What would you use this for?
It's viable enough that clone cards have been built based on the reverse engineering efforts:
I wonder why? Because of delays during emulation?
I could see that if it was a software emulation or e.g. an FPGA reimplementation, but this one is still using the original GPUs so would be comparable to having a modern GPU from Asus or Gigabyte instead of the reference designs from AMD or Nvidia.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the Playstation 2. That system occupied a lot of late nights during my college and young professional years. My memories of those games are wrapped up in those tumultuous times.
As fond as those memories may be, I just can't play emulations/remasters of those games nowadays. Why not? I'm convinced it's because the loud fan noise of the PS2 is missing without the original system. That fan blast was on before, during, and after every gaming session. It filled the silence when the game paused. It picked up when the game peaked. It was there when I had loud joyful matches of Burnout 3 with friends. And it was there during long lonely nights following a breakup. The PS2 fan's noise pierced my soul.
Nostalgia is a very fickle thing. It's never just the favorite game, or food, or jacket. It's where you were at the time, the smells in the air, the twitches around you, the people you were with, the way you felt.
What is an authentic recreation of an old game?
For one, it might just be running it on the original hardware. It may be hearing some specific electric hum or click before the system starts. It may be the way the buttons on those old controllers felt. And that may be enough.
For others, it may be playing the game with a friend lost to time. Or playing the game in one's childhood bedroom, long since demolished. Or playing the game while eating a special pizza, from a place that's long shuttered.
So if recreating the experience is as simple as getting the old hardware assembled, that sounds relatively reasonable and achievable.
Still, ultimately, I prefer not chasing ghosts. Why cling to the experiences of the past when we can make new experiences today? It's a hard lesson learned. Nostalgia bites me hard.
Obviously hardware has improved so much that you can play a game like Deus Ex on any hardware today and it performs perfectly well. But there are also games that run into problems with high clock rates for unrelated reasons. So for an accurate emulation, you would want a clocked down CPU and 3DFx chip running on a FPGA or something.
Interpolated pixels kind of look fine sometimes. NFS2:SE looked most fine. They don't make them like that anymore.
(Thus, reimplementing this under either OpenGL or Vulkan ought to be reasonably trivial using modern hardware.)
> they were basically very fast (for the time) 2D triangle renderers.
that's still true of GPUs today :) in fact, with the exception of h264/265 encode/decode, and "AI" - that's all that graphics cards have ever done!
As I explained in a sister comment, there's a lot more going on with rasterization, even back then, than "painting 2D triangles" might imply. Yes, only the XY coordinates determine the screen location of a rendered pixel, but the Z coordinate even at that stage has a lot to do with its color (e.g. for perspective-correct texture lookup) and whether it is painted at all (Z buffering).
I guess Glide could be defined as low-level API since it was defined by single vendor's architecture instead of some more abstract machine like GL and other APIs.