Reference Drivers:
What are they and what do they mean to me?
by William d0gmA Gall

What are these Reference Drivers and should I use them?  Will the Reference Drivers hurt my Righteous 3D II?  Can I use the Reference Drivers on my Pure 3D II ?  Why should I use the Reference Drivers?   I heard people getting higher frame rates with the new Reference Drivers is this true ?

Look familiar?  If it does you have either been on IRC, Newsgroups or reading though my mailbox.  I will try to clear up the latest craze in questions: 'Reference Drivers: What are they and what do they mean to me?' in the following document.

What is an API
First off we need to understand exactly what an API or Applications Programming Interface is.  You've heard of Plug and Play cards, well this is essentially Plug and Play programming or as us programmers like to refer to it: "Reusable Code".   An API gives the programmer a means to Interface or access the features of, in our case, our 3Dfx card through a generic interface.  API's are typically distributed as some form of .DLL file or driver.

3Dfx boards support three API's.  Direct3D(DirectX), OpenGL, and 3Dfx Interactive's own Glide.  We will only concentrate on Direct3D and Glide as OpenGL is still in beta. 

On to the Drivers
The drivers supplied with your Voodoo, Voodoo Rush, and Voodoo2 card all have the same basic components: 

Support for glide API
Support for Direct3D API (DirectX)
Control Panels to adjust settings

OK here is where we will get into those Reference Drivers I promised.  3Dfx is constantly working with game developers and hardware manufacturers at fixing bugs in their drivers, optimizing drivers, and adding new features.  When 3Dfx comes out with an update to their drivers they make the changes available to the individual hardware manufacturers such as Canopus, Creative Labs, Diamond, etc. and are also posted as the "Reference Drivers" on their web site.

The Hardware manufacturers then take the new drivers and their control panels and tweak the Direct3D drivers.  Both Diamond and Creative Labs told me basically they are able to enhance the performance of the Direct3D drivers (Glide and GL are controlled by 3Dfx).   Dylan Rhodes over at Creative Labs also added:

As 3Dfx matures their Direct3D drivers, our engineers will look for additional performance tweaks that will benefit real games...not benchmark programs.

Hardware manufacturers such as Canopus and Quantum 3D also add in support to the drivers for features such as their 'TV Out' capabilities that are specific to their cards.

Why would I use Reference Drivers
One of the biggest reasons for using the reference drivers would be if your cards manufacturer doesn't have drivers for your specific operating system.   A lot of board manufacturers don't have WinNT drivers for their Voodoo and Voodoo2 cards.  This means if you want to run it in NT your only choice is to use the Reference drivers.

Another reason for using the Reference Drivers is to take advantage of the latest version of Dirct3D and Glide.  Recently Activision released the Enhanced Battlezone patch with the Large Assets(Textures) patch as well.  On my Canopus Pure 3D II it crashed every time I ran it though which was rather disappointing seeing as I had been waiting for the patch for some time.  After checking the newsgroups and confirming that yes the patch did work and hearing everyone praise the new patch I grabbed the latest Creative Labs Beta drivers and installed them and Battlezone was working and looking better than ever.  While I was writing this Canopus released new drivers that fix the Direct3D issues.  Moral to the story: By using Reference drivers I didn't have to wait a week for my cards manufacturer to release a new driver, I just had to live without TV out for a week.

Another good example is Final Fantasy VII is reported to work fine with the Voodoo Rush Reference drivers.

But what are the Cons?
The only con I could really think of was that there is no one to call for tech support when using the Reference Drivers.  For questions about these drivers your best option is to check out the  3Dfx News Groups.

When I asked a few manufacturers 'What are your recommendations on which driver to use and is it merely to simplify tech support reasons?' here are my responses:

Scott Bamford, Diamond Multimedia:

Answer:  Diamond supports the use of the Diamond manufactured driver. Why? 
1.  Typically you will get increased performance
2.  Engineering and QA have tailored our drivers specifically for our products
3.  Typically there is specific Diamond information in the bios for mode support, etc. that may or may not be supported with the reference driver.
4.  It make it easier for Tech Support to support Diamond engineered drivers, since all of our engineering and QA is done on them.

Dylan Rhodes, Creative Labs on the Pros and Cons of Reference Drivers:

Our policy of releasing the latest 3Dfx drivers as public betas makes it an ideal situation for all of our customers. If you want to try out the latest new technology (for example, Glide 3.0) before your friends have, you can join our beta program and get the latest drivers even before they’re on the 3Dfx site. Or, you can stick with drivers we’ve officially released and be able to count on our support team if you should hit any snags

Dylan also elaborated on what drivers he recommends you use:

If you want to be assured of a high-quality driver and the ability to contact our technical support team if you need installation assistance or have other questions, I recommend that you stick with the drivers which we officially release via our FTP site. We’ve fully tested them in our labs and our support team will be able to give you all the assistance you need.

However, a lot of Voodoo2 owners tend to be more PC-savvy than the average computer user, and they generally like to push the performance of their PCs to the limit. This is why we release new reference drivers to our customers as betas as soon as we get them from 3Dfx. This way, our customers can get their hands on the latest and greatest days or weeks before they’re even available to the public on the 3Dfx web site. However, we can’t offer telephone or e-mail support on these beta drivers until our support team has been trained on the new drivers.

If the ability to contact our support team for assistance isn’t an issue for you and you’re wondering if it’s worth it for you to upgrade to the latest reference driver (either via our beta program, or from the 3Dfx web site once 3Dfx has released them to the public a little later on), I recommend taking a look at the 3dfx.products.voodoo2 newsgroup. There, you’ll hear reports from other users on their results with the latest drivers.

Where do I get them?
Does all this talk of reference drivers have you itching to get your hands on them?  Here are links to the goods:

Voodoo Glide Reference Driver  (Win95/98, WinNT)
Voodoo Direct3D Reference Driver  (Win95)
Voodoo Rush Single Board Reference Driver (Win95/98)
Voodoo Rush Dual Board Reference Driver (Win95/98)
Voodoo2 Win95/98 Reference Drivers
Voodoo2 WinNT Reference Drivers

Note:
Voodoo Rush owners will have to determine if their board is a single or double(has a daughter board).
Voodoo2 owners have the additional option of a non-WHQL compliant Control Panel which has options to enable/disable VSync.  For More information see my Voodoo2 Control Panel Reference.

Conclusion
I hope this helps clear up the issues or at the very least shed some light on the Reference Driver issue.  Basically the choice is yours.  If you are running an operating system that your particular board doesn't have drivers for such as NT then Reference drivers are your only choice other than changing OS's.  If you are the type that calls tech support every time your computer locks you are probably not the best candidate for Reference Drivers.  If you feel at home on the computer and want to try to fix a problem with a game or just want to impress the girls and can live without tech support then I say go for it.  I would like to thanks Scott and Dylan for the help and great info.

Written by William Gall
Date: July 27, 1998

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