3dfx Interactive Inc has filed suit against Singapore-based Creative Technology Ltd and its American subsidiary Creative Labs Inc, claiming copyright infringement and breach of contract. According to San Jose, California-based 3dfx, Creative breached a licensing agreement and infringed 3dfx’s copyright by including source code from the Glide API into Unified, a software layer designed to run 3dfx-specific games on its own TNT and TNT-2 based graphics accelerator products. The agreement between the two is said to prohibit the use and modification of any 3dfx source code to operate with non-3dfx acceleration technology. 3dfx also says it is owed money by Creative for its products.
Glide was written to enable game developers to write 3D titles specifically for 3dfx accelerators, and 3dfx says that 200 software titles have already been written, with 100 more under development. Creative says it hasn’t used 3dfx code to translate Glide instructions so that they can be understood by graphics chips supporting Microsoft Corp’s DirectX. Unified is available as a prototype on Creative’s website, and 3dfx wants distribution halted.
Relations between the two companies have been strained since 3dfx acquired board manufacturer STB Systems Inc last year for $141m (CI No 3,559). Before the deal, Creative and Diamond Multimedia Inc were both shipping their own boards using 3dfx Voodoo chips. After the STB deal they found themselves directly competing with their supplier, and were forced to shift to rival chips.
