The sale at auction of a prototype of the never released Voodoo 5 6000, due to bankruptcy of its manufacturer, for $15,000, is something that we honestly do not understand. While this is a unique piece of hardware history, you don’t have to spend that much money to play PC games that rely on Glide, the hardware API. 3Dfx.
There were a few years, in the 90s, in which all games were compatible with 3Dfx cards, called Voodoo, so if you didn’t have one you couldn’t play them with the graphics at their best. Obviously, today said visual level, that visual quality has been exceeded, but when we play with them there is a myth that we cannot do it in the accelerated 3D version of yesteryear, since we do not have a Voodoo installed in one of its variants. In any case, we could not do it, since today’s motherboards lack classic PCI or AGP ports.
How to have a 3Dfx graphics card on your PC and for free?
Well, you really don’t need it, 22 years have passed and even the poorest graphics card can execute what is a 3Dfx Glide API wrapper, which transforms the instructions on the fly to DirectX and in a way that our NVIDIA card or AMD. Specifically, the most popular is nGlide, which also allows for a much better experience than the original hardware, which was released in the days of CRT monitors.
- It supports anisotropic texture filtering, which is why it is much better than the trilinear one used in the original Voodoo.
- Renders at 32-bit color, so you don’t suffer from Dithering or “color washout” issues
- It supports panoramic resolutions and, therefore, we can play on 16:9 or 16:10 monitors.
- If the game is going too fast you can make the frame rate go to the speed of your monitor.
- The list of games compatible with said Glide Wrapper is extensive.
It is not the only wrapper that exists to play the games that were only compatible with Voodoo, since we have alternatives like DGVoodoo.
Why does it work better than emulation?
We have to start from the fact that the Glide API was one of the first developed for 3D graphics and would be comparatively a pared down version of OpenGL. What’s more, the most veteran will remember how their driver mentioned MiniGL due to the fact that these cards did not have hardware support for all the functions of the famous API, this so you can see how simple they are.
Well, today all graphics cards have OpenGL support natively and because the Glide API is based on a shortened version of it, it is very easy for the application to translate the instructions on the fly and that the games do not have a visual problem in the middle and all this for free, without having to go to an auction and pay what has been paid for a graphics card from 20 years ago than today, which in performance is no more what a paperweight
