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

To: Jeff Lins who wrote (8423)	10/17/1998 11:41:00 PM
From: Simon Cardinale	Respond to of 16960

Jeff: My thoughts on your framerate/true color post... Framerate: Framerates up to about 60 fps are noticeable to everyone. After that we're getting into range of the monitor's refresh, which runs at maybe 85Hz for a modern monitor / card setup. However for internet play (which makes or breaks many 3D games) 30fps may be a reasonable target so that internet traffic does not cause lag. But a card that can only do 30fps is going to become a slide-show in a good frag-fest. Better to take a card capable of 60 fps and limit it to 30. Polygons: You're right on target here. This is definitely the next big jump in realism. Shadows and lighting can be as flashy as you like, but as long as we're lighting and shadowing ambulatory geometry lessons we've got a long way to go. The fact is V2. TNT, Banshee, et al are able to produce millions of triangles per second while games typicaly use tens or hundreds of thousands. I'm not sure of all the limitations on why this is, but the main one is the CPU's ability to do the mathematics required to draw them. Shortcuts like "strips and fans" allow more triangles with less math, but until we've got on-board geometry processors we're severely limited. There may also be fill-rate bottlenecks, too. Though if you have enough polygons you don't need such large textures. True-color: This is important only in situations where banding is obvious, like in a sunset or other gradually graded undetailed surface. (If you saw the 16bit ATI 128 shots that were posted on voodooextreme you'll see serious banding problems in the sky. They got around this by introducing complex cloud-scapes.) As we move from indoor labyrinth crawls to outside first person shooters this will become more important. 16bit color is mildly annoying but not harmful to gameplay, and certainly not the greatest hurdle in realism (as you pointed out). In the end this is a minor step that 3Dfx waited to take because no one was using it (and most games still don't) and probably so that it could claim the highest framerates possible. Smart move but a position that needs to be abandoned in their next release for marketing reasons (as should be their stand against AGP texturing support). Simon