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
It wasn't just graphics, it was audio as well. People have it nice now but back then you were still fighting audio driver issues. AC'97 support made that situation livable but it took forever for everyone to support it.

>>nekoas+FN
My opinion on this one, for games authors anyway, was changed by reading an early 2000s piece by someone rebutting a lot of the noise Carmack was making on the topic, focusing on exactly this point: by DirectX 6, you got an API that was a suite which gave you, yes, the graphics, but also the sound, the input handling, media streaming for cutscenes and so on. OpenGL vs Direct3D was a sideshow at that point for most developers: it was "solves one part of their problem" vs "solves all of their problems". And no-one involved in OpenGL showed any sign of being interested in those other problems.

>>rodger+uL1
Input handling was pretty basic back in the day, there wasn't that many different hardware options to support.

For audio everyone was using 3rd party tools like Miles Sound System etc., but even OpenAL launched around 2000 already as an OpenGL companion. Video had the same thing happen with everyone using Bink which launched around 1999.

In comparison using OpenGL was a lot nicer than anything before probably DirectX 9. At that time in DX you needed pages and pages of boilerplate code just to set up your window, nevermind to get anything done.

Advanced GPU features of the time were also an issue, OpenGL would add them as extensions you could load, but in DirectX you were stuck until the next release.