Stupid question?

[Ikke]

Hi, can anybody tell me why (and how) the G400Max is faster then the G450. I have both and switched them now a couple of times in my PC (PIII 650 Chaintech 384Mb SB Live)and I can't spot a REAL difference, om my g450 2D looks better (I can use higher reslotutions and still read the letters) and it looks like Direct3D and Glide games run better in 1024*768. Games like Nocturne and Resident EVil run prefect at 1280* on the G450 and on the MAX you sometimes see how the screen is build up.

[Wombat]

The first thing is that your processor isn't fast enough. At 650MHz, the G400MAX is still CPU dependent, and will have speed increases until 800MHz or better.

Also, bigger textures, and lots of other things will slow the G450.

[Maggi]

The G450s performance is held back by its crippled 64bit bus ...

Even though I was able to clock it higher than I had my G400, it has lower performance.

Btw, what do you mean, Direct3D and Glide games ???
Are you using a Glide wrapper ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[Ikke]

I mean games like FAK2 and NOLF, I don't use anything else then the Matrox glide drivers.

The performance isn't good at 1024, but I just tried it to see the difference. A real difference I see in Crimson Skies at 1024*768. Everything looks more colorfull on the G450 (maybe some setting, I don't know).

When I use 3DMark the MAX is much faster then the 450. I know about the 64bit bus, but it is 2x faster (they say), so what's the difference?

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Ikke:
...
I don't use anything else then the Matrox glide drivers
...

Sorry, but could you enlighten me on that one, please ?

Matrox never ever wrote drivers for Glide, did they ???

[Admiral]

He must be thinking of OpenGL... or TurboGL an confuses it with the 3dfx minigl driver.

[Ali]

NOLF only uses DirectX, so he must mean that.

Ikke, Glide is an API made and owned by 3dfx, no one else can use it, although there are some drivers out for some Nvidia cards that did use a wrapper.

I guess there might be a wrapper that works for all graphics cards, but as it would be slower than OpenGL or DirectX there would be no point using it.

Ali

[Ikke]

Sorry, I meant opengl, but isn't that glide for the matrox cards or is this a real stupid suggestion. Do you have some url's where I can find a larger explanation on this topic?

[Wombat]

I thought 3Dfx was going to open GLide. Or has that not happened yet?

[HollyBerri]

Oh, dear.... no, Ikke, openGL is NOT Glide for <U>any</u> card.

Did you ever have a Voodoo or Voodoo 2 3D-only card, back when your main video card only did 2D (or very limited 3D)? Glide is the API for the Voodoo cards.

Many games were written using the Glide API for 3D, because most everybody bought a Voodoo (1) to render 3D games (since there were few if any consumer video cards that would render 3D at that time). But only 3dfx cards could use that API.

So, Sun (who already had professional-level 3D, since Sun systems are used to do CGI for movies and animated cartoons) went into competition with 3dfx by releasing the OpenGL API, which is supported (to some degree) by a much wider range of video card manufacturers, like all of them. Games were written to utilize OpenGL, but programmers were already familiar with Glide, and that was easier for them, especially since few video cards had good 3D abilities for a long time.

There was a lot of controversy for a while among game programmers about whether to write in OpenGL (which was a better and more flexible API), or in Glide (which was more supported by the installed user base).

Microsoft was working with Sun for a while, but they had a falling out, so DirectX was born, which became Microsoft's 3D API.

So your games might use Direct3D (which works great on a G4xx), OpenGL (which doesn't necessarily work well on a G4xx, but won't necessarily work any better on any other card--most card manufacturers have trouble writing drivers for OpenGL implementation), or Glide (which only works on 3dfx cards unless you have a "wrapper" which makes your video card pretend to be a 3dfx card as far as the game is concerned).

All clear?

Corrections gratefully accepted.

-----------------------
Holly

[Wombat]

I thought that OpenGL was SGI's baby...

[Rags]

It is.

[superfly]

actually you can consider glide as a sort of "light" version of opengl that was custom built with the voodoo arquitecture in mind.

read it from an article that was interviewing brian hook,and how he was part of the team who created glide in the first place.

[HollyBerri]

Doesn't "SGI" stand for "Sun-something with a G-something with an I", though?

Guess I'd never pass a job-interview there... (I read that IBM used to ask in interviews, "What does IBM stand for?". It was quite shocking how many people who expected to work there didn't even know the company name)

[Jorden]

www.sgi.com ... look down at the bottom, it says Sillicon Graphics, Inc

Jord.