posted 12-17- 01:51 PM               

You have Direct3D, Microsoft's generic 3D API (Application Programmer's Interface). There's OpenGL, which does pretty much the same thing as Direct3D, except it's cross-platform. And you have Glide, which was originally written by 3dfx to run only on their boards, the Voodoo, Rush and Banshee. They're all basically different ways to do the same thing.

Once upon a time, about three or four years ago, when the time the first Voodoo was released, Direct3D wasn't ready, so 3dfx had to give programmers a way to get their board to work. Since the Voodoo was the first popular 3D accelerator a lot of developers wrote software that would run on it.