T he first consumer 3D graphics cards appeared under 3DFX’s “Voodoo” branding in late 1996. These were add-in cards that still required a regular video card (or chip) to display 2D scenes. But they enabled games like Tomb Raider, Descent, Grand Theft Auto and Unreal to use 3DFX’s proprietary Glide API and render things (well, some things) much faster than software rendering. A number of other proprietary 3D graphics APIs appeared around this time, including the S3 3D Engine (used in Virge cards), the Nvidia Multimedia Library, the Creative 3D Library (used in Blaster 3D devices) and the even more imaginatively titled ATI 3D C Interface (for 3D Rage hardware).
Silicon Graphics, makers of expensive workstations, also had a proprietary API, in the form of IRIS GL. This could do 3D things, but was also much more general purpose (it was also a windowing system). There was industry demand for parts of this API to be licenced (and competition from the likes of Sun and IBM), and in 1992 SGI tailored a version of IRIS GL into a new open standard called OpenGL. They also organised the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (OpenGL ARB), a group of companies that would maintain the specification in future. Today, OpenGL is steered in much the same way by the Khronos consortium.
Linux, of course, was still very young at this stage, but early efforts to support OpenGL appeared in the form of Utah GLX (circa 1995, see http://utah-glx. sourceforge.net). Complete OpenGL support for consumer cards wouldn’t appear until the GeForce era, but when id Software’s GLQuake was released in 1997, so too was a ‘MiniGL’ driver for the 3DFX Voodoo card, which implemented just enough OpenGL to run Quake. John Carmack had originally written GLQuake for SGI machines, which were powerful enough to do all this in software, and intended to port this only to the Rendition Vérité chips found in 3D Blaster cards. Home PCs couldn’t hope to run GLQuake on their own, but manufacturers of other graphics cards (keen to quash 3DFX’s monopoly) were able to release their own MiniGL drivers. And release they did.