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

To: Simon Cardinale who wrote (13464)	6/24/1999 10:53:00 PM
From: Obewon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

I came across a VERY INTELLIGENT post at Yahoo that I hope the author doesn't mind if I post here for him. I suspect that he has uncovered something that previously considered by investors (who if they are like me don't really know much about tesselation or multi-resolution meshing). <<Nextgen speculation by: robvh 28585 of 28587 I was thinking about what new features we might find in 3dfx's nextgen product (Napalm?). We have all been expecting higher fillrates and more textures per cycle (I'm hoping for at least six) but these are simply evolution. What revolution might the next product hold? Beyond T&L that is. Most people agree that geometry acceleration is in the cards. 3dfx's recent downplaying of GA makes me a little nervous. However, I can sympathize with how difficult it must be to design GA that will outperform current and future CPUs. What would be more appropriate would be geometry assistance. Now for some flagrant speculation. We know that 3dfx has applied for trademarks for two previously unheard of buffers. Namely, the T-buffer and M-buffer. I was trying to imagin what these might be for and came up with a possibility. Just about every new game to be released within the next year carries Level Of Detail features. In Messiah for example, they call the process of scaling down the number of triangles in a given scene/model as Real-Time Deformation and Tesselation (RT-DAT). Tesselation is the actual scaling of the geometry model. Tesellation = T-buffer? Other games are implementing various other mesh manipulation techniques including one put out there by none other than Intel. MRM, it's called (Multi-Resoltion Mesh). Mesh = M-buffer? It occurred to me that this scaling of individual models/meshes would be an ideal way for a 3D processor to assist the CPU. The CPU would handle the world geometry and off-load the models to the 3D geometry processor. Perhaps 3dfx has implemented its own MRM algorithms in Glide. It would save the programmers a lot of work, code, and licensing fees if this were all handled efficiently via the API and 3dfx hardware. Thoughts? robvh>> Obewon