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

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (9875)	12/23/1998 6:34:00 AM
From: Joe C.	Respond to of 16960

Gamers and the press are not interested in TDFX's OEM strategy - period. When the cards are viewed from a retail respective and given TDFX's history of producing the best, Banshee/V3 don't clearly lead the pack. Therefore, I'm not suprised that we would receive the brunt of the criticism while companies like ATI (underdog) are given the kid glove treatment. I wouldn't mind this so much if we had some more major OEM wins as evidence of the strategy working well. I expect STB will help get us there. Re: Europe From what I've read, TDFX has a very good reputation overseas. The issues people are raising are valid but I don't think they will be material. I also don't believe barriers to entry are that high. STB does sell in Europe even though their distribution may not be as good as some of their competitors (I don't know how true this is). TDFX could choose to go it alone over there. Given their name and some selling effort/dollars and staffing, they should be able to capture that market as well. Keep in mind, that TDFX already has a small office in London. I'm not sure what STB has. Joe C.

To: Patrick Grinsell who wrote (9875)	12/23/1998 9:49:00 AM
From: Marc	Respond to of 16960

So i guess that that you were able to but a Rage 128, why don't you all wait before making those coments, remember what you were all saying before you were able to try the TNT.....Please. Trilinear Filtering on the Rage 128 from : angelfire.com A A good synopsis of all these 3D terms can be fournd 3Dimensional 128 site. There have been many threads going around about "trinlinear filtering" and the Rage 128 and the throughput penalty for enabling it and "kluges" by other companies to get enhanced filtering using a technique LOD Dithering to approximate this filtering technique...the problem is that this technique is passed off as "trlinear filtering". Here are the two best responses that I have seen. The are by the "G" brothers Geoffrey and Dan who can be found in many of the 3D forums cutting to the chase on 3D issues. Date: Thu Dec 17'98 - 1:02pm Author: Geoffrey G. (gbgitch@southwind.net) Subject: Nope. in response to Re: Urban Legend?, posted by Dave Steele on Thu Dec 17'98 - 7:21am Nope. They both have exactly the same hit. The issue is that Zanshin does not realize the Riva TNT is NOT TRILINEAR FITLERING. Trilinear is free as long as multitexture is not used (since they both use similar processes) since Quake uses multitexture you cannot use trilinear with it without a hit. The TNT's older drivers had a 30% hit in performance (about equal to the Rage 128's hit) the new (TNT) drivers DO NOT TRILINEAR FILTER, they just say they do. In fact the newer drivers do a thing called LOD Dithering, it has a similar effect to trilinear filtering only instead of blending the two mipmaps it stipples them. This is the trick used by the Banshee and the i740 to fake trilinear. It breakes up the 'line' artifacts from mipmapping, but it causes pixel crawl. Date: Thu Dec 17'98 - 3:21pm Author: Dan G. (dangitch@southwind.net) Subject: Re: Nope. , in response to Nope., posted by Geoffrey G. on Thu Dec 17'98 - 1:02pm Re: Nope. I think that theoretically trilinear filtering should never be completely free on either the TNT or Rage 128. Unlike, say, the Voodoo2 or Permedia3, their extra texture units should never be sitting idle. If they're rendering something simple, like single textured, bilinear filtered, un-bumpmaped pixels, then the second unit should be busy helping get the job finished in half the time. This is why a 90MHz TNT has a theoretical 180 Mpixel/sec single textured bilinear fillrate, and 90 Mpixel/sec single textured trilinear fillrate (or bilinear filtered, dual textured, etc). As such, switching to trilinear filtering should result in a 50% performance hit. In reality, the TNT doesn't get anywhere near its theoretical peak of 180 Mpixel/sec fillrate, so the drop-off isn't that sharp, but there should still be some slow down. To add to the confusion, however, the TNT's current drivers seem to avoid dual pixel rendering in DX6 titles, meaning it actually is effectively free there right now, until the drivers are updated. It's no wonder the "free trilinear on TNT" theory is so hard to disprove! I think the thing I will take away from this is that LOD dithering is a way of getting a alternate and possibly better visual with some known tradeoffs. The problem is that it is passed off as something else. Cavaet Emptor.