PsyMan said:
But that's why Glide is superior in some things compared to other APIs... Some things can be done faster and easier with certain APIs. Glide is a quite simple API and gives the oportunity to the coder to do some things "manually" using the way that thinks that it's best (the coder has more options, he is less restricted but he has to do some time consuming and sometimes hard operations).
Have you noticed that many framebuffer effects (like on Mario kart and 1080) are much faster (and correct) when using Glide 64 than when using any other video plugin? This is more like an API restriction rather than insufficient coding ability.
Even though Glide was not so widely supported back then it had amazing compatibility. The real problem with Voodoo cards were the very buggy DirectX drivers... If 3DFX was still here then Glide could even be supported by other video card manufacturers as well.
The fact that other plugins don't do all framebuffer functions right is probably because the other plugins aren't updated as often as Glide64. OpenGL has a function called GL_EXT_framebuffer_object designed for render to texture functions, or you could use GL_ARB_fragment_shader(there are other ways also). Direct3D9 has tons of options for render to texture functions.
If you go back to N64, it was designed by engineers at SGI, the creators of OpenGL. The design was intended to be similar to SGI Indy workstations of the time(MIPS R4600 based stuff with SGI video chips). If you want to try out an SGI, you can load one up in MESS(the old computer/console emulator). The N64 video chip was designed to be somewhat similar to the OpenGL pipeline.
The Voodoo graphics chip was designed by ex-SGI engineers around the same time, and they made their own API (Glide), designed to be a cut down version of OpenGL to be easy on PC game designers, who at the time were still doing software 3d(Quake) or software 2.5d(Duke3d) games. Because it would be too expensive at the time to add hardware T&L to the Voodoo, they completely left support out for that in Glide2/3.
OpenGL on the other hand ALWAYS supports hardware T&L, it's up to the video driver whether to use hardware support if available, or use a software fallback. 3dfx would have probably done much better had they just pushed OpenGL(the industry's 3d standard) instead of being greedy and trying to monopolize the market with their own custom thing.
