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

To: AJ Berger who wrote (1122)	12/10/1997 11:08:00 AM
From: William T. Katz	Respond to of 16960

AJ, I understood your point and that is why I described the progress in the Direct3D and OpenGL front. Programming in OpenGL is perhaps the easiest and most hardware-independent way to get your software out the door. The problem is the performance hit. Direct3D has been somewhat of a nightmare ... I'm sure you've read id's Carmack's rant on Direct3D vs OpenGL. But as Direct3D starts improving, that Glide-is-fastest-to-program rationale starts to lose steam. The biggest factor, though, is the target market size. It's a big deal if you have your software out but it only targets 10% of the PC market. I'm not really arguing that 3Dfx is kicking some booty right now, but as a possible shareholder I'm trying to project the company growth through 98. Even for those in the graphics industry, I think the future is not crystal clear. The hardware acceleration is getting so good and so cheap that things tend to turn quickly. This will translate into volatility, both in stock prices and company's profits. All that said, I still think 3dfx is the best consumer-level graphics system I've seen. I should have bought after seeing a Voodoo2(?) prototype game at an Intel software developer's conference earlier this year. -Bill