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

To: JR who wrote (4478)	6/20/1998 2:42:00 AM
From: stephen wall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

From MF: ----------------------------------------------------------------- David Whittle, of the Voodoo Review, in his Special E3dition, Part 3, has said the following about the Banshee: ---Start Quote---INTRODUCING BANSHEE===================== The highlight of E3 this year was getting invited to get a behind-the-scenes view of 3Dfx's next generation 2d/3d card called "Voodoo Banshee". OK, I didn't get invited , I actually begged 3Dfx PR dude Andy Keane to fit me into Product Marketing guru Saul Altabet's demonstration. Before I went to the Banshee demo, I chatted a bit with Andy about the stock market and Voodoo Rush. Mr. Keane said the stock market wasn't in their hands so they can't really comment on it. As for my question about Voodoo Rush ("do you consider it a failure?"), Andy seemed to agonize over this one. He said you really have to compare Rush with other first generation 2d/3d combo cards, such as Matrox's Mystique or S3's Virge. Compared to those cards, it is a true success. And 3Dfx did learn an important lesson from Voodoo Rush, and that is that 3Dfx will not enter a hardware partnership with another company again (Rush's 2d portion was made by a company called Alliance). This segues nicely into Voodoo Banshee. Banshee is the first 2d/3d card completely designed by 3Dfx. As I mentioned, I attended a preview to this technology in a secret little room in the East Hall of E3. Everyone who attended signed a NDA (non-disclosure agreement) meaning we can't mention the contents of the meeting, but I got permission from 3Dfx to pass along certain things to you faithful Voodoo fans. I can't give away everything, but I left the meeting 100% certain that VB will be THE 2d/3d card choice for both high-end gamers (the 2d performance is 2nd to none) and casual gamers. Here's what I CAN say about Banshee.... -It exists! The first sampling began in March, and 3Dfx is gearing up for it's second sampling round. The first prototype is already running 2d and 3d games and benchmarks. It will be available in both AGP and PCI, and can be MPEG2 (DVD) and TV-out "ready". -Banshee will have the highest 2d performance in the world, better then any other card coming out this year! This bold statement is based on unique features that have been implemented in hardware, such as direct hardware polygon support which enables it to immediately draw polygons based on vertices (yes, we are talking about the 2d portion here) rather then other cards which use software rasterization or draws each line in the polygon. According to 3Dfx, this feature "...enables us to draw a polygon in tens of cycles rather than the thousands required for conventional devices." -The world's FIRST 128-bit VGA for the fastest performance on DOS games and applications. Ok, there aren't many DOS games anymore, but it's still kinda cool to have this feature. -Voodoo Banshee will support 256 raster operations (ROPS), which means that it will perform 99 percent of the frequently used ROPS/Blit calls in hardware as opposed to slower software drivers other cards will be using.-Voodoo Banshee is an extension of the Voodoo platform, which will make it compatible with the 250+ game titles of Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2. Game developers have a consistent platform to write for that will be easy to write for Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 titles. Will there be any Voodoo Rush or early Voodoo2 incompatibilities? The future is not yet know, but 3Dfx are taking great pains to insure the highest level of compatibility. -3D performance? I can't really go into it, except to say that it's what you would expect from 3Dfx. They say "there's a new capability that will turn some heads..." I'm not even sure what that's referring to, but the tease is VERY intriguing! :-) So there you go, some inside info on the next big thing! I know it's not everything you wanted to know, but hopefully it's enough to convince you that it's going to ROCK! I'll keep you up-to-date on this hot topic as info is made available