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

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (3719)	6/5/1998 4:57:00 PM
From: Mike O'Brien	Respond to of 16960

Importantly, I see _nothing_ here to suggest true "geometry" or "lighting" acceleration, which involve calculating 3D rotations & translations, angles of incidence and other things requiring high-speed floating-point matrix manipulations, etc. They may do it, but I doubt it will be in version 1.0, and there isn't anything here to intimate such capabilities. >> Remember that the earliest 3D boards all tried to accelerate all phases of the rendering pipeline, and 3Dfx was somewhat unique in focusing on rasterization to the exclusion of all else. Clearly they had the right idea then, and I think it's still the right idea. Geometry data (prior to transformation and culling) is huge, and no one wants to send it over a PCI bus. Also, Intel and AMD are already putting geometry acceleration into their processors, which is the right place for it. -Mike