Glide was a proprietary 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx used on their Voodoo graphics 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 fairly widely used as a result. The introduction of Direct3D and full OpenGL implementations from other vendors eventually doomed Glide, and 3dfx along with it. The rewrite of this article is being devised at Talk:3D computer graphics/Temp. ... A application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system, library or application provides in order to allow requests for services to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. ... 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ... 3dfx Interactive was a company which specialized in the manufacturing of cutting-edge 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. ... A graphics/video/display card/board/adapter is a computer component designed to convert the logical representation of visual information into a signal that can be used as input for a display medium. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Glide is based on the basic geometry and "world view" of OpenGL. OpenGL is a very large library with about 250 calls in the API, many of which are of limited use. Glide was an effort to select those features that were truly useful for gaming, leaving the rest out. The result was an API that was small enough to be implemented entirely in hardware. That hardware was 3dfx's own Voodoo cards. This led to several odd limitations in Glide — for instance, it only supported 16-bit color. OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). ...

The combination of the Voodoo's raw performance and Glide's easy-to-use API resulted in Voodoo cards generally dominating the gaming market from the mid to late 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, making their cards particularly popular for players of the various Quake-derived games. MiniGL was 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. A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to uniquely identify the source of its products and/or services to consumers, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities. ... MiniGL is a cut-down version of the OpenGL 3D graphics API. It was developed by id Software in order to provide a cross-platform hardware abstraction layer for their Quake series games, the first to directly support acceleration on graphics cards. ... Zombies attacking the player. ...

As new cards entered the market 3dfx managed to hold the performance crown for a short time, based largely on the tight integration between Glide and their hardware. This allowed them to be somewhat lax in hardware terms, which was important as the small gamer-only market 3dfx sold into wasn't large enough to support a large development effort. It was not long before offerings from nVidia and ATI Technologies were able to outperform the latest Voodoo cards using standard APIs. 3dfx responded by releasing Glide as an open source API, but it was too late. By late 1999 they announced that almost all games had moved to Direct3D, and to a lesser extent, OpenGL. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) (pronounced ) is a major supplier of graphics processors (graphics processing units, GPUs), graphics cards, and media and communications devices for PCs and game consoles such as the original Xbox and the PlayStation 3. ... The current version of the article or section is written like a magazine article instead of the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Today old games supporting Glide can often be run on modern graphics cards using one of many available Glide wrappers. In computer programming, the adapter design pattern (sometimes referred to as the wrapper pattern) adapts one interface for a class into one that a client expects. ...

External links

• Glide Sourceforge Project
• GLIDE programming manual
• Glide Wrappers at VoodooFiles