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The Importance of an OpenGL ICD

The controversy over 3dfx’s lack of a final OpenGL ICD, and even the heat Matrox took over an incomplete G200 OpenGL ICD until recently isn’t nearly as justified under gaming situations as it is under high-end professional arenas. Quake 2 can live running off of a MiniGL, however if you try and power up 3D Studio Max on a Voodoo3 and attempt to render in anything other than Direct3D and you’ll begin to understand what all the commotion was about. For a high-end graphics accelerator, driver support is critical to the performance and stability of the card’s operation. Weaknesses in a card’s OpenGL ICD as well as a card’s NT driver support are two very important factors that quickly become the downfall of some of the most popular graphics cards that worked just fine under your favorite games.

As briefly mentioned above, 3dfx is by far the worst of these contenders. The Voodoo3’s OpenGL ICD, from a high-end standpoint, is unacceptably slow and the lack of completeness takes 3dfx almost entirely out of the running for a good professional by day, gamer by night, video card. In all fairness to 3dfx, the Voodoo3 was never intended to be used in a high-end environment, so penalizing them simply because their card doesn’t do something it wasn’t intended to do isn’t justified at all. Be warned though, if you have a Voodoo3, prepare to either have another video card or another system for all of your high-end OpenGL rendering work. Once 3dfx completes the Voodoo3’s OpenGL ICD, things may change for 3dfx and the Voodoo3 may become the perfect card for this type of a market, but until that day comes, 3dfx is left as a gamers only option. Keep in mind that if you don’t require OpenGL support in your professional applications then 3dfx suddenly becomes a contender again, applications such as Photoshop don’t depend on 3D acceleration, and therefore would work perfectly fine on a gaming system that features a Voodoo3. However 3D Studio Max users (and users of similar programs) definitely understand the importance of a full OpenGL ICD.

ATI, surprisingly enough, seemed to offer a fairly stable, and reliable solution with their Rage 128 that managed to outperform some of the big boys in the high-end rendering tests AnandTech conducted. The Rage 128 seems to be a viable option for the professional by day, gamer by night market, although ATI has not been known as the best for driver support and quality in the past.

Matrox’s OpenGL ICD, albeit being complete, was the worst performing out of the entire bunch. Matrox definitely has a good amount of tweaking necessary on the G200’s OpenGL ICD before it can even come close to beating the ATI Rage 128 which seems to be the closest competing graphics accelerator in its class. At the time of testing, Matrox would not supply AnandTech with an OpenGL ICD for the G400 under Windows NT. According to Matrox the performance of the NT OpenGL ICD is not yet up to par with what they are expecting from the final ICD and therefore they wished to remain out of the performance comparison under Windows NT. The situation didn’t seem much better for the G400 under Windows 9x either, the G400’s drivers and OpenGL ICD under 9x are in desperate need of performance tweaking as the G400 came in dead last, second to only the G200 which yielded the slowest rendering performance of the entire bunch. To even further illustrate the lack of maturity of the current G400 drivers, under Windows 98, using the Direct3D API for rendering, the G400 takes a back seat to Matrox’s own G200! While Direct3D rendering isn’t the most important factor to consider when looking at a high-end graphics card solution, it is worthy of mentioning as it should be used, by Matrox, as a wakeup call for improving their driver performance.

S3’s Savage 4 features an OpenGL ICD approximately comparable to ATI’s ICD support under Windows NT, while that isn’t saying a lot for S3, it is definitely more than 3dfx can offer and a faster performing solution than what Matrox can offer at this time. The stability of S3’s NT drivers on the other hand, is a completely separate issue. While the drivers remained fairly reliable during the testing, comparatively speaking, S3’s drivers crashed more than a few times over what the rest of the competition managed to step away with. The stability issues however, can easily be fixed with some more driver tweaks, the important thing to keep in mind is that the OpenGL ICD is functional, and can be used in a professional environment. Kudos to S3 on that.