Part 2:
PROBLEMS WITH BOARD DESIGN
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As far as the engineering goes, we're as good as anyone at board design. As an example, it was one of our test engineers that helped get the design through FCC compliance testing -- the initial scan failed (not uncommon, by the way) and he determined the changes needed to clear Class B. The board is now fully compliant with FCC regulations.
ACTIVE COMPONENTS (MEMORY) ON BOTH SIDES OF PCB
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Placing active components on the solder side of a card, while less common in PCs than in other applications, is a reasonable approach to solving very complex layout issues, especially ones with the critical timings that the Voodoo2 chipset has. I'd be willing to bet that Diamond uses active components on both sides too -- they're already doing it with their Fire GL Pro line (Permedia2-based) cards. Why don't you ask them?
DRIVER DEVELOPMENT AND ROBUSTNESS
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We are not doing our own driver right now. With the software talent at 3Dfx, we saw little we could do to improve game
performance in the short term and we felt we could get to market quicker if we used their code rather than tweak it around. There are a
lot of things that can be done to optimize synthetic benchmarks like 3D WinBench -- some reasonable, some of questionable value
and some that are downright slimy. While we know that not optimizing for Direct3D benchmarks *may* hurt us, we think that
providing 3Dfx's reference drivers with little or no modification will provide you virtually identical performance in a game to any
other Voodoo2-based card, and keep you on track with the most recent version. If we're wrong about this, then we'll do our own
drivers at a later date. In keeping with the spirit of the product so far, we'll see what YOU want and do that.
If you're uncomfortable with ANY of this, please wait and buy someone else's board. While I don't think you need to do that, I'm not trying to FORCE anyone to buy my product. I build what I think is a good board, with the features and price that most of you want, and then let you decide if it is worth buying.
Jim Carlton
Product Marketing Manager, Graphics and Video
Creative Labs, Inc. |
