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

To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (10942)	3/2/1999 1:15:00 PM
From: Casey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Well the local EB is pushing the hell out of the new v3's. Display boxes all over the place. Almost all the video cards they sell are voodoo this or voodoo that. There are two TNT cards and one of them is from STB. Also a TV tuner card from STB. Well since last week we now have a clear understanding of the MetaByte deal. Basically works for any chip set and TNT retail won't be ready for a while. Sharkey's is just blantently out of control at this point pushing the non-existent TNT2 SLI. Between the retail presence of 3dfx and better in-roads to OEM's through STB things could fall in place real nice. Never forget Banshee killed TNT in retail and got "some" nice OEM wins even without the 32-bit color that TNT has. V3 will pretty much be on the shelves when TNT2 is just being announced. I would definitely give this round to 3dfx. Bottom line is that 3dfx quitely got all their ducks in a row and if Rampage is all its cracked up to be 1999 will be the year of 3dfx. NVidia has already lost their chance at a major retail presence with their new chip. Lets just hope the OEM's love STB. Casey "we are in trouble, things are looking up" K

To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (10942)	3/2/1999 1:39:00 PM
From: Synapsid	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

To better understand the differences betweeen the Savage4 and the Voodoo3, consider memory bandwidth. The Savage4 uses a 64-bit memory interface which is cheaper to manufacture and enables the use of commodity SDRAM chips in a 32MB board. The Voodoo3 (and NVIDIA's TNT for that matter) is a true 128-bit architecture. What this means is that a 166 MHz Voodoo3 board has a memory bandwidth at its disposal that is approximately 2.4 times higher than a 143 MHz memory Savage4 (2.6 GB/s vs 1.1 GB/s). Similarly, a 143 MHz Voodoo3 has a memory bandwidth of 2.3 GB/s vs 1.0 GB/s for the 125 MHz, 64-bit Savage4. S3's chip tries to make up for this memory "horsepower" deficit with techniques that reduce memory bandwidth requirements (such as efficient AGP texturing and texture compression). Because memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck with S3's chip, differences in memory speed have a greater influence on actual performance compared to Voodoo3. Because the Savage4 is not targeted as a high-end product (illustrated by the lack of memory bandwidth), the 32 MB board from Creative is a bit of an anomality, since it is an attempt to eat high-end market share by hitting the 32MB spot using cheaper memory chips than would be possible in a Voodoo3 or TNT board (a 64-bit memory interface allows the use of commodity 64Mbit SDRAM chips in a 32MB configuration).