Marshall, Greetings to you too. Per your questions:
MS states DirectX5 will come out this summer-fall in final form. MS is issuing an early beta version to developers coming to the "meltdown" during the second week of February. "Meltdown" is an event organized by Microsoft to bring the major hardware companies together with the major developers to see if all their software works with our hardware. The hardware weenies get hotel rooms and the software weenies go from room to room to test sw and debug. Remember the Yul Brenner line from "The King And I": "The bee goes from flower to flower to flower. The flower does not go from bee to bee to bee." Call us hardware flowers.
Talisman is a fascinating technical amalgamation of graphics ideas, with a big focus on 3D functionality. I got to go to some of the early presentations MS did for Talisman. Obviously, I couldn't discuss it on this thread. I think it will be a while (late 98?) before the majority of the Talisman concepts make it into the motherboard space. Interestingly, the Talisman design group now has control of the DirectX interfaces to hardware, so you can bet they'll provide all the DX hooks to Talisman hardware, ergo directing hardware development to the Talisman paradigm.
The difficulty with Talisman is that Talisman is going for concepts like screen resolution and effects, more than precision. This makes Talisman unsuitable for CADish applications, the real roots of today's 3Dness. The compromises in Talisman (3D sprites, tiling, etc.) diverge from good old fashion brute force, an alluring concept for us Slavic guys. Ergo, it is unclear if Talisman is the right way to go or maybe the 3Dfx led "MORE POWER" direction. Now, if you took an honest poll of developers today, I think they'd prefer more power under familiar paradigms.
Still, MS has enormous market power and they may get their way. I've met a couple of the Talisman technical leads and they are very, very bright guys. How Intel's little entry fits into this also puts another spin on things.
Oh, the joy of being a second tier supplier who's market has grown to the point of attracting the 800 pound gorillas. The question will be, can the specialists, like S3 and ATI, survive tactics like those MS can use, e.g. giving away "free" Web Browsers which are actually paid for by monopoly rents from other businesses.
To Bill Gates and Andy Grove, graphics is a secondary business, though an interesting one. To us, it is life itself: our stock options, our vocations and our friends. I think we have the emotional edge. I think they have the capital edge. I'd say technology is a wash. It will be a most engaging battle.
In two years, I'll be real happy or real pissed. The next year won't give us the answer on the fate of ATI or S3. That will happen in the summer of next year when both the Intel and Talisman chips/chip sets have been out long enough to be accepted (or not) by the developers and OEMs. S3 and ATI will either be rocking or on the run. Too early to tell now. It's all in the implementation. Maybe S3 and ATI team up with the other major graphics companies and embrace Talisman, thereby fighting off Intel. Maybe Intel can't get that small mob of companies to get a graphics product out the door. Maybe the developers treat Talisman like they are now treating Direct3D, i.e. with caution. A very interesting business scenario, don't you think? The discussion will log another few tens of thousands of entries on techstocks.com.
Good luck.
Ski |
