can anyone who knows this stuff care to comment on this exchange? who is right? pete > 1. What is Glide? > > Glide is a very low level, 3D API plus drivers that accesses 3D graphics > accelerator hardware based on chipsets manufactured by 3Dfx (these cards are > collectively called "Voodoo cards"). A program can ONLY use the special > hardware acceleration features of your Voodoo board by using the Glide > library. If you want to use your Voodoo's capabilities, you must use Glide. > Glide supports little else besides defining a view point, displaying a > texture, and send tri's. Not at all true. All 3dfx cards can do openGL, aswell. > There are some Glide features which resemble OpenGL, and some have no > counterpart. Either way, the important point is: if you use OpenGL or a > clone to perform some graphics task, it won't be hardware accelerated unless > that implementation makes use of Glide. Ummm. Basically, under X3, Mesa used glide to do OpenGL accelleration. But it was genuine openGL. Under X4, the same is true, but instead, now, there's a unified drivery-thingy called DRI that can talk to your hardware under it's own steam without going via Glide. Glide is still available, but it's not used like that...
