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

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (7777)	9/30/1998 2:41:00 AM
From: Simon Cardinale	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Fourthwave seems a bit muddled for professional market analysis. There is the potential that this multi-texturing technology is at the heart of DirectX 6.0. If so, 3Dlabs with its Permedia III and ATI with its Rage 128 are at risk. Permedia III and Rage 128 are threatened if their hardware impinges on 3Dfx's patent, not if they use the same API call. More important, if 3Dfx seeks to get aggressive, it could well severely impact the implementation of this feature in D3D as implemented in future silicon. In this case, Microsoft could end up being the loser. The net result is that the whole industry loses when the API is under assault. Maybe that is the intention of 3Dfx with its Glide API and this suit is only the beginning. They are consistently assuming that Direct3D makes a single-pass multitexturing request that is unique to 3Dfx's hardware, which I don't think is accurate. D3D API calls are intentionally very generic so that many kinds of hardware can implement features however they like. That's pretty much the point of Direct3D. 3Dfx went to a lot of trouble to work with MS to get single-pass multitexturing support in DX6. If they intended to make Glide the only single-pass multitexturing API why would they bother? It would just antagonize MS who would then have to remove the capability from D3D. Simon