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3dfx Owners Report Trouble With TR Editor
12:13 PM | Michael Eilers | Comment on this story
A series of reports published on Accelerate Your Mac are revealing a problem that may be facing owners of 3dfx Voodoo 2, 3 (and possibly 4 and 5) cards. Specifically, when trying to use the level editor that ships with Tomb Raider Chronicles, recently shipped by Aspyr Media, the editor fails to work.
The failure of this editor on V2 cards is no surprise, as those cards do not allow rendering of 3D graphics in a window (rather than full-screen) which the editor requires. However, the V3 (and by extension V4 and V5) series of cards will allow 3D drawing in a window; yet readers are still reporting problems.
Ray Swartz, former Mac engineer for both 3dfx and ATI, wrote in to XLR8 with an explanation of why users are experiencing problems. Here is his note:
The Voodoo 1 & 2 drivers were built on top of Glide2, which was only full screen. But beginning with the Voodoo 3, all the drivers were built on top of Glide 3, which supports windowed mode and 32-bit color. This includes the RAVE and OpenGL drivers.
From my experience trying to support multiple-window RAVE apps, like 3D World and the French Touch modelers, there was a bad bug in Glide 3 which often gave various "fifo" errors when more than one window was being rendered to. These bugs were never fixed. Sorry.
Users of other applications that draw OpenGL or RAVE in a window (such as Lightwave and Cinema 3D) reported similar problems or loss of function, so this problem is not isolated to TR's level editor specifically.
As the editor does require 3D hardware acceleration to function, 3dfx owners may be out of luck at present. If any IMG readers are having success with V4 or V5 cards, please report your results in the Forums. Jump to XLR8 for more details on the problem.
 Aspyr Media
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