On Friday morning 3dfx slapped Creative Labs with a lawsuit, claiming that Creative had breached a license agreement contract and infringed on 3dfx's copyright for its proprietary Glide API. About the only one surprised by the suit was Creative Labs itself.

　　The focus of the suit centers around Creative's recently announced Unified technology, a software wrapper that translates Glide calls into Direct3D - the idea being to allow gamers to play their favorite Glide-only games, like Starsiege: Tribes, on non-3dfx video cards. Why? While fast, 3dfx's Voodoo boards are notorious for lacking technological enhancements, like 32bpp rendering and large texture support - enhancements that the competition has.

　　3dfx's concern stems from the fact that, as a vendor of Voodoo products, Creative Labs was given Glide source code under a license agreement. "First of all, that source code isn't useful to us", said senior brand manager Jim Carlton. "Secondly, we've been careful to keep that code in a secure environment anyway, away from the development of Unified".

　　According to Creative Labs' corporate council John Dansforth, both companies were in the midst of negotiations about Unified when 3dfx filed the suit. "We offered to call on a neutral third party expert to compare our Unified code with their Glide code when they surprised with us with this lawsuit", said Dansforth. "3dfx's timing is very peculiar. Were they afraid of what the neutral party would find out?"

　　Creative is confident that the suit will be eventually thrown out, calling it a "distraction". In the meantime, development on Unified continues at Creative Labs, and the company hopes to have the final build available as a free download by the end of the month. That build should have full support for Creative's TNT and TNT2 3D Blaster video cards. Support for the 3D Blaster Savage4 will come shortly thereafter.