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Glide is a proprietary 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. It was dedicated to gaming performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data formats identical to those used internally in their cards. The Voodoo cards were the first to offer performance to really make 3D games work well, and Glide became widely used as a result. Further refinement of Microsoft's Direct3D and full OpenGL implementations from other graphics card vendors, in addition to growing competition in 3D hardware, eventually caused Glide to become superfluous.
API
Glide is based on the basic geometry and "world view" of OpenGL. OpenGL is a large graphics library with roughly 250 calls in the API, many of which are of limited use. Glide was an effort to select primarily features that were useful for real-time rendering of 3D games. The result was an API that was small enough to be implemented entirely in hardware. This focus did lead to various limitations in Glide, such as a 16-bit color depth limit.
Use in games
The combination of the hardware performance of Voodoo Graphics (Voodoo 1) and Glide's easy-to-use API resulted in Voodoo cards generally dominating the gaming market during the latter half of the 1990s. The name Glide was chosen to be indicative of the GL underpinnings, while being different enough to avoid trademark problems. 3dfx also supported a low-level MiniGL driver, essentially a "different Glide" with a wider selection of OpenGL calls and lacking the dedication to a single hardware platform. Due to the Voodoo's "GL-like" hardware, MiniGL on Voodoo was very "thin" and ran almost as well as Glide.
Glide wrappers and emulators
Glide emulator development has been in progress since the late 1990s. During 3dfx's lifetime, the company was aggressive at trying to stop these attempts to emulate their proprietary API, shutting down early emulation projects due to legal threats. Once 3dfx went bankrupt and was purchased by NVIDIA, Glide emulation was no longer as unwelcome and as of 2009 there are several capable emulators available to run older games.
References
- 3dfx wraps up wrapper Web sites, The Register, April 8 1999.