Message-ID:	<015f01bd96d8$5b439520$8b4d08c3@arthur>
From:	"Arthur" <arfa AT clara DOT net>
To:	"DJGPP Mailing List" <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>
Subject:	Re: offtopic: D3D vs GLIDE vs Open GL vs proprietary vs . . .
Date:	Sat, 13 Jun 1998 15:15:39 +0100
MIME-Version:	1.0

>Hi,
>
>as you said, only cards with the 3Dfx voodoo/voodoo Rush chipset support
>Glide.
>D3D is a general approach. Write one .EXE file, get acceleration on all
>machines.

Not necessarily: some cards support more features than others. For instance
my ATI 3D Rage Pro supports Z-Buffering, but earlier D3D cards from ATI
don't. It's always a bad idea to assume people have the right hardware. But
all it requires is a bit of research, and then put which features each card
has in a LUT. Problem solved.

>I own a Diamond Monster 3D II X100 (8 MB Voodoo2 board) which is awesome.


Lucky *#~!

>The Voodoo chipset is very great and is greatly accepted. All my friends
own
>a Voodoo board. Games such as Quake 2, Unreal or Motorhead look very great
>and they're very very fast even on my Pentium 233 w/ MMX. (Quake needs
FPU).


*Even* on your 233MMX with Voodoo 2?! They all run fast enough on my 200MMX
without any 3D acceleration.

>I strongly recommend writing apps for Glide since the SDK is also available
>for DOS (www.3dfx.com).

Has anyone actually managed to get the GLide SDK working for DJGPP?

>If you want to do Direct3D, you have to get a Win32
>compiler such as Microsofts Visual C++ 5 (I strongly recommend this one)

Or get RSXNTDJ, which allows you to write Win 9x/NT apps in DJGPP (including
DirectX 5).

>Voodoo outposts are located at www.op3dfx.com www.voodooextreme.com and
>others. There are screen savers, VRML viewers, movie renderers (smooth
>full-screen videos, great!), WinAmp plugins, etc. out that support 3DFx.
>As I said before, have a look at Glide. There are over 3 million users that
>can't be wrong..


Ahh yes, but think how many more use D3D. All the 3D screensavers, VRML
viewers etc. from Microsoft (and others) support D3D. Also it is worth
noting that Quake 2 does NOT use GLide, but Open GL (not sure about Unreal
or Motorhead). Open GL is available on far more graphics cards than GLide
(which only exists on Voodoo boards). If you are lucky enough to have Win
NT, then you don't even need a Voodoo graphics card to use Open GL programs.
The original Quake was written in DJGPP with Open GL.

Open GL SDKs are available from Silicon Graphics and Microsoft.

Using GLide has speed advantages over Open GL but poor image quality (in
comparison). If you are aiming at mid-high end Pentiums (P133+) you should
consider Open GL for the Graphics quality alone.

Also note that when DX6 is released in a few weeks time, it will have a
improvements in terms of ease of use, speed and image quality over previous
incarnations of DirectX. It will also have far more features than either
Open GLor GLide (yes, even the Voodoo 2), because it is taking advantage of
the new graphics cards to be released in a couple of months. Can GLide
handle Aniostropic filtering or 24-bit colours or full 128-bit graphics card
support? I think not.

If you do want to stick with GLide, my advice is to also get some other SDKs
from companies such as Matrox, ATI, Videologic and so on, so that you can
also take advantage of the different hardware capabilities of each card
directly (giving speed and image quality advantages, at the expense of extra
code).


Finally, make sure you are not totally hardware dependant!

James Arthur
jaa AT arfa DOT clara DOT net

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