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

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (7374)	9/18/1998 1:02:00 AM
From: Matt Webster	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16960

Not to be a pain, Chip, but I still don't get 3DFX's reasoning to not go AGP AND keep 8-12 MB local RAM. 1) Half-Life is supposed to have 40 MB of textures. It's fine if TDFX does not believe in AGP, but then why do we not have a Banshee or Voodoo2 with 64 MB of RAM? RAM is supposedly virtually free, right? 2) Given, say, 40 MB of textures, I think the concern/claim is that 8 MB of local RAM is slower than some local + AGP 2x combination. I think I understand the argument about AGP being marginal. What I do not see is why we are not seeing a race in local DRAM size led by our own favorite underperforming company. Heck, why don't we stick four DIMM sockets on the board and let users install as much RAM as they can afford? Then, game designers can make super high-res versions. Better yet, TDFX can add value by offering proprietary versions of games that fit on super large texture sizes. Get with it TDFX! I want a 64 MB Banshee 2 by March! Matt Footnote: might this be exactly what Micron has in store for its Rendition-based product, to put gobs of RAM on the graphics card? No one makes RAM more cheaply than MU (Go USA!) and this could develop into a strategic advantage. Now, where else can 128 MB of RAM help? My guess is that a 128 MB DRAM buffer on a disk drive would offer a huge performance benefit. But that's another thread.

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (7374)	9/18/1998 8:41:00 AM
From: Scott Garee	Respond to of 16960

Tom and AGP I'm really baffled by Tom on this one. He has done a lot of research into AGP in the past and this latest article completely debunks everything he's said in the past. There are 4 articles in his video guide directly covering AGP: tomshardware.com Read them and see if you can figure out what's going on. The decision by TDFX not to rework the existing PCI/AGP interface in the V2 core was sound as far as price/performance and time to market considerations go, but they underestimated the impact of the missing marketing feature list bullets. Oh well, they've seen this and have stated they will fix it, there's nothing we can do but wait. The only current benefit of AGP Execute is the ability to load only the needed portion of a large texture. This feature is the reason the large texture demos outperform V2. A V2 has to load the entire texture, even if only displaying part of it. If this becomes an issue in real games TDFX can't update the Glide drivers to do partial texture loading. Right now there is no compelling reason, other than useless benchmarks. The MGA-200 is the best AGP Texture engine out right now (pending further news on TnT) and it isn't going to run Half-Life faster than V2. I doubt TnT will either. I haven't seen info on ANY upcoming game which leads me to believe AGP Execute is needed to run it well. Here are the big ones I see coming and they all work excellent on V2/Banshee: FPS --Half-Life --Daikatana --Shogo FS --Falcon4 Racing --GPL Maybe MythII will benefit from AGP2X to quickly load all those pretty pictures. :)