From the tone of your arguments I assume that you think that 3Dfx is dead (or dying) because they lost the technology lead. I disagree. 3Dfx is playing in a different league now. If 3Dfx had stayed completely retail then I would agree with you, 3Dfx would be in deep trouble. But the fact of the matter is that 3Dfx is playing in the OEM field now. The big boys, the BIG MONEY. In this field technology != success. ATI, mediocre chipsets but vastly successful in the OEM marketplace. Why? pricing and distribution. 3dFX now has the guns to compete in this field. Does nVidia? Who do you think will survive a price war? That is the question now, not who has faster framerates or 16-bit vs. 32 bits. Without STBI, nVidia won't even have a chance to compete. Creative and Diamond you ask? They have S3 to pimp to OEMs. Even the most talented generals will lose a war if they don't have the necessary troops.
these are who I think are going to be the major players in each category:
OEM = 3Dfx, ATI, S3, nVidia, Matrox; winners? 3Dfx and ATI.
Retail = 3Dfx and nVidia; winners? tie
3Dfx has A LOT riding on the OEM success of V3, we know that and they know that. We'll know in about a month before how successful 3dFX is.
And with regards to losing the technology lead. TNT2 is nothing new, it's just a TNT1 with a die shrink (not to say that die shrinking is easy, it's pretty hard actually). It's ludicrous to assume that a company with a technology lead is going to keep it, especially in the rapidly changing world of graphics chips. It is a lot easier to reverse engineer a product than to come up with a completely new one. It is a lot easier to say "Company X (which is highly successful) has these features, let's add a couple more" than to say "What do people want?"... Now that 3Dfx has dropped the ball will it be able to pick it up? The rumors coming out of Immersion '99 might provide the necessary information, it might not. The question I want to know is what do they have AFTER Rampage. |
