VooDoo 5 5500 PCI info needed

[Reznor007]

Yes, but they don't support it in the same way as 3dfx did. GLide is pretty much to-the-metal Voodoo-series code.

Same reason, say, ATi's R5 core can't run GLide.



Software raster = slooooooooooow.

Yes, however, not as slow as some think. For example NFL Blitz '99 arcade plays at 20% speed on a 3GHz P4. That may seem very slow, but you have to realize that is doing software 3dfx emulation at 640x480+interpreter emulation of a 150MHz MIPS R5000 + interpreter emulation of an ADSP2115. Carnevil is 50-75% on the same system, and consists of the same hardware. Compared to the emulation portion, I'd say the software rasterization only takes up maybe 20-30% of that.

As for a hardware wrapper/driver for other cards, any R200+ or Geforce3+ card could find an appopriate function for anything a 3dfx card could do. With R300 or GeforceFX it's even less of a problem.

 

[milen]

Glide is just an API, yes it's very close to 3dfx hardware becasue it was written for this purpose. It can be done in ATI,NVIDIA,SIS... cards but it would not be better than 3dfx cards, and maybe not faster.

The companies will not make money from this so they would not make it.

 

[Tagrineth]

Yes, however, not as slow as some think. For example NFL Blitz '99 arcade plays at 20% speed on a 3GHz P4. That may seem very slow, but you have to realize that is doing software 3dfx emulation at 640x480+interpreter emulation of a 150MHz MIPS R5000 + interpreter emulation of an ADSP2115. Carnevil is 50-75% on the same system, and consists of the same hardware. Compared to the emulation portion, I'd say the software rasterization only takes up maybe 20-30% of that.

Is it doing bilinear filtering?

As for a hardware wrapper/driver for other cards, any R200+ or Geforce3+ card could find an appopriate function for anything a 3dfx card could do. With R300 or GeforceFX it's even less of a problem.

Glide is just an API, yes it's very close to 3dfx hardware becasue it was written for this purpose. It can be done in ATI,NVIDIA,SIS... cards but it would not be better than 3dfx cards, and maybe not faster.

The companies will not make money from this so they would not make it.

NO. It can NOT be done natively on anything other than the Voodoo series. Reznor, what you suggest would be wrapping code, not running natively! That's what 'finding an appropriate function' IS.

Only the Voodoo series can run GLide natively. Period. Get over it. It's the same as MeTaL only running on S3 cards, RRedline only on Rendition Vérité, No Direct3D on Intergraph Wildcat and Intergraph/3DLabs Wildcat2...

 

[milen]

Do you think that ATI and NVIDIA cards support Opengl natively, it's only supported by their drivers.

     Video Card
      |
     Unified Driver
      |
      |
----------------------------------------------
 |          ;|           |                    |
 |                       |                     |
Opengl            DirectX            Glide

This is universal diagram for all cards.

But in fact on 3dfx's cards Opengl call are converted to Glide than Glide to Hardware Calls. DirectX is directly converted to Hardware Calls.

So Opengl,DirectX,Glide are softwares(APIs) and the cards have some features which are used through this APIs.

 

[Tagrineth]

Do you think that ATI and NVIDIA cards support Opengl natively, it's only supported by their drivers.

This is universal diagram for all cards. (snipped)

But in fact on 3dfx's cards Opengl call are converted to Glide than Glide to Hardware Calls. DirectX is directly converted to Hardware Calls.

So Opengl,DirectX,Glide are softwares(APIs) and the cards have some features which are used through this APIs.

Direct3D and OpenGL are both wrapped to GLide on the Voodoo series; Direct3D, however, unlike GLide, has the necessary runtimes integrated, rather than referencing external files like OpenGL does (which is why OGL stops working if you delete GLide2x and 3x.dll, whereas D3D keeps working - it's for WHQL reasons).

Voodoo3 and VSA-100 actually support some Direct3D and OpenGL in hardware, though. Moreso in VSA than V3... actually, the VSA supports a lot of D3D/OGL, though there's still more wrapped to GLide than necessary...

Anyway, I digress. If nVidia or ATi supported GLide, it would be through a wrapper, and only through a wrapper. The hardware can't support it natively. Basically it wouldn't be any better than using, say, eVoodoo or GL2IDE, except that the IHV's would include more speed hacks.

 

[Reznor007]

Is it doing bilinear filtering?





NO. It can NOT be done natively on anything other than the Voodoo series. Reznor, what you suggest would be wrapping code, not running natively! That's what 'finding an appropriate function' IS.

Only the Voodoo series can run GLide natively. Period. Get over it. It's the same as MeTaL only running on S3 cards, RRedline only on Rendition Vérité, No Direct3D on Intergraph Wildcat and Intergraph/3DLabs Wildcat2...

