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

To: Waldeen who wrote (7028)	9/10/1998 12:56:00 AM
From: Simon Cardinale	Respond to of 16960

Waldeen: "parallel" and commoditization To me basically SLI is the first hint that the video designers are realizing that Graphics are "inherently parallel". Inherently parallel means that each 'processor' addition increases the speed up proportionally. Patrick hit on in his previous post. Lots of tasks are not inherently parallel, and the speed-up decreases as processors increase. Accepting your definition of parallel, I'd have to say that SLI is not parallel. Two boards in SLI is not nearly twice as fast. For the most part Voodoo2 and Voodoo2 SLI are CPU limited. They're waiting for the CPU to send the triangles. The next big performance jump is going to be from dedicated geometry processors built into the next generation of 3D cards. IMO with the graphics companies lowering their chips to commodity prices, graphics will be "parallel" very soon. The chips are getting cheap enough to include more than one per board and in so doing possibly increase sales volume enough to compensate for the declining margins in this business. Maybe. This "commoditization of graphics chips" thing has been repeated so many times that it's entered the conventional wisdom phase. Fortunately it's not really true. The high end of 2D cards was never commoditized. Low end - sure. It didn't matter which $45 video card you got. Tseng Labs, S3, whatever. They were all crap, capable of running a 14" monitor at 800x600 at 60Hz. Now large monitors are prevalent, and the graphics cards to run them are selling in much larger quantities. Naturally prices dropped some (economies of scale and such) but Matrox built a successful company by filling the highest end. Now with 250Mhz RAMDACs and 16MB RAM 2D is finally hitting the null driver performance level, even at very high resolutions and refresh rates. Remember, this is a recent development. Well, there was a long life from Monochrome text and CGA graphics to today. How long will the 3D development take? First you have to figure out what the target is. Well, look away from the monitor and look around your office or home. We know what reality looks like, and there's no theoretical barrier to reaching it. At the very least we ought to be able to create 3D rendered scenes on par with the images we see on TV or in the movies. And not just on a single flat screen, of course. Separate pictures for each eye will be the next huge UI (user interface) revolution, and it'll probably start in gaming (check out H3D to see one of the first fairly successful implementations of this sort of technology). 3D will advance faster than 2D did, but it's got an enromously farther way to go. 3Dfx is poised to be a very influential player in creating true virtual reality. Simon