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
Microsoft pushing D3D was a good thing, OpenGL drivers were an even bigger mess back then than today, and drivers for popular 3D accelerators only implemented the 'happy path' needed for running GLQuake but were either very slow or sloppily implemented for the rest of the API.

D3D was a terribly designed API in the beginning, but it caught up fast and starting at around DX7 was the objectively better API, and Microsoft forced GPU vendors to actually provide conforming and performant drivers.

>>flohof+Uo
I agree. D3D7 was the first version actually widely used, and it came about as a glut of 3D card manufacturers appeared. Microsoft was willing to change it drastically to appease developers. OpenGL is still held back by the CAD companies. We're lucky Vulkan is here as an alternative now.