What?!? So if GPL was programmed for D3D(which was much inferior at time of
development to Glide or Redline), my Voodoo 2 and Rendition cards would not
be obsolete? Poor performance but available to more users? That does not
sound like a good decision to me. You are completely missing the points of
my posts.
As I have already stated in previous posts:
What are all those must have D3D only games? Motoracer(over a year
old), Jedi Knight(over a year old), Flight Sim 98? Any others? I've yet to
see a game that gives a good reason to run a D3D version instead of a Glide
version, if both are available. I know of maybe one - Madden 99. And if you
are talking about
D3D only, which ones are the really good ones again?
Please, please, please tell me one other D3D game that performs better on
more available video cards than its Glide counterpart.
And as for opengl:
Please give me a list of currently available and working opengl games.
Quake/Quake2/Hexen 2? Unreal is still in beta for
opengl, right? Does it currently work with TNT, Matrox, Riva128, i740? Any
other opengl games? Are there any not programmed by id software or running
on some version of the Quake/Quake 2 engine?
While opengl is a much better solution than D3D, at the time of GPL's
development, there very very few cards that could run true opengl or even
have official opengl drivers for that matter. And this is still the case as
of today!
And by the way, guess which cards will currently run the opengl Unreal beta?
My outdated, obsolete Rendition. But why would I run it when the Glide
multi-texture version is so kick-ass!
Bottom-line(and this will be my last post on this subject - I hope):
D3D would have been a poor decision given the development cycle of GPL.
Papyrus wanted the best performance for their super intensive engine. D3D
would not have been able to handle it, I doubt it could even handle it now.
Opengl may have been a better than D3D performance wise, but its available
for alot fewer cards than 3DFX and Rendition would be. Name the currently
available consumer 3D cards(not professional Intergraph types) with true,
working, non-beta opengl drivers, that are running true, working, non-beta
opengl games. I believe there are a very select few, if any, but I could be
wrong.
Don Chapman
