OpenGL vs Glide

[NikPreviousAcct]

I was talking to someone here at work about vidcards when he said something about Glide looking better than OpenGL as far as picture quality goes. What do you think? Why?

How would one tell the difference, really? I mean, I've had my fill of 3dfx (VooDoo3 2000) and went for a GeForce2 Pro. Aside from the obvious differences, if you were to take a GeForce2 and a VooDoo5 5500 or something and play them side by side, would you be able to tell the differences specifically referring to OpenGL vs Glide?

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

Okay, I see poll votes, but I don't see anyone actually answering my question as to if you can even see the difference or what it is...

 

[DClark]

Glide is dead. OpenGL and Direct3D has surpassed Glide, but some 3dfx faithful seem to cling to it as if it were the messiah.

In its day, Glide was the best API out there (Direct3D just plain sucked), but its' day was several years ago.

 

[AA0]

In terms of IQ, glide is slightly better from what I've heard, never really did the comparision with glide myself. As a gaming API, OpenGL is far better, multiplatform and can be used with any cards. Glide always sucked that way.

 

[Superwormy]

Boot up Unreal on a Geforce2 computer, or Radeon 8500, Geforce 4 whateva ya want, then play it later on a Glide based comoputer, UNREAL looks SOOOOO MUCH BETTER in Glide.

Course that's just Unreal.

Obvously Glide is dead, so it's no longer really an issue here, its gone and far insuperior now. But it used to own.

 

[oldfart]

Glide: 16 Bit color, 256 x 256 max texture size
OpenGL: 32 Bit color, 2048 x 2048 max texture size

OpenGL looks better.

Games that were coded for Glide ran very well, but OpenGL gets the nod for better quality.

 

[TheAJFrost]

Anything that is written just for one graphics card is going to look and perform better. Look at the PowerVR (old, old crap) games that were written just for it were quick, anything else was slow and had graphical glitches. GLide was good at the time, thats GOOD, not the second coming.

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

Cool. Thanks guys 🙂

nik

 

[BFG10K]

The only reason Glide runs "faster" in some old games is nothing to do with the API, it's the fact that the games were originally optimised and built to use Glide. That and the fact that Glide only supports small 16 bit textures and has hardly any of the advanced filtering and mapping modes that OpenGL has. Quite frankly the feature-set of Glide is absolutely pathetic.

 

[jiffylube1024]

<< Boot up Unreal on a Geforce2 computer, or Radeon 8500, Geforce 4 whateva ya want, then play it later on a Glide based comoputer, UNREAL looks SOOOOO MUCH BETTER in Glide.

Course that's just Unreal.

Obvously Glide is dead, so it's no longer really an issue here, its gone and far insuperior now. But it used to own.
>>



Sort of true but not really, and false for Unreal Tournament. If you load Unreal Tournament with the extra textures (UT CD 2) and the OpenGL textures settings, then the game looks much, much better in OpenGL with the high-res textures. The reason Unreal looks better in Glide was that it was originally written to support Glide; other API support was secondary at the time. As said above however, if you write a game for a specific API, it will look best with that one. Max Payne is Direct3d only and it looks awesome. Quake-3 based games look excellent too (OpenGL). It's all about what the developers work with. Glide used to be a developer favourite, but not it has finally met its demise.

Glide was an excellent API in its time however; with Glide games on a Voodoo card looked pretty much as good in 16-bit as any other video card in 32-bit, and the memory/hardware limitations at the time made 16-bit rendering much more atractive.

 

[Rand]

Functionally OpenGL is vastly superior, supporting much larger texture sizes and higher color depth and many other quality enhancing effects that GLIde lacks.

That said, if your not using any of OpenGL's extra features and it's just a basic render then GLide tends to look slightly superior IMHO.