Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (13277)	6/14/1999 11:34:00 PM
From: Greg S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

OpenGL has support for features 3dfx hasn't even implemented yet and supports extensions for those features 3dfx wants to be specific to their hardware. There is no need for 3dfx to reinvent the wheel. As a standard, OpenGL is very impressive. I did some work with it 4 or 5 years ago or so with a triple-headed SGI Onyx and kept wondering "why the heck don't they make GAMES with this stuff?!" The answer of course being that the price of the machine I was using had at least 5 zeroes in it at the time. (Talk about your hard-core gamer :) But it is definitely the most robust - QUALITY - 3D API out there. However, you must realize that while there are TONS of features included in the standard, most actual implementations of OpenGL don't support those features. Or rather, they support them ... in software. I wish I could name a few off the top of my head but they go beyond what even professional graphics hardware does today. The reason is that the OpenGL standard is very farsighted - which, as the future approaches, becomes a very good thing for us gamers because it's yet another slow-moving standard but it's at least light years ahead of D3D. (Ever play Quake on a -REAL- machine, like one with 128MB of texture memory? It's pretty ridiculous getting 120 fps at 1600x1200) From what I know, GLide is simply a stripped down, nimbler version of OpenGL - but I haven't developed with it so I couldn't tell you for sure. My feeling is that the 3dfx guys liked the idea of OpenGL and wanted to bring it to the masses in a much more lightweight form - an API "for the present" that they could extend it into the future, and it worked really well at first. But that whole extension into the future part doesn't seem to be panning out, if that was their plan. In retrospect, _perhaps_ had they spent the same amount of resources just making a really good OpenGL implementation, they'd be waaaaaay out in front of the competition. But who knows. My point: (I like to ramble) OpenGL rules, but Glide did have a purpose by essentially bridging the gap between OpenGL and the mainstream. But now that that gap is well on its way to being closed, perhaps Glide will be squeezed out. -G