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

To: Medisco who wrote (5725)	7/23/1998 6:47:00 PM
From: Michael Linov	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

I think 3dfx is in an excellent position to cover almost all aspects of the market... I'll try and break it up, though, because its not that simple. 1) Person buys their first PC on a budget. Cost is the primary concern. PC goes for $500-$750 w/monitor. Onboard video is 2-4mb , Cirrus logic, trident, or other chipset ($3 per chipset, $5-10 memory). Performance in 2d is fast enough, and 3d is unusable. Now, seeing whereas his friend has a PC (or, if 3dfx can advertise succesfully to such an end user), he can purchase a 3D only board for $99 (VooDoo 1) to $200 (Voodoo2) to make his system perform very well w/all the games on the market. I know many people who did just that after seeing what a voodoo card can do. Oddly, I think a card like the banshee, tnt, etc. wouldn't really appeal to this after sale market, since they feel they're buying (and therefore paying for) something they don't need, mainly 2d which they already have. 2) $1000 PC's from well known OEM's... These PC's typically ship with mid-high range cpu's, and video costing $20-$40 + per chipset. This is the target market for banshee. ATI, S3, Nvidia, and to a lesser extent Matrox, are all players in this market. 2D Performance in all these cards is good to excellent, and 3d performance is acceptable. Brands are important here, and Banshee would form an ideal fit. If 3dfx can make a name for itself (amongst the general public), it could easily compete here, and, all things being equal, probably be the best choice due to unequalled software support. The competition in this area will be very fierce and not really based on performance. Of course, Voodoo2 is still a viable upgrade path for all these cards, even if for no other reason than the huge installed base of 3dfx only, or 3dfx enhanced games. Glide is very much a key feature of the 3dfx platform. Many games (Unreal, FF7, WC Prohecy) only run on Glide or look much better/faster on glide. In many cases, support for other platforms only appears MONTHS after the initial 3dfx release. 3dfx has excellent brand loyalty. Few other companies can claim such a following (Matrox might be one, in the 2d world). When Banshee becomes available, many existing 3dfx users will choose it as their 2d card of choice (if all goes well, of course). Even if competition from NVidia and Nec comes close to (or even sometimes beats) 3dfx, the installed (and still building) Glide software base, consistently high performance, and good drivers will tilt the scale in 3dfx's favor. Something of note... Every employee of my company owns one or more 3dfx card. Ranging from a lowly Stingray 128 rush ( Oops, bad word there, but it wasn't THAT bad really), up to my Obsidian X24. Some of us bought them because we want the best thing money can buy... but even our sales guy (whose not very computer literate) picked one up so his kids can play Quake and Unreal. Seeing a 3dfx card in action sells it like nothing else can, it seems :)