You're right, only time will tell. I tend to have a more positive outlook because I see the general direction that 3dfx is taking. I am truly taking a long-term view on this stock, and won't be selling it when it hits $30 sometime next year either. Small companies have to evolve into market leaders. It doesn't happen overnight, and its never painless. I think 3dfx is one of the few companies that has a chance to become tommorow's "Microsoft". The company has a superb product, a vision for the future, and a real plan to get there.
Banshee is the key to 3dfx's future, and V2 is that product that paid for it. By releasing the V2 (little more than a slightly revised V1 with faster memory, V1 allways had support for multiple TMU's, and SLI) in march, they had a cash cow to pay for the development of the much more ambitious 2d-3d part. The V2 also cemented their domination of the 3D market. Make no mistake, the V2 was never 3dfx's next generation product. Once the initial 2D/3D design for banshee is complete, and the software teams are up to par on the intricaceis of writing DX6 drivers, we are in a position to release an entire FAMILY of products, low-end to high-end, with much faster development cycles, and lower r&d costs. In effect, I believe the worst is behind us. All initial indications point to the Banshee being one of the fastet (if not the fastest) 2D cards out there, all this, from a first generation design.
For those of you that argue that Banshee should have had 2 TMU's, 32 bit color (3d) support,AGP 2x etc, time will tell. These features will almost certainly be added in the next generation product (1Q 99), but consider that time is money, and the holiday season is critical. It is impossible to predict development times for products precisely, and a certain amount of uncertainty must be factored in. Adding those 2 features would have a) Complicated the memory architecture (and raised costs), b) delayed development by a few weeks. Why take the chance, if you can simply phase in the feature in the next version of the product family?
As for the V2, its got plenty of life left in it well into the 2nd half of 99 (just like the V1 is still selling). There will be plenty of markets opened once the price of the chip (and card) goes down. |
