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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12637)	5/17/1999 4:36:00 PM
From: JAG	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 16960

Best Buy just put the TNT2 on the shelves today. When I was in there, one guy had a TNT2 card in his hand, the other a Voodo3. I asked the guy with the Voodo3 what was the best card, he said the TNT2. I asked why he was holding the Voodo3, he said only because his current games are Glide I continued to watch him and he picked up the TNT2 and was giving it some very serious consideration. Now that TNT2 is in the stores Mr. Patrick, we shall see who the winner is in terms of sales. Do not count eggs before all the eggs are on the shelves for sale. If TDFX would have made a quality card with they would not have it out a whole month earlier. Look's like it has backfired on them as they do not have any major tier one wins.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12637)	5/17/1999 5:06:00 PM
From: Obewon	Respond to of 16960

A couple of things struck me as significant about the Carmack interview on Gamecenter.com. 1) Carmack is on the advisory boards for both Nvidia and 3dfx so he is well aware of what direction each company is going in. 2) He's under an NDA because of this so cannot devulge this info directly to anyone. 3) However, he's mentioned that he's told developers for some time that they should allow the API's to handle the transform and clip. Why would he recommend this if he didn't KNOW that either/both 3dfx's "Voodoo4" or Nvidia's "NV-10" were going to handle these operations. This interview is the best indication yet that 3dfx's next card will support geometry acceleration. 4) "There is no clear direction to the technology going forward." This means that whoever can establish themselves the best with developers will have a leg up in deciding the direction of the entire industry. S3 has already shown that texture compression is one area of contention by getting Microsoft to license its S3CTC. Various statements made by 3dfx officials indicate that they are deciding whether to try and fight this compression standard with 3dfx's proprietary texture compression. 3dfx should be able to get its next-gen card out months before its rivals based on it history and development cycle. Nvidia followed 3dfx's lead (yet again) when it partnered with Acclaim to try and get Acclaim games to run better on its cards. Fortunately, 3dfx already has alliances with Blizzard, Eidos, Sony, and EA locked up. 5) Furthermore, Nvidia will have to wait on Microsoft to support its new capabilities under the D3D API which may or may not hinder developers from writing games incorporating these new capabilities. As owner of the Glide API, 3dfx can have been working on a SDK incorporating new tool features which will be ready far sooner than Microsoft. Obewon