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

To: Pierre-X who wrote (7065)	9/11/1998 7:28:00 AM
From: Michael Linov	Respond to of 16960

Banshee drivers MUST be flawless to attain market LEADERSHIP. If they are not, capturing the top spot will take 3-6 months longer. The Rage Pro Turbo IS last years ATI Rage Pro w/new drivers. It is an OK card with good Video out, but its unacceptable compared to this generation of products. Great for V2 sales though. None of the other cards have hardware DVD Accelaration. All have software assisted DVD which operates approx. at the same level of performance. X Y Scaling , and motion compensation are supported by ALL the latest cards (including the banshee). Hardware DVD with a daughtercard is a totally different solution. The card does all the DCT transforms freeing up the CPU to do other things. People tend to forget that it takes alot of time to design good drivers (especially in a new area, where the necessary skills of the company were'nt fully developed). 3dfx didn't have to rely on DirectX for the success of V2. They now how to develop new Glide, DX6 (95 and NT), and OpenGL. The banshee is their catch up (and overtake) project. It will allow future products (and existing ones, like the V2) to beat the likes of NVIDIA (who have written nothing but DX drivers all along). Software development cycles are often MUCH longer and prone to delays than hardware cycles. Now that the skill set is in place, I expect 3dfx to be able to deliver 2D/3D solutions second to NONE, indefinetly.