Why did 3dfx glide die?

I’m just kinda curious, it sure looked like the Glide were the best graphics in all of the games where it or other things were the options. I have a Voodoo3 3000 video card.

Anyone know what happened, and why in general people think OpenGL, DirectX etc are going to be better?

Glide made sense when 3dfx was the only show in town with a respectable card. Then along came the competitors, that basically chewed away 3dfx’s position in the industry (made easier by some really stupid decisions on 3dfx’s part). From a developer’s point a view, OpenGL and Direct3D became more attractive because they could reach a larger audience using those APIs. Raw framerate does not a game make.

Thank you.

Now making sure I have the terminology right, 3dfx referred to the chipset, that is, the hardware, and Glide was just the api that you could use to program against 3dfx chipsets right?

Were DirectX and OpenGL available for programming against 3dfx? I’m guessing yes, I think I’ve seen it, and it sure seemed that Glide always looked better against a 3dfx video card - was that an example of the “stupid decisions”, not supporting competing APIs as well do you think? Or was it just a coincidence, like they were more poorly programmed in the other 2?

By 3dfx, I was referring to the company in general. Yes, DirectX and OpenGL existed before Glide. But on all consumer video cards, neither could match the performance of Glide. The main “stupid decision” I think was relying on the old original Voodoo core for far too long. The Voodoo 3 should have supported 32 bit color and stenciling to have been competitive. Then they put too much time, money, and energy into desgining and producing the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5, which while finally bringing the series into line with its competitors, was too little too late, and too expensive. I think they should have canned the Voodoo series after the Voodoo3, and spent every R&D dollar on Rampage.

GLIDE has no support for vertex transformations / clipping / lighting.
And you have to manage textures by bare hands… But some very carefully optimized applications are faster because of it. (read - Unreal)