What's Better?
- Thread starter Mav23
- Start date
Dark Tower
Rear Admiral
Luanatic Use wickedgl with a voodoo card makes opengl almost as good as a glide.
Glide is the best with opengl coming second for voodoo owners. PS even new games have glide support or did you forget Deus ex???
Glide is the best with opengl coming second for voodoo owners. PS even new games have glide support or did you forget Deus ex???
Johnl12
Repairman
Actually for the next year or so Glide base games are still going to be release. Though at this time I would agreed that buying a 3dfx card may not be the wisest thing to do. From what I read 3dfx card owners are like Mac owners. They are completely loyal the 3dfx. Where Nivida owners are not so. Glide was consider the best, OpenGL second best. You see 3dfx was sold to Nivida earlier this year. Most likely Nivida will not be supporting 3dfx's Glide. So now there are basically only two 3D gaming standards, OpenGL and Microsoft Direct3D. Microsoft D3D is now bundle with DirectX 6.0 and up. So now on the newer games boxes it will state Microsoft DirectX and not Direct3D.
Basically all 3d cards and games release in the last two years have either supported Glide/D3D or OpenGL/D3D (I not sure but I think Homeworld supported all three). Since Microsoft develops D3D and built D3D support in Win98, WinME and 2000 and did not built in support for the other gaming standards. Nivida, 3dfx, ATI, Matrox, S3 and all other video cards manufactures and game developers basically had no choice but to support D3D too. Now most 3D gamers would agree that D3D is not a very good gaming standard.
3dfx decided to stop licensing its Voodoo graphic chip. They thought that making their own video cards was the way to go. This was a mistake, which cost them market share. Also, Nivida was able to release a new graphic chip every six month. 3dfx was unable to match this.
Now there are still a lot of games available, which support Glide. But any new 3D game that was started in the past I'll said 5 months, would most likely be base on OpenGL/D3D. So the issue now would be which graphic chip and which graphic card to get.
ATI, Nivida, ST Microelectronics, and Matrox are the four major graphic chip manufactures. Nivida is consider the leader with ATI in second, then ST Microelectronics, and Matrox a distance four. All of these chips support OpenGL/D3D. I personally would not worry about a Matrox graphic card. Matrox for years was consider the best 2D graphic card. Most still consider Matrox the leader in 2D. But for gaming, 3D is what counts. As far as Nivida and ATI are concern, think of them as Intel Vs AMD. Nivida has a bigger market share. They are into one-upped men ship. If you compare Nivida's Geforce 2 MX and ATI's Redaon chips, ATI has a slight advantage. It has a built in DVD decoder, which supports Mpeg3 and 4. Nivida base cards use a software decoder for DVD. ATI's Redaon are also a little fast then the MX cards. Nivida has just announced it release of two new MX chips. These two new chips (MX 200 and MX 400) will be faster than ATI's Redaon chip. But there will be no new features.
I don't know a lot about ST Microelectronics Kyro II graphic chip. It's suppose to be a good alternate the Geforce 2 MX cards.
Nivida has released the new Geforce 3 chip. This chip is faster and will have lots of new features. The problems though is that no new game release in the the next year, years and a half will be able to take advantage of these new features and graphic cards base on this chip should start around $300.00. Also as far as I can tell they still wont have a built in DVD decoder. You can check out these two-site http://www.tomshardware.com and http://www.anandtech.com for more information about graphic cards.
[Edited by Johnl12 on 05-26-2001 at 05:36]
Frosty
a full fledged GF
But Summoner sucks, like every other Volition game.
And as far as quality goes these days, DX8 is faster than OpenGL and looks just as good in games. GLide was just 3DFX's own twisted version of OpenGL, streamlined for 3DFX cards, but it was never "the best." GLide fell short of Rredline and OpenGL regularly. And while D3D used to suck terribly, the yearly DX revisions by Microsoft continue to make it less and less sucky.
