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 was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL ... 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.

I was acutely aware of the various 3D API issues during this time and this rings very true.

>>useful+t7
Yup, remember when they "teamed up" with SGI to create "Farenheit"? Embrace, extend, extinguish...

>>wazoox+Gj
My "favorite" Microsoft fact is that DirectX and Xbox were codenamed Manhattan and Midway because Microsoft's gaming division just ran on "what codename would be the most racist towards Japanese people?". The dxdiag icon is an X because it was originally the radiation symbol!

And this tradition is carried on to this day in milder form when Western game devs hear Elden Ring is more popular than their game or try to "fix" visual novels and JRPGs without playing any of them.