3dfx Voodoo Graphics Gets Windows XP x64 Support 104
ryszards writes, "GlideXP author Ryan 'Colourless' Nunn has turned his insanity up a notch with a driver that allows running the 32-bit NT Glide .dlls for a Voodoo Graphics board on Windows XP x64. Already supporting Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 on 32-bit Windows XP, adding XP x64 to the mix lets even more folks reminisce about the good old early days of consumer 3D acceleration hardware. Any excuse to fire up GLQuake one more time!"
Re:Hrm ... (Score:3, Informative)
The glide interface DLLs (still 32bit) can then communicate correctly with the card using this minimal kernel driver.
Re:Speaking of Glide (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, there are loads of 'em [google.co.uk]
I used to use a Glide Wrapper so I could play The Sentinel Returns [yahoo.com] properly on my system.
Re:Hrm ... (Score:2, Informative)
3dfx was acquired by NVIDIA in 2000.
Re:Much better choises than GLQuake available (Score:5, Informative)
The Voodoo 2 totally lacked 32bit rendering (what was less of a problem back then, given that the other cards' performance numbers were not high enough to render anything at 32bit reliably anyway), and the Voodoo 3 "only" boasted a so-called "22bit post-filter", which provided a MUCH better visual experience at negligible framerate losses. However, (at least european) gaming mags went rabid about the fact that "Voodoo 3 still does not support 32bit color depth!1" (which, again, was nothing to really care about, given other cards' performance at True Color settings!), and until today I'm sure that this kind of hype (and pushing of NVIDIA's TNT2-Chip along with it) did a great deal to sink 3DFX in the end.
Voodoo 5 supported True Color rendering from the beginning, but the market (or rather the marketing machinery) had moved on to the next hot subject, namely "T&L", by then (which, again, had virtually no real impact on anything that truly mattered for real world games), and due to lack of sales and the high costs 3DFX burdened itself with by acquiring STB, one of the greatest computer graphics companies ever went out of business. Just sad.
Re:Speaking of Glide (Score:5, Informative)
Dunno about that...
Last time I saw it running on Glide under a recent Windows, there seemed to be a bug where it didn't wait for vsync properly and the CPU got way ahead of the graphics, leading to really ugly control latency. I probably screwed up somewhere
The win32 software renderer didn't have this problem.
-lead programmer of Montezuma's Return
Security issues (Score:4, Informative)
Two services, both of which are running as privileged users, which directly map memory and IO space to a user-space process without any significant checks being done on what is asking for access or what it's asking for access to in a common driver running under a networked OS.
You might say why have a glide card in a server but just how many drivers for other hardware use this same sort of rubbish to interface to their hardware without us knowing? How many still do it under XP, 2003, Vista etc.?
Every time you install a device driver you are really granting complete machine access to the driver, without audit, without checks. Even in XP x64, he's shown that the ability to create such a driver (one that has privileged access and will grant it to any software that asks for it) requires only a trivial re-compile of a badly-designed driver, using publically available source code, and an install.
Have people known about this particular driver issue for a long time? Although deliberately introducing malware onto a system via this method would of course require the administrators co-operation, how many third-party device drivers, services, etc. can be subverted to provide that level of access to any software that asks for it?
That's the scary bit - the fact that the author must be a bit mental to want to run a VooDoo on an XP x64 machine is re-assuring in comparison.
Re:Speaking of Glide (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WTF Are you talking about? (Score:1, Informative)
Voodoo 2 was capable of two-card SLI for what "multi-chip" typically refers to. (You wouldn't call a multi-chip IBM RS-series processor "multi-processor" when it was a single logical processor, now would you?) It was the Voodoo 5 that introduced "multi-chip" rendering on a single card.
True, Voodoo 2 ruled, but after the TNT series only in the SLI configuration, or otherwise only because Glide was still popular among game devs... not because of any technical excellence of the chips or the card. They needed three chips to have less than what Nvidia managed to squeeze on a single-chip solution.
And to answer a post somewhere above [I'm too lazy to wait for another submitting window], the STB purchase affected 3dfx's downfall (as it pissed off every single third party board maker, who promptly hopped over to Nvidia's camp instead, and also because STB's old board plant at Juarez was a never-ending source of problems), but so did the incredible feature creep of the Rampage project -- originaly slated as a successor to Voodoo Graphics already! -- and the jaw-dropping way 3dfx bled money on stuff completely unrelated to chips, drivers, or retail. All the while Nvidia recovered from the NV1 and NV2 disasters (quads as rendering primitives, anyone?) to constantly come up with improved products (even if the famed "6 month product cycle" never quite happened) to gradually win almost all the third party video card makers. The rest is history -- Nvidia bought out 3dfx and buried the projects, bar the jittered sub-pixel sampling method maybe...
And what's that got to do with anything? (Score:4, Informative)
Also the Voodoo 2 didn't have 3 processors on board, it had 3 chips each which was a part of a single unit. One chip did the frame buffer, the two others were texture units. Together they formed what is a single pipeline on a modern card. While separate chips, you had to have one frame buffer chip and at least one texture chip. Adding more texture chips made multi-texturing faster, but not single texturing. In no case did it help geometry.
The Voodoo 5 was different. Each VSA was it's own self contained chip. You could use one or you could use more. However they weren't very powerful. It took 2 of them to make a showing at all against things like a GeForce, never mind a GeForce 2. That was not the right way to go. More chips is a valid in visualization systems (which 3dfx chips were oft used in) but not for consumer desktops. As is seen with the SLI market there IS a small market for it for the ubergamers, but it's got to be optional, not mandatory to get reasonable performance.
Multichip is expensive (Score:3, Informative)
Example: in 1996 when 3dlabs designed the Permedia, it was a multi-chip solution (just like their workstation products) consisting of a pixel and vertex processor. In 1997, 3dlabs combined the multi-chip Permedia into the single-chip Permedia 2. Despite being priced mucn cheaper than the Permedia, the Permedia 2 made 3dlabs much more money due to the low-cost, single-chip design.
3DFX designed the Voodoo Graphics as a multi-chip solution (just like their arcade boards), and they were high-priced due to the cost of a multi-chip solution. Even worse were the Voodoo Rush cards, which required 3 chips, and didn't work properly. 3DFX raised that cost even higher with the Voodoo 2, which required THREE chips for a 3D-only solution. They also increased the PCB complexity by requiring THREE 64-bit independent busses.
What they should have done after the Voodoo Graphics got them recognition was release something like the Voodoo 3 (with reduced clocks), but they put that off in favor of the Voodoo 2 because they could release it earlier. Later, they released the cut-down Banshee, and they made the mistake of marketing it (and pricing it) as a performance product, instead of a midrange part designed to entice OEMs.
Near the end of the year, other competitors released chips that were much better than single Voodoo 2 cards for the same price. The Banshee barely kept up in the price war with the TNT and Savage 3D, and the Voodoo2's price plummeted as a result of that price war. The market for Voodoo 2 cards saturated, and because 3DFX had no way to reduce the build cost (thanks to their multi-chip design), they took losses.
So, by the end of 1998, consumers were left confused by all the inconsistency. All 3DFX fans had to purchase were overpriced Voodoo 2 cards that required a 2D card, and all they had to look forward to was the Voodoo 3 (same performance as Voodoo 2 SLI, 6 months down the road, big deal). The only impressive card 3DFX released in 1998 was the Voodoo 2, but it was only impressive for the first half of the year. 3dFX never saw the "big picture" that was the single-chip 2D/3D card until it was too late.