zlacker

>>BirAda+(OP)
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. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.

Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.

In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. 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. 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.

Sigh.

>>ChuckM+25
>In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most.

False, 3dfx killed themselves. Their graphics chips and their architecture became quickly outdated compared to the competition. Their latest efforts towards the end of their life resorted to simply putting more of the same outdated and inefficient chip designs on the same board leading to monstrosities GPUs with 4 chips that came with their own power supply. Nvidia and ATI were already eating their lunch.

Also, their decision to build and sell graphics cars themselves directly to consumers, instead of focusing on the chips and letting board partners build and sell the cards was another reason for their fall.

Their Glide API alone would not be enough to save them from so many terrible business and engineering decisions.

>OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL

Again, false. OpenGL kinda kiled itself on the Windows gaming scene. Microsoft didn't do anything to kill OpenGL on Windows. Windows 95 supported OpenGL just fine, as a first class citizen just like Direct3D, but Direct3D was easier to use and had more features for windows game dev, meaning quicker time to market and less dev effort, while OpenGL drivers from the big GPU makers still had big quality issues back then and OpenGL progress was stagnating.

DirectX won because it was objectively better than OpenGL for Windows game dev, not because Microsoft somehow gimped OpenGL on Windows, which they didn't.