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

I don't know the details myself but as a FYI... this famous answer covering the OpenGL vs DirectX history from StackExchange disagrees with your opinion and says OpenGL didn't keep up (ARB committee). It also mentions that the OpenGL implementation in Voodoo cards was incomplete and only enough to run Quake:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054...

The author of that answer is active on HN so maybe he'll chime in.

>>jasode+tl1
> It also mentions that the OpenGL implementation in Voodoo cards was incomplete and only enough to run Quake

That brings back some memories... I remember having to pick the rendering pipeline on some games, like Quake.

I also remember the days of having to route the video cable from my graphics card to my 3dfx card then to my monitor.

>>spookt+bz1
>I remember having to pick the rendering pipeline on some games, like Quake.

You can still do that in some recent games, e.g. Doom 2016 and Half-Life: Alyx.

>>mepian+aT1
Yeah it's swung around again - it feels like 25 years ago you could choose between DirectX and OpenGL (and software too), then for AAA games at least there was DirectX only for the longest time, but now DirectX or Vulkan (or OpenGL, or DirectX 12 instead of DirectX 9/10/11).