Once upon a time, a company in San Jose, California named 3dfx Interactive was king of the gaming video

card market. In October 1996 they released the Voodoo I, which was a phenomenal success. It was the first hardware accelerated card, but only rendered 3D; it had to be piggybacked with a 2D video card. The idea was that 2D rendering was handled by a high quality 2D video card (Matrox was immensely popular at the time) but 3D information (see Glide2, Section 3.1 ) would be passed to the Voodoo I and rendered, using the Voodoo's fast hardware to perform the necessary graphics calculations. They released the Voodoo Rush in April 1996. It should've been a more powerful card, with a 50MHz GPU and 8MB of RAM. Even better, it was their first combined 2D/3D card, meaning that it freed up a valuable PCI slot (most PC's only had a couple of PCI slots back then) but the Rush wasn't as popular. 3dfx removed the multi-texturing unit from the Rush, and it was outperformed by the Voodoo I. At the time, ATI had their Rage series and nVidia had their Riva 128, but the Voodoo I blew them all away. This was a good time for Linux. id Software's open sourced the Doom codebase and ported Quake I to Linux (December 1996). We were getting our first tastes of real commercial gaming. Life was simple: you purchased a Voodoo. And it felt good, because 3dfx open sourced their drivers. The king of video cards worked with Linux developers. Not only did we have the best video cards, but the drivers were all open source. In March 1998, 3dfx released their Voodoo II, with its 3.6GB/sec memory bandwith, 12MB of video memory and 90MHz core. It supported resolutions up to 1024x768. This was 3dfx in its heyday. Like the Voodoo I, the Voodoo II was a 3D only card, and piggy backed with a 2D video card. The Voodoo Banshee was released in September 1998 as a combined 2D/3D card, like the Rush. Despite the faster 100MHz core, the Banshee was outperformed by the Voodoo II because its multi-texturing unit was removed, like with the Rush. And again like the Rush, it wasn't popular. But 3dfx reigned supreme, and nobody could touch them. In April 1999, the Voodoo III was released. There were a number of Voodoo III's, ranging from a 143MHz core speed to 183MHz. There were TV-out versions. There were PCI and AGP versions (it was the first AGP video card). It was another success, but 3dfx began to lose ground to nVidia, which released their TNT 2. The TNT 2 outperformed the Voodoo II, and accelerated 3D graphics at full 32 bit color, while the Voodoo's were stuck at 16 bit color. But life was still good for Linux. We had a card that was almost neck-to-neck with nVidia, our drivers were open source, and in December 1999, id Software gave us a huge gift: they open sourced the Quake I codebase. Then nVidia released the GeForce 256 in October 1999. 3dfx's Voodoo IV, its direct competitor, was about a year late which is very bad when you're competing for a bleeding edge market. While nVidia was putting real R&D into their cards, 3dfx was simply adding more and faster RAM. The Voodoo IV and V rendered in full 32bpp color, had great AA support (Section 7.4.3 ), featured a 2nd GPU, more memory, and was arguably the king of of video cards. However, 3dfx's late release of the Voodoo IV and V coupled with the fact that the GeForce could be had for half the price meant that 3dfx was sinking fast. For Linux, the newest Voodoo's could only accelerate at 16 and 24 bit color. Worse still, the Voodoo V's 2nd GPU was unused by the Linux driver (and to this day, the Voodoo V is

functionally equivalent to the single GPU Voodoo IV on Linux). Most Windows users were switching to nVidia, and despite the fact that the nVidia drivers were proprietary, even Linux users began to jump onto the nVidia bandwagon. VA Linux, the largest Linux server vendor, put nVidia into their machines. Then in April 2000, 3dfx was attacked on a different front: ATI started releasing their first generation Radeons. Until this point, ATI had always been an innovative (they developed their own 3D

penGL is a high level graphics programming API originally developed by SGI, and it became an industry standard for 2D and 3D graphics programming. It's defined and maintained by the Architectural Revision Board (ARB), an organization which include representatives from SGI, IBM, DEC, and Microsoft. OpenGL provides a powerful, complete and generic feature set for 2D and 3D graphics operations. There are 3 canonical parts to OpenGL:

GL: The OpenGL core calls GLU: The utility calls GLUT: OS independent window event (mouse, keyboard, etc.) handler.

OpenGL is not only an API, it's also an implementation, written by SGI. The implementation tries to use hardware acceleration for various graphics operations whenever available, which depends on what videocard you have in you computer. If hardware acceleration is not possible for a specific task, OpenGL falls back on software rendering. This means that when you get OpenGL from SGI, if you want any kind of hardware acceleration at all, it must be OpenGL written and compiled specifically for some graphics card. Otherwise, all you'll get is software rendering. The same thing is true for OpenGL clones, like Mesa. OpenGL is the open source equivalent to Direct3D, a component of DirectX (Section 3.14 ). The important difference being that since OpenGL is open (and DirectX is closed), games written in OpenGL are much easier to port to and co-develop on Linux than games written using DirectX