I've stopped watching (or , rather, being upset by watching) the price of this stock. 3dfx has actually given us a nice surprise with Banshee 2, producing a part that was far more powerful than any of us expected. However, it would seem the opinion of this group (mine included) is a counter indicator the price of the stock.
Anyway, I thought I'd add my 7 cents worth to the 32 bit discussion.
1. The fillrate that can be provided by a graphic card is limited by the memory bandwidth. Memory bandwidth is affected by the # of (independent) memory buses, speed of the ram, block writes, r/w architecture, r/w caching/queueing of writes, etc.
In a properly designed architecture, going from a 16 bit framebuffer to a 32 bit framebuffer requires at 32 bits of additional data transferred per cycle (more if you include a wider Z-buffer, which is also desirable). Now, either you take those extra 32 bits as a drop in speed, or , you segment your memory/drop maximum refresh rate, and borrow the bandwidth from texturing. Caching the writes helps, of course, but only up to the speed of the ram.
If ATI is getting the same #'s for 32 as 16 bit, they probably designed their chip around a 32 bit buffer, and do not make effective use of a 16 bit one. We've also not seen the effect this has during multi-texturing. Anyway, the long and the short of is that getting 32 bit color into banshee was probably a technical hurdle, which would have either cost more development time, or resulted in a massive drop in performance (since an implementation without a redesign would be a hack).
2. Voodoo3 IS the right name for (Banshee 2). This is still a carry over revision of the original Voodoo design. Name recognition is IMPORTANT, and the banshee2 would have confused many. I'm not complaining about the Banshee 1, as I consider it more of a beta for future products, rather than the next thing.
3. I own 5 Banshee's (I've replaced every other brand cards with them), and absolutely LOVE them for, of all things 2D work :) The banshee has WICKED image quality in 2D, far better than matrox. With the banshee's, my crappy old 21" Daytek can run at 1920x1280, distrortion free (if a bit blurry). On other cards, severe ghosting, and whobbling is present at these resolutions. PC mag did a nice review of some cards earlier, showing signal profiles. While not all banshee's were equal, they had superb signal charecteristics. Also of note, I never use 32 bit mode in 2D on any video card by default, it's too SLOW. I only switch to 32 bit when editing graphics, and go back immediately. Those who argue that 2D is fast enough are using crappy monitors, or LCD panels. Try running your apps at 1920x1280, or 1800x1440 full screen.
4. Since when did 3dfx announce a product less than 4 months before launch? We won't hear anything on Rampage till Feb. 99, at least. The name recognition also doesn't matter as much for Rampage, since it will be expensive (Rumors are $300-$500 min. per card), and will initially be adopted by hard-core gamers.
5. Since when did 3dfx communicate well with their shareholders? Nothing's changed, so why be upset :)
6. Banshee is selling like hotcakes in all the stores I visited around Toronto (Canada), the only bad news is that many are low on stock. Diamond Fusion AGP is readily available, and is a great card (I still don't like DIMD, though). TNT's are everywhere, but are staying on the shelves, alas, I think the lack of banshee's availability is hurting their sales somewhat, though many people choose to wait rather than buying TNT.
7. Am I the only power user out there who hasn't bought a TNT? I spend an average of $2500 a year on video cards, but I'm not planning to add one to my christmas list.
Now, here's a suggestion for 3dfx... why stick to 32 bit color, when you could make a card with 128 Bit color, and 4 TMU's :) Now, before you all think I'm crazy, think of doing all your matrix math using Multi-texturing in 3-4 cycles. Or maybe 2 Parallel V3's , with each supplying half bit's, providing true 30 bit color, by adding a little external circuitry. Wouldn't be too hard, and wouldn't run any slower either. |
