X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Direct3D


Grand Prix Legends

GPLs lack of inbuilt support for 3D accelerator cards other than those produced by 3dfx and Rendition contributed to a decrease in sales when those cards became obsolete, since at the time there was no Direct3D support.

An out-of-the-box copy of GPL lacks several features that one might expect from a modern driving simulation, and so most people add as a matter of course several patches: the official version 1.2 patch that adds force feedback; a second patch to add Direct3D and/or OpenGL support; and a third patch that gets around a problem that prevents the original game from working on computers with CPUs faster than 1.4 GHz.

Qube Software

It was founded in 1998 by Servan Keondjian and Doug Rabson who created the Reality Lab renderer and who subsequently played a leading role at Microsoft turning it into Direct3D.

Qube Software has produced games, however its main focus has been the development of 3D software that would address the key problems with 3D middleware Keondjian says he identified during his years working on Reality Lab and Direct3D.


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Direct3D |

Matrox G200

Throughout most of its life G200 had to get by, in popular games such as Quake II, with a slow OpenGL-to-Direct3D wrapper driver.

SiS 6326

According to a test of Tom's Hardware of January 21, 1998, it could perform roughly a third of the performance of a NVidia RIVA 128 or 40% less than an ATI Rage Pro in terms of frames per second in Direct3D benchmarks and simply couldn't play Quake due its lack of OpenGL support.


see also