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

To: Ben Wu who wrote (10679)	2/14/1999 1:39:00 AM
From: Patrick Grinsell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

New business model OEM advantages: I've been concentrating so much on my financials models that I forgot what the business arrangement can do for 3dfx. By not having to worry about board vendors they can knock a month or two (I'm guessing here) off time to market. I would expect a month of testing the new chip and a month of marketing/decision making on the boardmakers part. All of that is now gone. Also, 3dfx needn't support each vendor with a new set of drivers and hardware configs. Having vendors, such as canopus, requiring specialized drivers must be a pain in the ass. 3dfx generally created a generic card with several different options (mem config, ram type, # tmus etc.) which they needed to help the boardmakers implement. 3dfx doesn't need to spend wasted r&d anymore now that they know exactly what configuration they will bring to market. If the Voodoo3 2000 doesn't have tv-out, there is no sense in testing that configuration for tv-out compatibility. Finally, 3dfx can determine two different price points for their product. Before, they would give one price to the boardmakers and the boardmakers sold that chip to either an OEM or retail and 3dfx had no control. Of course 3dfx would like to charge a lower price to OEMs and a higher price to the retail customers. If the post over on the Yahoo board was right then STB lost the deal because of a $2 difference in price. The old 3dfx only had the choice of flooding the retail market with low priced chips through their OEM boardmaker or not being competitive in the OEM market because the chip price was too high. I think 3dfx knew that the majority of the sales were going to be in the retail area so they decided not to lower prices. This may have come at the expense of some large OEM deals. Pat

To: Ben Wu who wrote (10679)	2/17/1999 2:48:00 AM
From: Ben Wu	Respond to of 16960

OT - playstation 2 a console chip with enough power to put even the V3 to shame next-generation.com an excerpt: According to Sony, the new architecture, when using all three processors in parallel function, can calculate 55 million polygons per second. That's without effects. With parallel lighting, the system can calculate 34 million polys/sec. With lighting and fog, it's 30 million/sec. Finally, with lighting, fog and bezier curves the system can calculate 13 million polys/second. Bezier curves are the kind of calculated curved surfaces that John Carmack is using for Quake III (see this month's issue of Next Generation Magazine for more). In comparison, Voodoo3 boasts 8 million in its highest end iteration and has no hardware support for bezier curves. The Dreamcast and all older game consoles render even fewer polygons than that. plus lots and lots more goodies... eta on PSX2 is 9/00. i just wonder if 3dFX can slap one of those playstation cpus on it's next gen card to handle all geometry calculations... or even vice versa, slap in a V3 chip to handle the graphics rendering in the PSX2... oooo... i'm too scared to even begin to think what the performance will be like <G>