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
Part of the success of directx over opengl was that very few graphics card companies seemed capable of producing a fully functional opengl driver, for the longest time Nvidia was the only option.

I recall ATI and Matrox both failing in this regard despite repeated promises.

>>rabf+E9
Back in 1999 when the Quake source code came out, I started working on "Quake 2000" which was an improvement on the rendering pipeline of the code. I ended up getting free cards ship to me - one was a GeForce256, one was the Matrox G400 DualHead and I think the other was the ATI Rage 128 Pro.

The GeForce blew the other cards performance out the water. The Matrox was particularly bad and the dual screen didn't add much and I remember maybe 2 games that supported it.