It is doing 100% emulation of the Voodoo graphics core. This includes MIP mapping, perspective correct texturing, bi/trilinear filtering, alpha blending, fog, whatever the game wants to use. The driver also runs Wayne Gretzkey's 3d Hockey and San Francisco Rush.

And ALL drivers are essentially wrappers. The SDK for the particular API uses commands that are translated to the rasterizers machine code. For example, the Glide command grDrawTriangle() is not executed by the graphics core, it is interpreted by the driver to do the appropriate function.

The big difference in current Glide Wrappers is that instead of directly controlling the GPU, it sends out D3D or OpenGL calls that do essentially the same function. If ATI or nVidia wanted, they could make their own glide3x.dll and have it send direct hardware commands without going through D3D/OpenGL.

 

[Reznor007]

Direct3D and OpenGL are both wrapped to GLide on the Voodoo series; Direct3D, however, unlike GLide, has the necessary runtimes integrated, rather than referencing external files like OpenGL does (which is why OGL stops working if you delete GLide2x and 3x.dll, whereas D3D keeps working - it's for WHQL reasons).

Voodoo3 and VSA-100 actually support some Direct3D and OpenGL in hardware, though. Moreso in VSA than V3... actually, the VSA supports a lot of D3D/OGL, though there's still more wrapped to GLide than necessary...

Anyway, I digress. If nVidia or ATi supported GLide, it would be through a wrapper, and only through a wrapper. The hardware can't support it natively. Basically it wouldn't be any better than using, say, eVoodoo or GL2IDE, except that the IHV's would include more speed hacks.

There is no such thing as supporting an API in hardware. The chip supports many 3d math functions, and the drivers simply interpret 3d API commands to the chips own internal instruction set.

 

[Tagrineth]

There is no such thing as supporting an API in hardware. The chip supports many 3d math functions, and the drivers simply interpret 3d API commands to the chips own internal instruction set.

So would you please explain to me why 3DLabs of all companies couldn't get Direct3D to work at all on the Wildcat and Wildcat 2 cores?

 

[AlphaWolf]

So would you please explain to me why 3DLabs of all companies couldn't get Direct3D to work at all on the Wildcat and Wildcat 2 cores?

I am no expert on 3D crap, but I would guess that it was probably due to some limitations of the core that couldn't meet the needs of the API.

AFAIK, the API is in fact done through the driver interfacing with the hardware. I can't see why they would design any specific GPU to tailor a specific API(s), because one of the key points of an API is to avoid this, this way the hardware can drasticaly change without breaking software compatibilities. Otherwise there would be no layers between the hardware and the software application, and it would still be like the old days where X game is only compatible with Y card.

I think the real reason is, why use glide when its obsolete? It's not a professional standard, it was meant specificaly to make the old games at the time work on the slower hardware they had available. Only one company owned it at the time that it was actualy a good standard, and now that its been replaced, why bother?

 

[Reznor007]

So would you please explain to me why 3DLabs of all companies couldn't get Direct3D to work at all on the Wildcat and Wildcat 2 cores?

It's probably something like a required feature missing that prevents the API from being able to work. However, it could just be that they A-didn't care enough about it, B-the resulting performance was so slow they decided not to release it and just said it didn't work, or C-were incompetent(hey...Creative owns them, and look at all the crap they get about poor drivers).

 

[milen]

So would you please explain to me why 3DLabs of all companies couldn't get Direct3D to work at all on the Wildcat and Wildcat 2 cores?

Maybe they are bad programers.


All drivers are wrappers in fact. Sometimes there are 2 or 3 passes between d3d,opengl command and video card. And for 3dfx as is said before D3D dosen't use glide. It uses the same layer as Glide for communication with Video Card.Opengl uses Glide and than Glide uses the layer. Glide is faster because it supports only functions that 3dfx hardware supports. It's written with 3dfx's hardware in mind and is otimized to get all avaible performence from it. D3D and Opengl are universal APIs and that makes them slower. If NVIDIA makes card wich supports directly all D3D fucntions and work toghether with microsoft to implement NVIDIA specefic code than the result will be maybe somehting like GLIDE.

 

[Tagrineth]

or C-were incompetent(hey...Creative owns them, and look at all the crap they get about poor drivers).

Creative bought them when Wildcat VP was already ready and IIRC Wildcat 4 was already out.

3DLabs are hardly bad programmers; they have quite possibly the most stable and functional drivers available today, period.

And yet they couldn't get D3D working at all on Wildcat2. Trust me, I've talked to them extensively about it. WC2 owners wanted compatibility, not speed... and 3DLabs simply couldn't give it because they core was designed specifically for OpenGL, and has no D3D capabilities at all.

