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

To: Ralph Bergmann who wrote (1231)	1/7/1998 11:45:00 AM
From: Frank Medvedik	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

From WWW.OGR.COM (Online Game Review) Essential Hardware of 1997 In a year when a glut of 3D accelerators and force feedback joysticks hit the market, it's nice to see that some people out there still value quality. The Voodoo Graphics 3D chipset from 3Dfx dominated the market, and nowhere was this more evident that with the Pure 3D from Canopus. This card has quality stamped all over it, from its excellent software drivers to the built-in TV-out port. Of course, the biggest bonus of this card is the extra 2M of texture memory that it ships with. What this means is that you'll receive a nice performance boost over standard 3Dfx-based cards when you are playing a game with particularly complex textures. The drivers are rock-solid, and allow you to do a lot of behind-the-scenes tweaking directly from them (removing the need to hack your configuration files). The only place where the Pure3D lags is its lack of bundled software. But then again, the reason you're probably buying an advanced Voodoo card is because you've got a bunch of games already that are just crying out to be accelerated, so who really cares that you lose a stripped-down copy of Wipeout XL Technology Achievement of 1997 1997 was more a year of evolution than revolution. We saw the movement of more games to Internet play, the addition of force feedback to a lot of games and the ever-increasing amount of 3D support in software. Unfortunately all of these technological areas were already implemented in prior years. And it's for exactly that reason that we chose 3Dfx' Voodoo Graphics as the best technology for 1997, even though it was introduced in 1996. When there were countless pretenders to the throne in 1997, all claiming to beat the Voodoo in a variety of ways, no one really came close. By the end of the year, a few accelerators could claim to eat the Voodoo, and even then the subject was far from closed. The fact that it took a year for the entire industry to catch up with a particular technology should illustrate the dominance of position that 3Dfx has enjoyed over the past year. With strong developer support,extremely positive sales (witness 3Dfx's stock jump recently), and a whole ton of great word-of-mouth advertising, Voodoo Graphics has dominated the technology of games in 1997 from start to finish. Could 1998 be the same? With Voodoo2 and Banshee chipsets due from 3Dfx this year, it seems that the competion may have a lot of catching up to do. Again.