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To: Steve Porter who wrote (58807)	6/25/1998 8:05:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Also to add some more doom and gloom (sorry, but just calling it as I see it), what about AMD(and IDTI and Cyrix) with 3D-NOW, the PowerPC with AltiVec, and the raw power of the Dec Alpha. Throw in Sega, Nintendo and Sony and there is ALOT of competition in the gmaing market. A PII is _not_ the most effecient way to get decent game performance. Can I get Quicken for a Sega? How about Excel for Sony? Or Word for Nintendo? That's why a PC is called a General Purpose computer. Sure, a dedicated game computer will whip a PII's ass for game playing but if you think that nobody's looking for a high-performance PC for gaming then you must also believe that nobody's buying Voodoo2 cards. As far as AMD goes, they've never been able to get an acceptable yield with larger dies. What makes you think they can do it now on smaller dies? Because Sanders says so yet again? Has he ever been right about yields or his company's profit projections in the past? Every time Intel comes out with a new chip everyone says how nobody needs it because there's no software to stress it. This always changes because someone realizes they can now do something that just wasn't possible in the past. Hell, if NASA can land a man on the moon with on-board computers having less power than in my dear old departed Pinecomm 8088 then why would anyone need anything faster?

To: Steve Porter who wrote (58807)	6/25/1998 11:24:00 PM
From: Francis Chow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

The next generation of chips, already under development offload even mroe work from the CPU. Coupled with DirectX6 which has the ability to feed even more "raw" data into the graphics chipset, the CPU will be used for less and less, eventually only for sound routines and the like (which are also being offloaded to dedicated co-processors). Hummm . . . sounds like we're building a dinosaur here. I'm not up on the latest dinosaur biology, but as a kid I read that the really big one had small brains distributed to different body parts - one to control the tail and hind legs, one for the forelegs etc. . . .

To: Steve Porter who wrote (58807)	6/25/1998 11:57:00 PM
From: Haim Barad	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

You are responding to this message from Steve Porter on Jun 25 1998 7:34PM EST You are talking insanity now. Yes there is now a bottle neck in the CPU at this stage of the game. But this isn't something Intel (or their investors) should count on for much longer. The next generation of chips, already under development offload even mroe work from the CPU. Coupled with DirectX6 which has the ability to feed even more "raw" data into the graphics chipset, the CPU will be used for less and less, eventually only for sound routines and the like (which are also being offloaded to dedicated co-processors). This is not at all true. Games will make more and more use of the CPU (and therefore be more and more scalable). How? You can make a laundry list of techniques: more complex models, deformable surfaces, better physical modelling, displacement mapping, volume rendering, mixed rendering, better lighting models, fog volumes, and so on. On top of this, the difference we are talking about are going from 35 to 57 fps. Well the human eye can only see between 24 and 30 reliably anyway, so what difference does it make???? Again, this is short sighted. If a game developer sees that a high end platform is rendering his content at a high rate, then that means he has more "headroom" to enhance his content (i.e. use more and better features on the high end gaming platforms than you would see on the low end platforms). In other words, a fast Pentium II system with a high end graphics card can show a "more exciting" game than a cheaper platform. Many games in the past were designed this way and game developers will be doing this even more in the future. Haim