Glide serves 3 primary purposes:

1. It relieves programmers from hardware specific issues such as timing, maintaining register shadows, and working with hard-coded register constants and offsets.
2. It defines an abstraction of the Voodoo Graphics hardware to facilitate ease of software porting.
3. It acts as a delivery vehicle for sample source code providing in-depth hardware-specific optimizations for the Voodoo Graphics hardware.


By abstracting the low level details of interfacing with the Voodoo Graphics hardware into a set of C-callable functions, Glide allows developers to avoid working with hardware registers and memory directly, enabling faster development and lower probability of bugs. Glide also handles mundane and error prone chores such as initialization and shutdown.

Glide is but one part of the 3Dfx Interactive Software Developer’s Kit (SDK), which is designed to assist developers in creating tools and titles that are optimized for the Voodoo Graphics hardware. Other components of the SDK include the Game Controller Interface (GCI) Library and the Texture Utility Software (TexUS™).

Glide is not a full featured graphics API such as OpenGL™, PHIGS, or the Autodesk CDK™: it does not provide high level 3D graphics operations such as
 

1. transformations,
2. display list management, or
3. light source shading.


Glide specifically implements only those operations that are natively supported by the Voodoo Graphics hardware.
In general, Glide does not implement any functions that do not directly access a Voodoo Graphics subsystem’s memory or registers.

The Glide Utility Library contains utility routines that

1. create fog tables,
2. extensions that do significant pre-processing before calling Glide routines to access the graphics system, and
3. obsolete routines that are provided for interim compatibility as Glide development continues.


The Glide library can be linked with an application with or without debugging aids. The debug version has error checking and parameter validation, which may cause performance degradation. When an application is initially developed and debugged it should use the debugging version of Glide. After development is complete the release build of Glide is employed for optimum performance.