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

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (9531)	12/11/1998 4:14:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

For dedicated gamers that care only about their frag-rate, 32-bit is totally a non-issue. What they only care about is framerate and ping. What I've found out is that if you take the time to play-test the TNT and the Voodoo2, you will discover that the Voodoo2 still gives you a quantitative advantage (i.e., you'll get more frags), especially when playing against top players in a low-ping environment. There are several problems though: 1.) At 800x600, you only get a _slight_ advantage. The performance difference is not enough that average players would notice. At 1024x768 the difference is greater, but novices (the growth market segment) probably wouldn't notice because... 2.) Almost nobody takes the time to play-test these cards. Ignoring price, most purchase decisions are based on visuals or word-of-mouth and believe me, there _is_ a significant, noticable improvement in visual quality when you move to 32-bit. Screenshots don't really convey the improvement, but it is very obvious in side-by-side or A/B comparisons. The improvement is something that sales/marketing-types can easily run with. All other things being equal, casual gamers will prefer the 32-bit version of Quake2 over the 16-bit version. 3.) Finally 3Dfx is confusing the "influential users" who hear 3Dfx say that 32-bit give horrible performance, but then see friend's machines with TNT cards or chat with other players on the net who have TNT cards and are playing very well with them. Chip