[Edited by Frosty on 05-26-2001 at 10:06]
And as far as quality goes these days, DX8 is faster than OpenGL and looks just as good in games. GLide was just 3DFX's own twisted version of OpenGL, streamlined for 3DFX cards, but it was never "the best." GLide fell short of Rredline and OpenGL regularly. And while D3D used to suck terribly, the yearly DX revisions by Microsoft continue to make it less and less sucky.
[Edited by Frosty on 05-26-2001 at 10:06]
.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
You know what game was great? Descent: the Descent to Descent Mountain: Descent. THAT FRANCHISE DOESN'T SUCK AT ALL!
Frosty
a full fledged GF
Oh come on...
SilentWarrior, Freespace was a soulless collection of meaningless missions, with a backstory as light as any FPS out there, and with wingment named Alpha 2. It doesn't get much worse than that.
And who are these "suits?" Since there's not any central game awards agency, you must mean mean individual gaming mags. If so, "suits" isn't the word you're looking for. And anyway, no 2 magazines agree, and they certainly don't get together when it's time to give awards like "Game of the Year." Each one chooses its own, based on its preference.
Your preference is abviously games that illicit no emotion whatsoever.
[Edited by Frosty on 05-26-2001 at 11:08]
SilentWarrior, Freespace was a soulless collection of meaningless missions, with a backstory as light as any FPS out there, and with wingment named Alpha 2. It doesn't get much worse than that.
And who are these "suits?" Since there's not any central game awards agency, you must mean mean individual gaming mags. If so, "suits" isn't the word you're looking for. And anyway, no 2 magazines agree, and they certainly don't get together when it's time to give awards like "Game of the Year." Each one chooses its own, based on its preference.
Your preference is abviously games that illicit no emotion whatsoever.
[Edited by Frosty on 05-26-2001 at 11:08]
Tachyon wasn't too bad of a game, since it was like Privateer and all, but some of those missions were nearly impossible. The ones in nebulas and stuff were EXTREMELY difficult, and a good deal of the missions for the Bora were outrageous. (Since they only have dumbfire missiles, it's harder for Bora than GalSpan.) Still, I think that's the best flight sim I've seen other than Wing Commander.
Death
gh0d (Administrator)
Tachyon was an ok game, but not spectacular. Without Bruce Campbell's voice-over, it'd probably have been worse, IMO. (Ironically, Tach is the closest we'll get to seeing BC in a Privateer-ish universe, though he's long been a fan favorite for playing Burrows in the predicted (but never materialized) Priv3.) I did like, though, that you had the option of going either way, though I felt the GalSpan plot branch was the weaker of the two, and left me feeling a bit empty, for lack of a better term, when it was done.
FS/FS2: *yawn* They were ok as far as space combat goes, but the story wasn't really there, even after hiring actual writers for FS2. I'm sorry, but Alpha 3's biting the big one (not too hard, as wingmen AIs are stupid, in just about any game in existence) just doesn't cut it compared to Shadow's being vaped by a pair of Salthis (IIRC on the type), Spirit's kamikaze against the Heaven's Gate starbase (where her fiancee Phillip was rumored to be held captive by the Kilrathi), or even Dallas' death in WCP.
Oh, and FS2's netcode sucks boulders through a coffee stirring straw, not to mention a clunky engine that, at times, taxed even a K7-700 w/ 256MB of memory feeding a GeForce2 card.
As for the graphics question that kicked off this thread, Glide is a better API for 3Dfx cards, although as has been noted elsewhere 3Dfx is hardly "top dog" any more.
In reply to another comment, it used to be that D3D only real advantage was being already bundled with the OS, but the later versions do hold up pretty good in their own right. DirectX is about the only thing I can think of from Microsoft that's only gotten better with later versions. (Though, it is starting to get the bloat reminiscent of their OSes...)
FS/FS2: *yawn* They were ok as far as space combat goes, but the story wasn't really there, even after hiring actual writers for FS2. I'm sorry, but Alpha 3's biting the big one (not too hard, as wingmen AIs are stupid, in just about any game in existence) just doesn't cut it compared to Shadow's being vaped by a pair of Salthis (IIRC on the type), Spirit's kamikaze against the Heaven's Gate starbase (where her fiancee Phillip was rumored to be held captive by the Kilrathi), or even Dallas' death in WCP.
