3DFX Message Board - Msg: 5768910

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Technology Stocks : 3DFX

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To: Michael Linov who wrote (7307)	9/16/1998 8:01:00 PM
From: Eric Howard	Read Replies (1) of 16960

Hi, I have been following this thread for about six months now and have been invested in 3dfx for about a year now. I first bought the stock because I loved the product, I had a 3dfx Voodoo card and it worked great. When the Voodoo2 came out I bought one of those and later upgraded to the Obsidian X24. At this point though I am concerned about 3dfx as a company because I believe they have temporarily lost the technological leadership role they used to hold. I really believe the performance and feature set of the Nvidia TnT chip took them by surprise. If the TnT did not exist then Banshee might have been good enough to lock down a majority of the major OEMS. From the STB conference call though, we now know that Dell and Gateway are going to use TNT on at least some of their models. Banshee also has an undisclosed OEM win but is that really going to be enough to carry the company for any length of time? In my opinion early next year they need to introduce a new high end product which can match the image quality of the TnT and the Matrox G200. I am going to buy a 2d/3d card for my computer and I will probably pick up the Spectra 2500 even though I already have an Obsidian board. Image quality is a big deal and this will become 3dfx's weakpoint if it is not addressed early next year. Personally I hate Nvidia's PR department and their misleading press releases but the TnT at 90Mhz is still a very good chip. If you want confirmation of this,read the latest plan files from John Carmack and Brian Hook of Id software. They complement Nvidia on the feature set of the board as well as the robustness of the Open GL drivers that Nvidia provided. In another plan file today a developer from Raven is mentioning how a problem in the Open GL drivers from 3Dfx will probably prevent them from initialing shipping colored fog in Heretic II. He goes on to say that 3dfx knows about the problem but they are spending all of their time working on the Banshee drivers so he does not think it will get fixed before the game ships. He then goes on to mention how cool the Tnt card is that they have. This kind of information concerns me because these are the places I would go to determine what should be my next video card. Like it or not I think for the first time 3dfx has very valid competition and they are going to have to respond or face serious problems. I have bought 1 Voodoo card and three different Voodoo2 cards but if I was going to buy a computer today I would get the TnT card because of its feature set and image quality. I might also add a Voodoo2 card for Glide games but assuming that this API will be enough going forward I think is a big mistake. Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to add another perspective to the mix. I am long 3dfx but I am concerned and I agree with Pat that there are serious issues to be dealt with.

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