MesaFX on NV40....

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Within a few days I'll be buy'n a brand new GAinward/Leadtek or Point Of View GeForce 6800 GT/ULTRA anyway is it possible that I could get MesaFX  running on my 6800 for Glide apps?

What's I'm try'n to experiment is that if it is possible to play Glide games in Glide mode om my 6800GT/ULTRA.

If any of you have experience with this, plaese tell me how it went.

Freindly Regards,

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

[dborca]

Originally posted by Obi-Wan Kenobi

What's I'm try'n to experiment is that if it is possible to play Glide games in Glide mode om my 6800GT/ULTRA.

i got it that you think mesafx will give you an invisible voodoo card in your machine? hmmm... interesting! what should be your choice, then?

mesafx doesn't care much about the underlying hardware, so as long as you get your glide dll going, mesafx will run. how to do that? there are a number of wrappers around (a very good one here http://www.zeckensack.de/), but then again, why use mesa on top of it? mesa gives you opengl, and nVidia is the king in that area...

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Originally posted by dborca

Originally posted by Obi-Wan Kenobi

What's I'm try'n to experiment is that if it is possible to play Glide games in Glide mode om my 6800GT/ULTRA.

i got it that you think mesafx will give you an invisible voodoo card in your machine? hmmm... interesting! what should be your choice, then?

mesafx doesn't care much about the underlying hardware, so as long as you get your glide dll going, mesafx will run. how to do that? there are a number of wrappers around (a very good one here http://www.zeckensack.de/), but then again, why use mesa on top of it? mesa gives you opengl, and nVidia is the king in that area...

Thanks for the lovely tips I will let you hear something a soon as possible,, What I thought about this was, because the ex-3dfx engineers that worked and spent lots of time about the design of the FSAA for the NV40, that gave me an idea to try Glide and MesaFX on the NV40.

The M-Buffer of the good ol Rampage has also been placed in the architecture of the NV40 things like Motion Blur, Depth of Fiel Blur, Soft Shadow, Soft Reflections and so on.

Ondeed nVidia is The King of OpenGL, so Glide should be a worthy try.

The only thing that is missing is Glide, it should be possible with MesaFX's Glide32.dll I was thinking.

Regards,

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

[dborca]

nVidia does not have a Glide-like low-level interface. it was 3dfx proprietary, yet the API was public. i don't know what went wrong, but it was never adopted by other companies. perhaps it was so closely designed around the Voodoo chips. Glide was a RASTERIZATION library, and many RENDERING libraries could have been built on top of Glide, sparing the renderer of the grossy cross-platform details. however, Glide COULD have been a bit more lenient / general. then, maybe - just maybe - it could have been embraced by other IHVs.

speaking of http://www.zeckensack.de/, i personally never tested it. but the guy knows what he's doing (also, the lib is pretty uptodate: after i pointed out a bug in his wbuffer code, he fixed the problem asap).

the above glide wrapper really uses OpenGL to emulate Glide. so, basically you want something like: MesaFX -> Glide -> native OpenGL. which is pointless. my advice is:
1) use native OpenGL for OpenGL games
2) use glidewrapper for Glide games
3) use DirectX... naaaa, don't use DirectX at all

[milen]

Dborca, as you know much about 3d graphics and have expirience with Glide,Opengl and know why direct3d is bad . What makes glide faster and with better image quality than other standards at it's time 1999,2000,2001. I think there's something in it that opengl,d3d don't support.

[dborca]

why is it faster? easy, glide is a rasterization library. this has a major aspect: the 3d transforms must be done application-side, not driver-side. a good application can make its own personalized 3d engine. talented programmers can make it FAST, and use glide for rasterization only. there is always a balance between the generality of an implementation and its performance. do only one thing, and do it damn well! this stands true for any API. when that API is backed by a GOOD implementation, things can go even better...

why does it have better quality? considering the HW target (aka Voodoo), it is just normal. glide WAS tailored for voodoos. it can squeeze the best effects (texcombine, colorcombine, alphacombine) from them. moreover, programs that were designed for glide backend can use many features that are expensive in opengl/d3d without thrashing other parts of the opengl/d3d state-machine (trilinearness springs to mind). not mentioning some other cool effects that cannot be implemented at all, because they don't have any opengl/d3d correspondent.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Was the M-Buffer so different to the T-Buffer?

I suppose it had tot do with FSAA at higher frame rates at higher reso's. I suppose NV40 has that too. Does Nvidia's SLI come accros to 3dfx SLi? do they look alike, or is there still a big difference?

[secretfj]

It's seems to me that u dun need MESAfx to run Glide apps...
MESAfx is for openGL

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Well there is a Glide32.dll in the MesaFX 6.2.0.2 package and that gave me the idea of doing it, and a NV40 based card nearly has all the technologies of the Napalm, Daytona and Rampage cards, things like Depth of Files Blur, Motion Blur and so on,so I suggested that the only thing that was miss'n was Glide.

Therefore I decided to use the Glide32.dll file to make glide possible, then the

3dfx Voodoo6 6800GT 256MB GDDR3

has been created by Obi-Wan Kenobi for the name and the idea of do'n this experiment and the MesaFX people for the Glide32.dll file

If there other idea's please yell 'em out, I would be pleased to see more idea's and tips from other 3dfx fdans around here[8D]

[perer]

Don't call it Voodoo6, 3dfx was pretty determined to don't make voodoo branded cards anymore. Actually I think Nvidia shouldn't call the geforce 6 geforce anymore. Because it is a new architecture. After the Geforce FX fiasco, the geforce 6 deserves a better name.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

heh I call it what I want it to, any anyway, I got the XFX GeForce 6800GT Dual DVI 256MB GDDR3 now, so I installed the The Glide Wrapper you gave me dborca , but I get this Ouch Error :

" The Glide Wrapper's Glide2x.dll is missing. Try Reinstalling the wrapper. The Configurator won't work, and will now exit"

Well My Operating system is Win2K pro + SP4, I hope that isn't the issue?

I installed the ForceWare 66.93 drivers.

[dborca]

Originally posted by Obi-Wan Kenobi

" The Glide Wrapper's Glide2x.dll is missing. Try Reinstalling the wrapper. The Configurator won't work, and will now exit"

Well My Operating system is Win2K pro + SP4, I hope that isn't the issue?

I installed the ForceWare 66.93 drivers.

have you contacted zeckensack? it's his work, after all. and it seems to be an "installation" problem (not my strength ).

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

Originally posted by dborca

Originally posted by Obi-Wan Kenobi

" The Glide Wrapper's Glide2x.dll is missing. Try Reinstalling the wrapper. The Configurator won't work, and will now exit"

Well My Operating system is Win2K pro + SP4, I hope that isn't the issue?

I installed the ForceWare 66.93 drivers.

have you contacted zeckensack? it's his work, after all. and it seems to be an "installation" problem (not my strength ).

Well nah not yet, I thought first of you, that you might of known a sollution, oh well I send him a mail then hey

Thanx for your help dborca