshee would go the same good way, never to be thrown out...

Good luck to all of you involved in this project, and I hope that you will have the power to keep it running and make it succed !

Andrei.

On the Texture Memory Problem :

I'm not sure about the Banshee, but all Cards from Voodoo3 upwards seem to have 'backup' ways to tackle this problem :

For example, in 3D Mark 2000, 3dfx cards can do the 64MB Texture Memory test (even a Voodoo3).
Performance at that point is down to a crawl, but either the Engine, or the Driver already has the capability to swap even extreme amounts of Memory.

Same with UT2003, which will run even with very high Texture settings on a Voodoo4 or 5. Again, the drastic breakpoint in performance shows when Texture swapping begins, and can quickly slow performance quite dramatically.

Another observation (Large Textures) :
I used to play around with an old 3D Screensaver (OpenGL), that simply took the Desktop picture, stuff it into a Texture, and use it for 3D.
Amazingly, the Voodoo3 even accepted 1024x1024 Textures (the Desktop Resolution at that time).

Only problem that was more than apparent, was that (again, either the Engine, or the Driver) took an extreme time to convert/filter the oversized Texture downto a usable 256x256. This process took several seconds (!). Once it was done, though, everything was back to normal performance.

The Image now displayed in the Texture was 256x256, but looked completely Antialiased (alot of subpixels were used for filtering), so that details were blurred, but still visible (text was still readable).
---------------------
These are effects which I never fully understood.
The Cards basically were and are doing things that they basically are not supposed to be capable of.

I could tell that they worked reproduceably, but am still today unable to fully explain a) why they work, and b) what was responsible for the fact, that they work.

As said in another Thread, I believe a 'dirty' 3D engine doing no capability check for those features (Multitexturing, Texture Size, Video Memory) can initialize/use all those effects even on uncapable/limited Cards, yet they work (possibly by workarounds Driver-sized, with a hefty performance hit obviously).

Only those Engines, who correctly detect the missing caps, and logically reduce the 3D Effects/ Level of detail, usually cause upto, and including severe loss in Visual Quality, or fail/deny to initialize alltogether :-/

Can't proof that this is 100.0% correct, but was the only viable Explanation I could give to myself over the years...
-------------------------
3D Analyzer was on its best way to do exactly that (at least for Direct3D), but seems it is not being developed alot anymore :(
The concept, however, would have worked for all API's, and would have indeed even allowed for Full, Partial (substitute Rendering techniques), or NUL-Rendering (as currently implemented for most functions).

Yes, you are correct. It's still amazing that the Banshee is capable (along other voodoo3) to show all the demo on 3DMark 2001 even with the chance of running out of texture memory!
But again, for example NFS5 is a bacward example along Quake3. Both seem to force the video card to show some textures at the right dimensions, where others are limited to less than 128x128, when the original ones where 128x128 or more...

I have been a fan of KoolSmokey's Glide version for a while now and have heard good lings about GlideXP so combining this knowledge can only be for the better.

3dfx lives on!!!

But will anyone make new Glide applications?

I was just interested in what enhancements will a new Glide driver produce?

If no games are written for it wouldn't performance increases be minimal?

Yes, the Performance increases are of course mostly minimal, and restricted to the existing, old Games.

The biggest improvements are probably the Tweaks to Visual Quality, and the possibility to sqeeze a bit more Performance by the use of MMX and SIMD CPU features.

The latest Glide Games (like Unreal Tournament) however, can benefit quite a bit I reckon. The more complex the Glide Graphics, the more of an advantage you get :)

As far as iv'e seen, a voodoo3 doesn't like *complexity* too much..

Yep, too bad noone realized a working "G-Compression" yet (Geometry/Triangle compression).

Tesselation like N-Patches or Truform, done as a Driver hack to melt (reduce) adjacent Triangles during Triangle setup (before being sent to the Card to render), would be a blast :)

Sort of a Geometry LOD Bias setting ;D

Honestly falcon, where did you learn this stuff?

Each time i read your post i feel like a complete idiot.. you use words that are beyond my understanding.. did you go to a 3dfx uni or something like that?

*g*

No, these are just Ideas my mind comes up with...

And/or maybe I've been chewing through 3dfx Advanced Options and all the other Graphic Card Tweaks existing for too long ;)

All modern Graphic Cards contain a vast amount of performance- and Visually enhancing features.
One 'could' snatch those, and reprogram them to serve purposes that 3dfx Cards could make very good use of, due to their special situation...

* bites himself, because he stopped Programming many years ago :P

Hmm...a Transform and Lighting daughterboard for the V5500 and V6000 would be REALLY cool!!! 8)

Drool... :P

Just thought I'd elaborate since we were all creating fantasy addons... ;)

Still, I'll say it again...drool... :P

Id'e rather see 8x FSAA and 16x Aniso filtering on the v3 ^_^

Yep, they still had this Function even in modern AGP Cards (at least it was visible in the Driver).

Anyway, everything is possible in Software, yet only a question of performance (and someone talented enough to pull it off)...