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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Plaz who wrote (13145)	6/8/1999 4:44:00 AM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Re: Technology Lead (waring, very long)... Carmack said something recently that really got me thinking. I can't remember the link so I'll just paraphrase. Until now, the 3d graphics sector has been converging on a high-end SGI spec. Very soon we will have consumer 3d products that are more powerful than their professional counterparts. Where do we go from there? A very interesting question indeed. It may be that a brand new 3d accelerator may even have to break out of the polygon based mold to make further advances. Take voxels for example. You can think of them as a bitmap that has a z coordinate adding depth. Imagine an apple sliced into it's thinnest possible parts (1 pixel wide), with each slice representing a tiny portion of that object. A video card optimized for such calculations wouldn't use polygon based rendering at all. As a matter of fact, the size of the objects would be static (ie. 10 pixels high, 5 pixels wide, 3 pixels deep) instead of calculated. Where a polygon based card would recieve vertex information and lay a texture over that, a voxel card would have to calculate a whole object at a time. The voxel card would have automatic bump mapping, of course, but would lack the scalability of a polygon renderer. It would be harder, for example, to just increase the resolution to decrease the edge aliasing artifacts (jaggies). What am I getting at? Well, a leap into a new technology may require us to break the mold and therefore break Direct3d and OpenGL. I think Carmack is hinting (although I have no personal knowledge of this) that future products (either 3dfx or others) are looking to break outside the mold. There are some obviously really tough questions that will come out of this. Will the new technologies be reverse compatible? How do you get developers to adopt this stuff? Would OpenGL work or would a new API (Glide 5?) be required? Is it suicide to take a path that diverges from the mainstream? I'm personally of a divided mind on this issue. 3dfx created Voodoo1 without even a hint that developers or consumers would use the rediculously expensive product ($300). 3dfx took a guess and it paid off mostly because the product was so far beyond everyone else it was worth the money. What it comes down to is this, if the technology can produce truly amazing 3d graphics (Jurasic Park) people will pay...and pay dearly. If the new technology poses only a minor advancement over the previous versions (or competing mainstream products are just as good) the new technology will be bound to fail. I consider PowerVR an example of a failed technology. Although there are perfomance benefits from the tile-based rendering, it wasn't enough beyond the mainstream performance to justify the extra time for developers to build the workarounds. To summarize Pat's technology requirements: 1) Programming Interface to new technology that puts developers at ease. 2) Strong consumer support base. 3) Performance/Visual superiority increase to justify the break from mainstream technology. 3dfx already has 1 and 2. As a matter of fact, 3dfx is the only 3d company I know of that actually has BOTH 1 and 2. It's 3 that worries me. If 3dfx decides to build a proprietary technology out of greed rather than attempting to meet conusmer needs, we have a big problem. I wish I could say that 3dfx wouldn't do this, but history has shown otherwise. How many times have I heard 3dfx explain why consumers didn't need 32bit rendering or AGP texturing? What's to stop them from saying, "You need voxels. Never mind that the performance increase is minimal. It's the technology of the future." Customers have a way of voting with their feet. While we sit here considering whether the technology lead may be big enough, we also need to consider whether the technology lead is correctly positioned ahead of the market. I would hate to see 3dfx develop something that is so different it never becomes adopted. This would be truly sad, especially if 3dfx actually executes on the money. Remember the Amiga? Remember Sony Betamax? It's not just a matter of being a little better, you need to be in a whole different league. Pat