Glide is 3dfx’s proprietary 3D graphics API, built for its own Voodoo hardware. It was far simpler to target than Direct3D or OpenGL were at the time, which is why a whole generation of late-90s games were written to Glide directly rather than through a general-purpose API — and it’s why Voodoo cards are still sought after today: for a lot of those titles, real 3dfx hardware paired with Glide is still the most authentic way to run them.
It’s usually thought of as a Windows 98 thing, since Glide’s wide support was one of the big reasons to buy a Voodoo card back then, but Glide games are supported in DOS too, including a handful that run Tomb Raider-style titles natively from a DOS prompt rather than through Windows at all.
I keep coming back to it through the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 2 in a thin client builds — Glide compatibility is usually the actual test of whether one of these old cards is working properly, more than any benchmark score.
Related on this site
- 3Dfx
- How To Play 3Dfx Glide Games in DOS
- DOS Glide Games — the maintained list
- I made 3Dfx Voodoo2 work on a modern PC!