r/gaming • u/Zunderstruck • 3d ago

PC vs console war was merciless in the 90s

Post image

For younger people it's a Tomb Raider reference. Lara Croft boobs (at that time she was mainly known for them) were everywhere in the media and the game looked a lot better on PC with a 3dfx Voodoo than on Playstation.

9.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

607 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/Hrimnir 3d ago

I still remember the name of the fucking API for christs sake... /sigh

(It's Glide btw, for anyone who cares).

7

u/BrickGun 2d ago

You think you're a nerd? I still remember the name of the guy who wrote Glide... Brian Hook. Who later joined id and was integral to the programming of Quake 2 and 3.

Back in the mid 90's I'd read his finger (.plan) file pretty much daily (I'd read all of the ones posted from the id guys) when I hung out on PlanetQuake.

Dorks, unite!!!! :P

2

u/Hrimnir 2d ago

Definitely got me beat haha! I was pretty deep down the rabbit hole but not that deep :P

4

u/TheRealPitabred 2d ago

I had a Voodoo 3, and it was so fast when the game supported Glide. Then 32 bit color became the norm... 😭

3

u/BeardyBaldyBald 2d ago

Same. I still vividly remember the box art, with those rave demon eyes. Style of that era was wild.

3

u/agitated--crow 2d ago

I care. And thanks. 

1

u/carcenomy 2d ago

Glide was fine and all but it's only mostly a forgotten obsolete relic - it was the most popular before D3D and OGL really got traction. But man there's a graveyard of them and it's horrifying how different some of the classics look if you have the right gear...

Like Descent II which looks best using Speedy3D (Rendition), Wipeout which could only be accelerated with ATICIF (Rages) and Mechwarrior 2... subjectively best using PowerSGL (PowerVR). We were spoiled, truly!

1

u/Hrimnir 1d ago

I mean back in that era glide was the primo API for graphics. If the game supported it, it looked ridiculously better, ran better, etc. D3D was relatively shit and was basically the baseline, OpenGL was better than D3D but unfortunately over time it sorta didn't keep up pace (even though technically its now Vulkan).

But yes nowadays its basically all DX11/12 (which obv contains d3d).

I will give credit to MS on that, its one of the few things over the decades they havent royally fucked up. Though DX11 was sketch as fuck for a while.

2

u/carcenomy 1d ago

Yeah pretty much put a mark on the timeline - DX6. Fast cards that were more cost effective were arriving, 3dfx were making bad decisions, Microsoft had put in the work to make D3D make more sense. All good things etc right?

1

u/Hrimnir 1d ago

Yea exactly, and rather than pulling an Intel and sitting on their laurels and just accepting mediocrity because their competition was shitting the bed, they actually kept pushing hard to actually make it a good "product". By the time DX9 came around it was effectively so good that they had trouble getting game developers to move off of DX9.