3DLabs listened to the massive amounts of complaints though... WC3 can do DX7.

But anyway, it's the same thing as non-Voodoo series being incapable of running GLide. They simply don't support all of the functions needed to run it. And GLide compilers put out very low-level code...

 

[Reznor007]

Creative bought them when Wildcat VP was already ready and IIRC Wildcat 4 was already out.

3DLabs are hardly bad programmers; they have quite possibly the most stable and functional drivers available today, period.

And yet they couldn't get D3D working at all on Wildcat2. Trust me, I've talked to them extensively about it. WC2 owners wanted compatibility, not speed... and 3DLabs simply couldn't give it because they core was designed specifically for OpenGL, and has no D3D capabilities at all.

3DLabs listened to the massive amounts of complaints though... WC3 can do DX7.

But anyway, it's the same thing as non-Voodoo series being incapable of running GLide. They simply don't support all of the functions needed to run it. And GLide compilers put out very low-level code...

If they couldn't get D3D working, then either their hardware was sub-par, or their driver writers were incompetent. I'm going to say it was the driver programmers, since if it was capable of running OpenGL it should support most things needed for DX6 level support. How complete was the OpenGL support? Also, since the WC is a pro card, not a gamer card, they probably didn't care to include D3D as it is a gaming API, not a professional one. Once owners got them, they wanted to try their games, and since3dlabs already made their money off the customer, they didn't want to devote programming resources to adding that.

You don't design core features specifically for an API. You have your core support many 3d rasterization functions, then a driver to interpret API calls to your cores specific instructions.

PS, the Glide SDK does not send out low level code. The SDK merely creates a series of Glide API commands that are sent to the Glide2x/3x file and converted to machine code there. If you didn't do it there, it would require a recompile each time a new 3dfx card was released if you wanted to support it.

 

[The Khan Artist]

Tag, what do you think about Revenge? Is it all a load of BS?

And what about open-sourcing the 3Dfx D3D/OGL drivers?

 

[Reznor007]

Tag, what do you think about Revenge? Is it all a load of BS?

And what about open-sourcing the 3Dfx D3D/OGL drivers?

Load of crap. They talked so much about how they were writing a new ICD, yet the only person who even came close to updating OpenGL was Colourless, who never did any hyping/bragging. 3dhq was all a load of crap. The driver releases they did appeared to be nothing but slight modifications, and none of them worked as good as the official 3dfx Win2k drivers on XP with Colourless's GlideXP files, I should know, I've been running nothing but a Voodoo5 since June 2000...up to this day.

 

[AlphaWolf]

How do you know glide would run faster on another brand card anyways? Remember that its the driver developers that write the API layer. They probably didn't write the opengl layer as well as they wrote the glide layer on their cards. (I can think of numerous reasons for why they would do this on purpose) Just because glide is faster for a 3dfx card, doesn't mean it would be faster for say an nvidia, ati, or matrox card, because they may have already coded the opengl layer optimaly.

 

[Stezo2k]

well evoodoo & glide64 seem to be a good combination on pcs, quite fast on slower Pcs, glide has great possibilities as a api, i mean look when ultraHLE came out, the voodoo series ran that superbly, heh even made me buy a voodoo 2, i mean look at Doom III, the requirements are very high, lets just imagine a voodooo had 128 Ram, and doom III used Glide, the requirements would be a lot lower

 

[Reznor007]

well evoodoo & glide64 seem to be a good combination on pcs, quite fast on slower Pcs, glide has great possibilities as a api, i mean look when ultraHLE came out, the voodoo series ran that superbly, heh even made me buy a voodoo 2, i mean look at Doom III, the requirements are very high, lets just imagine a voodooo had 128 Ram, and doom III used Glide, the requirements would be a lot lower

Glide doesn't support the required functions. No dot product 3 blending, no stencil buffer(unless it was added as an undocumented V5 feature), and no vertex programs. I know this is just a hypothetical suggestion...but still

 

[AlphaWolf]

well evoodoo & glide64 seem to be a good combination on pcs, quite fast on slower Pcs, glide has great possibilities as a api, i mean look when ultraHLE came out, the voodoo series ran that superbly,

Compared to what? Another card with a glide > opengl wrapper? Of course thats going to be slower. I've had voodoo cards, I never thought glide was anything special. I've always looked at it as a stripped down proprietary counterpart to opengl.

Half life on a voodoo 3 running glide wasn't as fast as a geforce classic ddr running opengl.

 

[Stezo2k]

Glide doesn't support the required functions. No dot product 3 blending, no stencil buffer(unless it was added as an undocumented V5 feature), and no vertex programs. I know this is just a hypothetical suggestion...but still

heh, i know that, it was just an example, using glide on a voodoo can make it faster than openGL in some cases