Quote:Well, I never saw a Glide Reference rasterizer in Action then, as the only time would be called into action, would be when running Glide on a card with limited or no Hardware support.
(running glide Versions exceeding a Voodoo Card's hardware support always fails with an error Message, and I never saw Glide run natively for any non-3dfx Card)
IHV's I would (speculative) translate into "Industry Hardware Vendors", not sure...
Well that's got it's place in my topic, here my story :
I bought the NV40 because, it has everything an Voodoo5 or Rampage has, things like Motion Blur, Soft Shadows, Depth Of Field Blur, Soft Reflections, Rotaded Grid Full Scene Anti- Aliasing, and I could really gon on for days
but ofcourse there was one little thing missing, and that was the famous API alias --> Glide.
My plan was to try and get MesaFX working on my NV40 mabe even the I could let the application detect an invisible Voodoo card,
This was my questioN:
Anyway is it possible that I could get MesaFX running on my 6800 for Glide apps?here's dborca's answer on that:
i got it that you think mesafx will give you an invisible voodoo card in your machine? hmmm... interesting! what should be your choice, then?
mesafx doesn't care much about the underlying hardware, so as long as you get your glide dll going, mesafx will run. how to do that? there are a number of wrappers around (a very good one here http://www.zeckensack.de/), but then again, why use mesa on top of it? mesa gives you opengl, and nVidia is the king in that area...And then I came with this as a reaction:
What I thought about this was, because the ex-3dfx engineers that worked and spent lots of time about the design of the FSAA for the NV40, that gave me an idea to try Glide and MesaFX on the NV40.
The M-Buffer of the good ol Rampage has also been placed in the architecture of the NV40 things like Motion Blur, Depth of Fiel Blur, Soft Shadow, Soft Reflections and so on.
Ondeed nVidia is The King of OpenGL, so Glide should be a worthy try.
The only thing that is missing is Glide, it should be possible with MesaFX's Glide32.dll I was thinking.
I still had hope, and Zeckensack's sort of Glide Wrapper was the finishing touch.
For easy words Zeckensack calls it a Glide wrapper, but it looks more professional than a normal Glide wrapper,that program was the sollution that Glide was possible on a NV40 based card.
and that's where I learned more about Glide, which came in this reply from dborca:
nVidia does not have a Glide-like low-level interface. it was 3dfx proprietary, yet the API was public. i don't know what went wrong, but it was never adopted by other companies. perhaps it was so closely designed around the Voodoo chips. Glide was a RASTERIZATION library, and many RENDERING libraries could have been built on top of Glide, sparing the renderer of the grossy cross-platform details. however, Glide COULD have been a bit more lenient / general. then, maybe - just maybe - it could have been embraced by other IHVs.
speaking of http://www.zeckensack.de/, i personally never tested it. but the guy knows what he's doing (also, the lib is pretty uptodate: after i pointed out a bug in his wbuffer code, he fixed the problem asaplike I posted earlyer
And indeed Glide runs fine now on my GeForce 6800GT 256MB, I ran Unreal Tournament Game of The Year Edition from 1998, and the game detected 3dfx Glide For Windows. and the program ran with out problems, my settings were:
1024 x 768 x 16 @ Glide
FSAA x8 AF Off Avr fps = 120
and
1024 x 768 x 16 @ Glide
FSAA x8 AF x16 Avr. fps = 112
I noticed That AF has no big deal in Glide, because Voodoo's never had AF aka Antistropic Flitering, but I clearly did see a difference though, AF x16 gave a better image quallity than with out.
I will make some screenies for this if you gus wanna see my results
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