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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stock talk who wrote (11373)	6/30/1998 11:12:00 PM
From: stock talk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14577

s3.dimension3d.com Interview with John Carsey Posted on the 16th May 1998 by Tom Browne This should be of interest to you people out there who'd like to know a little more what's going on at S3. Here's an interview for you. You like? Hi John! First of all, could you introduce yourself to the readers? Hello, My name is John Carsey, I'm a game freak first and foremost! But some consider me S3's Game Evangelist. How did you get the job? I just convinced someone that playing computer games was a legitimate way of keeping touch with the game developers. I was originally at Creative evangelising Audio and 3D Graphics when a friend from S3 convinced me to come over to the dark side. How long have you been at S3? I've only been at S3 for a year, and oh what a year it's been. I've joined S3 just after the release of the ViRGE GX2. We have launched two more chips since then. How difficult has it been to persuade developers to consider working with S3? In the ViRGE days it was not too difficult. We did have the largest marketshare out there. We also did a major overhaul on our D3D drivers. That fixed a lot of problems for us. Some of our developers will go that extra mile and include workaround for the aged ViRGE. Since the launch of the Savage3D chip I think we surprised most developers. Most of the developers who got to work with it were really impressed by the speed of the thing. Those that have seen texture compression are eagerly waiting to play with it. Any recent successes? Ooh, I can't comment on some of this stuff so close to E3, but I can talk about earlier lines. Yes! We have had some key developers making sure that their titles work with our ViRGE and Trio3D products. Have you seen the coloured lighting in Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith? Wing Commander: Prophecy is another title that runs great. Don't forget Croc - this title has native support for our GX2. Ah yes, Croc. Will there be any more native ViRGE-family games, or is Croc the "end of the line", so to speak...? We feel that what the end user wants are games that work on their product. API's should always be transparent to the end user. I don't feel that native support is such an important issue. Back in the early days of D3D, you needed native APIs to cover features missing in D3D. Microsoft has really done a great job of including missing features in the last few versions of D3D. Draw primitive functions added to D3D supplanted most of the need for our old toolkits. So the additional benefits of using a native API are becoming minimal. We don't really push any APIs. It is the choice of the developers which API they program for. It appears that more titles support D3D than any other API, but developers should control their own creation and use the API(s) that they choose. So in answer to your question, there are some more native ports on the horizon. Last month I took a look Armor Command. There are others but they have not been announced yet. We're continually getting queries about whether people will ever be able to run Quake2 on their ViRGE family card? Is the MiniGL driver going to happen? If so, will it be a native solution, or work via. Direct3D? Well, as you know there is currently an unofficial D3Dwrapper for quake floating around the net. I don't think that id is very happy with this approach and I can understand their concerns. Quake is their baby and if they want to support an API they will see that it happens. We have licensed full ICDs for all our upcoming cards. ViRGE owners might have to wait a bit longer before a solution is reached. I will tell you that I have seen a developer running Quake2 on his ViRGE card. Onto Savage3D, how have developers taken to it? Most developers got their first look at Savage3D at CGDC. I had a secret area where developers could run their code in private. Everyone was happy with the frame rates and a few titles ran flawlessly. It was quite a surprise since the drivers were about a week old at the time. Now I've got to tour with the first few boards and get some work done. What makes it stand out from the other 3D chips such as Intel's i740 and 3Dfx's Voodoo2? Its speed alone sets it past both of those chips. Games running under D3D run faster with the Savage3D chip. We were publicly showing Turok running on those chips as well as a Riva 128. We beat them all in tmarks. We even have ways to get more out of the chip. It features DirectX 6's Hardware Texture Decompression. This will allow a 6 to 1 compression ratio on a 24 bit texture. Let's say you only have a 4-meg card and 2 Megs are being used for the z-buffer. That only leaves 2 Megs for textures. Using Texture Compression you could get up to 12 Megs of 24 bit data into 2 Megs of texture space. Imagine how fast your games will run when you are not constantly swapping textures in and out of the cache. AGP developers can even free up the AGP bus and use it for other graphics data. S3 invented this format and licensed it to Microsoft. So, in terms of getting the most of the chip - the CPU doesn't currently exist? The newer chips have a setup engine on them so usually they have to wait for the CPU to keep up. On a P2-400, they just wait there crying, "feed me, feed me" until the CPU hands off the requested information. Dave's been singing the praises of AMD's K6-3D - how important do you think this chip will be for S3 gamers? The K6-3D is a good chip. Anything that will help you squeeze a little more power out of your system is great. I guess you might say you get a lot of bang for the buck. Generally, I like to stick with Intel processors, I guess you could call me old fashioned. The K6-3D might actually change my mind. About the Native API, how is this developing? Given the diminishing amount of native games around nowadays, did S3 consider going down the nVidia route and develop a chipset specifically for Direct3D? The need for a native API is more an internal need than an external one. We need a fast way to bring our chip up. We need to be able to isolate driver problems, etc. We did consider going the D3D/OpenGL route but decided that keeping our native API would give developers another choice and might actually aid in porting other rendering engines to Savage3D. Our native API is available for those developers who would like to use it. Finally, do you think S3 will ever regain their lost reputation for high-performance graphics? Yes! I think we have started to make some progress with this new chip and the next few to follow. Based on the way developers have reacted at CGDC to Savage3D, we are back in the game! I'll update you after E3. Thanks for your time, John!