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

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (9361)	12/3/1998 2:24:00 AM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Respond to of 16960

Don't believe me? Does this look like 640x480 to you... gigapixel.com Not any 640x480 I've ever seen...who gives a rats ass about 32 bit if it looks like this! Pat

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (9361)	12/3/1998 11:15:00 AM
From: joel3	Respond to of 16960

Can some explain the following paragraph about V3: Just like the Banshee, the Voodoo3 has a standard VMI interface and doesn't have any hardware DVD acceleration (motion compensation). The company decided not to put it in. They reasoned that DVD decoding on a 350 MHz PII only takes up 68% of the CPU. Furthermore, the company expects to get WHQL with DVD (in the next few weeks), and according to Altabet, "That's the end of the story." gamasutra.com I thought that Banshee did have hardware DVD acceleration, however, it required the development of a daughter card. What is WHQL with DVD? Why is this a solution? BTW, does Banshee work with Cinemaster's DVD software? Thanks...Joel

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (9361)	12/3/1998 11:41:00 AM
From: timbur	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Re: 32 bit framebuffer I'm curious about this. 3dfx keeps mentioning the hit to performance it would entail. I think, and HOPE, that they KNOW this, and this is not just a waving of the hands marketing thing. They've spent a lot of time engineering their chips, and now have those nifty chip simulators. I wonder whether they have actually developed a version which does 32bit output. If they have, and have shown to themselves that the performance hit is extreme enough to not justify the costs of incorporating it into a final design, wouldn't that be neat if they actually said: "We have protyped a 32bit framebuffer, and not only would the typical game framerate decrease by 50%, but it would require us to charge $50 per chip instead of $30 to $35. In addition, it would have pushed back the V3 by X weeks/months." Would this type of statement be a reasonable response to the 32bit hoopla? The full-scene AA response would be encouraging were the news to have come out shortly after the infamous VE interview with developers, and not in an obscure interview on gamasutra. From my read on the oversampling, if a V3 3000 can perform at 2X a V2-SLI rig, wouldn't 4x supersampling mean the performance would be 50% that of V2-SLI, and on par with a single V2? Granted, at 640x480, this performance should be good enough for any of the current games. Timbur