You seem to be mistakened on a couple of issues.

GLide is an API that 3DFx used with their cards. 3DFx cards only supported glide. As far as performance: glide is up there with the other API''s. glide actually makes games run faster on systems which may not be considered fast. Voodoo cards are currently the most popular 3rd party cards for Macintosh (which has a quickly growing gaming market BTW). And new cards do support it. All of the Voodoo cards support glide, and they are selling more than enough to stay alive.

Maybe you meant to ask the question "Is glide as popular as D3D or OpenGL?" And the answer to that is no. Because of mass market, most games/cards support D3D accelleration. But OpenGL is probably going to be the most popular API soon because of such great features as eXtensibility and portability.

I dont think anything is dead.

Glide is dead. 3dfx thinks so, the designers of Glide (including Brian Hook) think so.

Use D3D or OpenGL.

Glide was a great API when it was released, since OpenGL and D3D support was non-existent and/or spotty on consumer cards. However, Glide only supports 3dfx cards (unless you use a glide ''wrapper'' which is a pretty kludgey thing to do) and 3dfx is no longer the clear market leader. Also, Glide has ''issues'' such as the fact that it isn''t a full graphics pipeline and is only really useful as a basic rasterization API (can''t support features like hardware T&L without heavy API rewrites).

The only real reason to use Glide these days would be for learning. Glide is a great API to learn the basics of 3D programming with because it is a good combination of low level and nice API design (for the limited subset of 3D graphics the API was designed for).

Glide may be phased out soon but it's replacement if there is one (Rampage API?) will no doubt have the support of all the existing 3dfx-junkies. I don't think anyone would argue that Glide was super-duper at the time Direct3D and OpenGL support was limited. Whose to say 3dfx's new API won't be just as good at accelerating the development of hardware T&L?

Paulcoz.

Edited by - paulcoz on 4/12/00 3:57:29 AM

From a professional point of view, Glide is D.E.A.D.

Don''t get me wrong, I really like working with Glide and I recommend it to anyone learning 3D who has a 3Dfx board. The problem is that 3Dfx no longer has enough of the market share to justify using a 3Dfx only API, and since you can get decent 3Dfx support with D3D or OpenGL, GLide no longer makes sense.

As far as why GLide was developed in the first place, that was probably just a clever marketing ploy by 3Dfx. By getting a 3Dfx specific API in games, they opened up the demand for their boards. Hell, remember MechWarrior 2 Mercenaries with the 3Dfx support? More than a few people went out and bought 3Dfx cards just to play that game.