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

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (8059)	10/8/1998 9:07:00 PM
From: Michael Linov	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

Tony T. Interview comments (from AGN R.A.), Basically nothing new. Two headed orang - someone thought it was a good idea. No orangs on boxes : ) Switcher for V2 and Banshee is work in progress, but no release date. Original Design goal for Banshee was to deliver 3dfx experience to Mainstream market, and OEMs. Banshee viable to go on MB. SGRAM vs. SDRAM performance. SGRAM offers block-write mode (solid fill), for some 3d applications 3-15% for SGRAM depending on applications, especially at higher resolutions. RAMDAC on chip, 250 Mhz. (BIOS is external) No DMI connector on boards - Banshee has full VMI port on chip, board makers can choose to supply connector. Banshee can do full frame-rate DVD decode on P2-300+ (even in worst possible case). 16 Bit algorithm on 3dfx is almost same as 32 bit quality due to 3dfx algorithm. 24 bit pipeline internally. Color adaptive technology to reduce to 16 bit, all done in hardware. 3DNOW for V2, and Banshee drivers. Performance on K6-2 will outperform a P2-350 in terms of frame rate (game optimized), otherwise, little performance difference. Current Banshee drivers are based on DX5, DX6 coming soon. V2 and Banshee drivers should be about the same. DirectX6 for V2 . 3dfx worked with MS to implement DX6 support. Fair number of titles make use of multi-texturing (Shogo is one). No (different vendor) SLI support in reference drivers. No guarantee that they'll be identical, so timing could cause SLI to not work reliably. Metabyte will support 2 different vendor boards, but others may not. Banshee does support TV out, board manufacturers decided to make first wave of boards without TV out. Very pleased with response to banshee, had to disclose info on Banshee (ed note: 3dfx doesn't like to disclose information : ) ). First 3dfx product suitable for OEM systems. Want 3dfx to be the entertainment standard... huge % of world with 3dfx inside. Many DX titles started as Glide games, and D3D versions tend to be developed targetted at 3dfx. People seek out 3dfx titles. Many games designed from ground up on 3dfx, optimized for it. Even if ported, game was optimized for 3dfx initially. Glide is very close to hardware, very thin. D3D isn't that thin. Provides new feature differentiation. Do not want to depend on anyone for that. Worked closely with MS on Multi-texturing and other things on DX6. Diablo 2 (game developer chose Glide). Much less effort to write engine, proto-type, etc. Saves development time. Games like trespasser are heavily dependent on software rendering (and run slowly on all platforms). V2 supports compression (like palettized textures). No execute mode AGP yet is because there's not enough bandith. V2 = 1.4 GB/s, AGP 2x, 300-500 MB/s... 1/5 of bandwidth. No devices on AGP outperforms V2 on multi-texture games. AGP is good, and 3dfx makes optimal use , but not texturing from AGP. PCI/66 is same, can buy AGP V2.