QuickDraw 3D - RAVE

In order to deal with the performance-critical rasterization operation, Apple designed QD3D to sit on top of a separate package known as RAVE (Rendering Acceleration Virtual Engine). The result was something much closer to OpenGL — more primitive to program, but with increased control over rendering.

Although RAVE did what it intended to do, the effort was essentially doomed. Good low-level 3D performance relies not only on the programmer to provide efficient models, but high-quality drivers for the hardware as well. This is where RAVE failed. Developers had repeatedly watched the “next big thing” come out of Apple only to see it be killed off in the next company reorganization, and were increasingly wary of putting any effort into supporting Apple’s latest developments. By 1996 the market generally felt Apple was doomed to bankruptcy, making matters considerably worse. Microsoft was at the same time trying to introduce their own similar library, Direct3D (D3D), and even though QD3D beat it to market and was technically superior, it was soon clear to everyone that it was destined to be ignored in favor of Direct3D.

At the same time the expected market for 3D desktop applications simply didn’t materialize. Most exiting 3D users stayed with their workstation-based modelers for performance reasons, and most other users proved to have limited 3D needs. 3D games, on the other hand, took off at about this time, and drove the widespread availability of consumer-level 3D hardware.

Although RAVE was designed to be cross-platform, only Mac hardware developers (ATI, NVIDIA, and 3dfx) produced drivers for it. This left any comparison between QD3D and alternative APIs one-sided, as outside of the Mac QD3D was forced to fall back to a software RAVE implementation.