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
This implies that they could not have pushed OpenGL to be less of a mess. Feels bad faith to argue, when you consider how bad all drivers were back then.

>>taeric+SU
Everybody wanted this. There was even an attempt at this, called "Long's Peak", that was ultimately voted down by the OpenGL committee after a long development road. Nobody else needed to sabotage OpenGL, Khronos was more than happy to do it themselves.

>>Jasper+rv1
> Khronos was more than happy to do it themselves.

I was involved in a few of those committees, and sadly I have to agree.

The reason Khronos is often so slow to adopt features is because how hard it is for a group of competitors to agree on something. Everybody has an incentive to make the standard follow their hardware.

A notable exception to this was the OpenCL committee, which was effectively strongarmed by Apple. Everybody wanted Apple's business, so nobody offered much resistance to what Apple wanted.