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

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (12826)	5/20/1999 1:53:00 PM
From: timbur	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

3dfx WAS a pure gaming company, that's why the STB merger is key. Now we'll start to see many more differentiated products; the Voodoo3 3500TV is just the start. As someone rumored, they have 4 teams working on 20 PCBs. I imagine some of these are lower-end but with additional features for the OEM crowd, some could be super high-end workstation designs for the CAD crowd. 3dfx has had 2 major directional shifts. The first was from moving from an arcade-only focus to a retail PC focus. This was only made possible due to the tremendous drop in RAM prices. But they were still game-oriented. The 2nd is happening now, with Ballard's declaration of war upon ATI. This is possible ony because they acquired STB. Otherwise, their designs would be at the whim of the board-makers (DIMD, Creative and the like). You can't control your direction unless you control the product. It will be interesting how NVIDIA will respond. Before, if you wanted all the bells and whistles, you purchased an ATI All-In-Wonder. And if you wanted good game performance you chose between TNT and Voodoo. This year, 3dfx will have an answer to both segments of the market. The only market they will be missing out in is the low-end, which sees alot of crappy S3 chips sold, usually on the motherboard. (I can buy a Super 7 motherboard with S3-AGP, modem, and sound card on the motherboard for around $70. This is probably what's in those cheap machines. My IBM PC here at work is a nice PII-450, but it's saddled with an S3 onboard and no external AGP slot to replace it. Ugly.) Cheers, Tim