Oh, and FS2's netcode sucks boulders through a coffee stirring straw, not to mention a clunky engine that, at times, taxed even a K7-700 w/ 256MB of memory feeding a GeForce2 card.
As for the graphics question that kicked off this thread, Glide is a better API for 3Dfx cards, although as has been noted elsewhere 3Dfx is hardly "top dog" any more.
In reply to another comment, it used to be that D3D only real advantage was being already bundled with the OS, but the later versions do hold up pretty good in their own right. DirectX is about the only thing I can think of from Microsoft that's only gotten better with later versions. (Though, it is starting to get the bloat reminiscent of their OSes...)
Mekt-Hakkikt
Mpanty's bane
I liked FS and FS2. Of course, there was no interaction between the wingmen, so there was no connection build up to me as a character. For once I was not the glaring hero who saved humanity alone, it made a nice difference.
They had an atmosphere that made me believe that there was real war for survival going on, and you got news what happened oustide your ship. They had a challenging enemy and neat graphics, with some good ideas.
I don't say it is more atmosphereic than WC1, WC2 or WC4, but surely more than Starlancer and IMO, more than WCP and SOPS.
A matter of taste again...
[Edited by Mekt-Hakkikt on 05-27-2001 at 07:30]
They had an atmosphere that made me believe that there was real war for survival going on, and you got news what happened oustide your ship. They had a challenging enemy and neat graphics, with some good ideas.
I don't say it is more atmosphereic than WC1, WC2 or WC4, but surely more than Starlancer and IMO, more than WCP and SOPS.
A matter of taste again...
[Edited by Mekt-Hakkikt on 05-27-2001 at 07:30]
I didnt care too much for FS and FS2. Most of the fighters handled like bombers. Very slow flight control response, poor roll rates and yaw rates, that awfull AB shaking, and weak weapons (terran side). The ships dont slide, but rather fly like they are on rails, but yet you have small inertia movement when you pull the throttle to a full stop. I think the biggest gripe I have with FS and FS2 is that when a mission starts, you are plunged right into the middle of the combat zone after the briefing, no chance to get your power settings and sense of direction before hitting the combat zone. Both games should have at least let you fly to the combat zone like in WC so you can get ready mentally and prepare your ships settings.
Another bad thing about the FS games is the comms. Too many keys to call up a specific wingman or wing, and when there are 3 bogies on your tail all about to sheer away your last bit of armor, who has time to fumble thru keystrokes just to cry out for help! With that many keystrokes just for the comms, it should have been set up so that you have a co-pilot, who could handle all the comms, or simpy made the steps to communicate much simpler and quicker, like WC's quick command "ALT-B", which would tell your entire wing to break and attack. At least with that, it breaks up the clusters of bogies bearing down on you so you can call up individual wingmen to take on specific targets.
As far as the ships, the only "real" ship with some balls was that new stealth fighter in FS2, it had good manuverability, but very poor weapons and missile loadouts. You could at least keep up with a bogie during a chase in that ship. The others would run out of AB fuel too fast and dont go fast enough, even if you set your AB charge rate to max, you still couldnt keep up with the Shivan ships, even their bombers had more speed and manuverability than the terran fighters! Even the Shivan cap ships had more speed than the terran fighters! In one of the FS2 missions, you take out some of the turrets on a Shivan destroyer before it hits a jump point, if you arent constantly checking your position, you end up getting run over by that destroyer, if not taken out by its flak guns. The torpedos you use to take out the turrets take WAY too long to lock on, and they move much too slowly, only to be shot down by the very turret its targeted to take out!
I can say this, in FS and FS2, the terran ships are inferior to the Shivans. The games do have excellent graphics. Very cool nebula effects in FS2, and the explosion effects are neat also. Watch out for those turrets on the terran capships! They like to indiscriminately fire in your direction, especially at the bogie you are chasing down! My two FS games sit in the CD rack collecting dust, so that there is plenty of room on the HD for all my WC games!
