Glide is a proprietary 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. It was dedicated to gaming performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data formats identical to those used internally in their cards. The Voodoo cards were the first to offer performance to really make 3D games work well, and Glide became widely used as a result. Further refinement of Microsoft's Direct3D an...
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Glide is a proprietary 3D graphics API developed by 3dfx Interactive for their Voodoo Graphics 3D accelerator cards. It was dedicated to gaming performance, supporting geometry and texture mapping primarily, in data formats identical to those used internally in their cards. The Voodoo cards were the first to offer performance to really make 3D games work well, and Glide became widely used as a result. Further refinement of Microsoft's Direct3D and full OpenGL implementations from other graphics card vendors, in addition to growing competition in 3D hardware, eventually caused Glide to become superfluous.
Glide is based on the basic geometry and "world view" of OpenGL. OpenGL is a large graphics library with roughly 250 calls in the API, many of which are of limited use. Glide was an effort to select primarily features that were useful for real-time rendering of 3D games. The result was an API that was small enough to be implemented entirely in hardware. This focus did lead to various...
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