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

To: Joe Pirate who wrote (10412)	1/30/1999 3:04:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Hi Joe, Welcome to our little thread. You might want to read some of the posts from the past month or so. Lots of your questions and issues have been hashed out here recently. FWIW, many of the active contributors here are long-term TDFX longs and are painfully familar with many of the good points you are raising. Hopefully we won't see too many flame wars re-erupt on these topics... You might consider joining "ClanDD" - a loosely organized group of gaming investors that meets online regularly to do "Due Diligence on the gaming industry" (i.e. play games). Just send me private mail if you wish to join. Chip coolhistory.com

To: Joe Pirate who wrote (10412)	2/2/1999 11:56:00 PM
From: Michael Madden	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

AGP-texturing is an overrated feature. Tom Pabst's latest article on the Voodoo3 expresses slight disappointment that the Voodoo3 won't support AGP texturing. I've seen similar sentiments in other Voodoo3 preview articles on the web. And, this surprises me. These online hardware gurus are so enamored with the screen shots that they seem to ignore the performance ramifications altogether. The AGP interface provides a meager 0.5 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Compare that to the 2.2 GB/sec on-board memory bandwidth of the Voodoo2. Even AGP 4X will only double the AGP bandwidth to 1 GB/s. However, by that point, the Voodoo3-4000 will have an on-board memory bandwidth of 3.0 GB/sec (if Tom's information on the Voodoo3 is correct; ie., 128-bit interface and 183Mhz memory clock). In simple terms, graphics performance degrades as the need to access textures through AGP grows. In other words, accessing textures from local memory will always lead to better performance than accessing textures over AGP. But the performance picture does not end there. The 440BX chipset arbitrates memory access between the CPU, the AGP bus, and the PCI bus. The bandwidth between memory and the 440BX chipset is 0.8 GB/s. That is not much larger than the AGP bandwidth. An active AGP bus can contend with the CPU for memory bandwidth and reduce the computational performance of the computer. In most real-world applications, the worst-case CPU performance loss is probably 15% or less. One last point about AGP. AGP texturing uses system memory. If AGP texturing is necessary to render a scene, the user must have enough system memory for the textures, the game, and the operating system. Otherwise, Windows95 will start "swapping" to disk and performance will suffer. So, if AGP texturing is so great, why does ATI feel that they have to load their Fury board with 32MB? The answer is performance. Because AGP texture access is so much slower than local memory access, the sweet spot for trading visual quality with performance lies fairly close to the maximum number of textures that can be held in on-board memory. This article does not aim to paint AGP texturing as a useless feature. It is useful. AGP texturing allows users to play games with more detail than local graphics memory can handle. The user might be willing to trade a few frames per second for a couple more megabytes of textures. However, the performance penalty increases significantly as the ratio of AGP textures to locally stored textures increases. Game designers consider these trade-offs when creating their games. A designer is not going to build a visually stunning game that uses 48MB of textures because it would be unbearably slow on most computers. Instead, they will design for the standard memory capacity of currently selling video cards; they will capture that sweet spot between visual quality and performance. For games this year, that will be 16MB (the current standard now). So, lack of AGP texturing is unlikely to hamper the gaming experience of users who own a Voodoo3.