RFB
Another bad thing about the FS games is the comms. Too many keys to call up a specific wingman or wing, and when there are 3 bogies on your tail all about to sheer away your last bit of armor, who has time to fumble thru keystrokes just to cry out for help! With that many keystrokes just for the comms, it should have been set up so that you have a co-pilot, who could handle all the comms, or simpy made the steps to communicate much simpler and quicker, like WC's quick command "ALT-B", which would tell your entire wing to break and attack. At least with that, it breaks up the clusters of bogies bearing down on you so you can call up individual wingmen to take on specific targets.
As far as the ships, the only "real" ship with some balls was that new stealth fighter in FS2, it had good manuverability, but very poor weapons and missile loadouts. You could at least keep up with a bogie during a chase in that ship. The others would run out of AB fuel too fast and dont go fast enough, even if you set your AB charge rate to max, you still couldnt keep up with the Shivan ships, even their bombers had more speed and manuverability than the terran fighters! Even the Shivan cap ships had more speed than the terran fighters! In one of the FS2 missions, you take out some of the turrets on a Shivan destroyer before it hits a jump point, if you arent constantly checking your position, you end up getting run over by that destroyer, if not taken out by its flak guns. The torpedos you use to take out the turrets take WAY too long to lock on, and they move much too slowly, only to be shot down by the very turret its targeted to take out!
I can say this, in FS and FS2, the terran ships are inferior to the Shivans. The games do have excellent graphics. Very cool nebula effects in FS2, and the explosion effects are neat also. Watch out for those turrets on the terran capships! They like to indiscriminately fire in your direction, especially at the bogie you are chasing down! My two FS games sit in the CD rack collecting dust, so that there is plenty of room on the HD for all my WC games!
RFB
Dark Tower
Rear Admiral
The shivans are supposed to be better than the terrans thats the points. Also that destroyer was a jugernaut I think you'll find. Personaly fs and the wc series are good in different areas wc becasue you had more of a ersonal feeling to it and striong storylines because of it. On the otherhand FS has a more lighter feeling because it isn't personal which is the feeling the developers are trying for. Personaly if the next WC looks like FS it will rule 
On another note the current plotline for WC seams to be mirroring FS in a unknow force kind of way.
Now could you please remember the moderators rules on these threads as its geting near to a wc verses fs thread and the last one was changed to who would win between a rabbit and a cat IIRC.
On topic please remember he asked what was better for voodoo cards so the answer is as follows. Glide is best, followed by WickedGl opengl drivers, followed by D3D and opengl depending on the game try both and then decide.
PS I just remembered you can change the flight dynamics of FS. Just download the descent manager tools for freespace. To get them just go to http://freespace.volitionwatch.com and go to the download section. When you got them installed just look through the liberies you can open and there should be a refernece there just extract it and tweak the value it mentions. If your really interested I'll write up some instructs for you since my bable maybe incohirent.
Lets kill kats and bugs, not flame each other.
[Edited by Dark Tower on 05-27-2001 at 16:05]
On another note the current plotline for WC seams to be mirroring FS in a unknow force kind of way.
Now could you please remember the moderators rules on these threads as its geting near to a wc verses fs thread and the last one was changed to who would win between a rabbit and a cat IIRC.
On topic please remember he asked what was better for voodoo cards so the answer is as follows. Glide is best, followed by WickedGl opengl drivers, followed by D3D and opengl depending on the game try both and then decide.
PS I just remembered you can change the flight dynamics of FS. Just download the descent manager tools for freespace. To get them just go to http://freespace.volitionwatch.com and go to the download section. When you got them installed just look through the liberies you can open and there should be a refernece there just extract it and tweak the value it mentions. If your really interested I'll write up some instructs for you since my bable maybe incohirent.
Lets kill kats and bugs, not flame each other.
[Edited by Dark Tower on 05-27-2001 at 16:05]
