> You must be from a different universe: MiniGL was released in 1996 - the very same year Direct3D 4.0 and Direct3D 5.0 shipped... As for Glide - that started also in 1996 and was commonly used until 3dfx went defunct.

Only the year is the same, but not the dates. Direct3D was introduced in DirectX 2.0 on June 2[0]. Voodoo 1, for which Glide and MiniGL were made, was released after Direct3D, on October 7[1].

It would be impossible for Microsoft to make Direct3D as an answer to APIs like MiniGL since MiniGL didn't exist at the time the first release of Direct3D was made!

> Again - in which timeline was that the case? Certainly not in this one: in 1996 (!!!) there were about 90(!!!) vendor-specific extensions [1]

I'm not sure what you refer to in "[1]", there isn't any date information in there. Regardless, from [2] (which is from 2000, when there were many more extensions than in the mid-90s) you can easily see that the vast majority of extensions are for hardware that is irrelevant to desktop PCs running Windows (e.g. the SGI-specific and GLX stuff).

In addition new OpenGL versions are essentially bundles of previous extensions, so a lot of these extensions are functionality you got with 1.1 (e.g. GL_EXT_texture is basically the ability to create texture objects which was introduced as an extension in OpenGL 1.0 and made part of the core API - and available to anyone with OpenGL on Windows - in version 1.1).

Of all the extensions listed even in the 2000s list, only a handful would be relevant to desktop PCs - especially for gaming - and several of them (e.g. Nvidia's extensions) wouldn't be available in the mid-90s.

> Neither of those were references that you could reliably run pixel-level A/B tests against to verify your drivers.

At the time that was irrelevant as no GPU was even able to produce the exact same output at a hardware level, let alone via APIs.

Also Direct3D didn't have a reference rasterizer until Direct3D 6, released August 1998. The Direct3D 5 (released in 1996) software rasterizers were very limited (one didn't even support color) and meant for performance, not as a reference.

> There never was an official reference implementation and there probably won't be any either.

That doesn't matter, Microsoft's OpenGL software rasterizer was designed to be as close as possible to what the spec described and was much more faithful to it than the software rasterizers available for Direct3D up to and including version 5.

> Unless you were porting software from other systems like SGI workstations, which I did at the time.

Yes, that could have been a problem since 3D GPUs at the time pretty much sucked for anything unrelated to fast paced gaming. But those uses were very rare and didn't affect Direct3D at all - after all Direct3D was at an even worse state with all the caps and stuff you had to take care of that OpenGL didn't require.

> We're back to execution buffers and manual (texture-) managing for performance reasons so I could just as well argue that early Direct3D was actually ahead of its time

Yeah and IMO these modern APIs are a PITA to work with, more than anything ever made before that with any improvement not justifying the additional complexity, especially when OpenGL could have been extended to deal with better performance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Interactive#Products

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20000818012212/http://oss.sgi.com...