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Nvidia buys out 3dfx!

This is very interesting, indeed. With two sources of outstanding technical expertise merging to one, I'd say ATI has some even tougher competition, ahead. It will be interesting to see what the next few years bring for the graphics chipset industry.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!
 
JH> 3dfx hasn't been a source of "outstanding technical expertise" since the days of the Voodoo2. Since then, they've released:
Voodoo Banshee - integrating a mediocre 2d engine onto the PCB of a Voodoo2 accelerator card.
Voodoo3 - slow performance and lack of features that were present in most of the competition at the time.
Voodoo4 - bad idea from design to implementation
Voodoo5 - too little, too late

3dfx has been making bad decisions that predate their purchase of STB in order to make their own cards. They were already hemoraging money at that point, and they looked at building their own cards as a way out of their ever-deepening hole of debt they dug for themselves. As is evidenced by the many failed recent mergers of chip manufacturers and card builders, this was a stupid way to go.

I'm pretty sure that Nvidia, who is arguably producing the best technology in the graphics business at this time, isn't really interested in really acquiring technology that is inferior to their own.

ATI wasn't really in the 3d acceleration game until very recently. They were mainly focusing on OEM products, where they still rule the roost.
They really broke in with the Rage 128, which was a little late to market, and have really made some huge strides with the Radeon.
Even though they've been around a long time, they're really a newcomer in this particular market. For someone who's been around such a short time, it's respectable enough that they're even in the game. Don't count them out just yet.

WaterB - Your Q&A link causes a Dr. Watson on IE before the page even loads. Don't ever do that to me again!
wink.gif


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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
Maybe so, Dan, but there are some interesting things that 3DFX has been working on that NVIDIA could improve upon for some fantastic products:


  • Hidden Surface Removal - Anandtech released an article on this, even though the technology is in it's infancy.
  • FSAA - Talk about a way to massively improve visual quality.
  • SLI - every 3DFX 3D graphics chip is capable of SLI. Think of what NVIDIA could do if they could SLI the GeForce.
  • T-Buffer - I admit that I don't understand this technology, but from my understanding, the response is underwelming.

Even if 3DFX products were late or not the greatest, I believe that it has to do with poor management and not poor engineering. Dan, being a software engineer, myself, I can appreciate the reality that succesful products require both good product management and quality engineering. I believe 3DFX has the quality engineering. I just think they had poor management. To explore why I think this:

  • The acquisition of STB
  • Choosing to stick with the 16 bit only world for too long.
  • Crippling the 2D/3D products like the Rush and Banshee - the first succesful 2D/3D card was actually the Voodoo3. For someone with a K6-2, this card was an outstanding addition to their machine. The problem with the Voodoo3 is that it is essentially just a beefed up version of the Voodoo2 - nothing new there.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!
 
3dfx FSAA> About **** time. ATI already had FSAA in the Radeon. Nvidia already had FSAA in the GF2. Now 3dfx is *working* on it?

SLI> While every 3dfx chip may have been capable of it, how many have actually used it? A feature is useless if it's never implemented.
"Think of what NVIDIA could do if they could SLI the GeForce."... Only thing I can imagine is spending $800 on my graphics subsystem in the form of 2 GF2U cards when I could get acceptable performance from a $100 GF2MX. No thanks.

2d/3d card> "the first succesful 2D/3D card was actually the Voodoo3."
Define 'successful'. If you mean commercially successful, I'd say that the Banshee was a moderate success, at least worthy of mention.
If you mean successfully implemented, the Banshee still predated the Voodoo3 by a good stretch, so I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that the Voodoo3 was the first successful implementation by 3dfx.

As for the other technologies, who's to say that if things had followed their past trends, that ATI or Nvidia wouldn't have come out with a superior technology to anything 3dfx was working on? Heck, when a company is $300 million in debt, how much money can they possibly have to devote to R&D?

I honestly think Nvidia just absorbed 3dfx to buy out a competitor. I really don't think much of the emerging technology that's being bought in this acquisition will ever come to fruition in an Nvidia product.


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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
My definition of success on a 3DFX 2D/3D card is the fact that it could outperform the Voodoo2. The Banshee was actually a crippled Voodoo2 (only one TMU versus 2 TMU's in the Voodoo2). Marketing wise, the Banshee was successful as it was the best 2D/3D card to stick in an AMD box before the Voodoo3's came out. Performance wise, it was slightly under the Voodoo2, and thus AMD owners (myself included, at the time) hailed the Voodoo3's arrival....but the Voodoo3 should have come out 6 months after the Voodoo2 - too little, too late....and that was the story of 3DFX ever since.

SLI actually has potential considering the memory bandwidth issues. I wonder what a 2 GF2MX card with HyperZ like technology and 64 MB of SDR RAM could do? Maybe you are right....too expensive. Still SLI has a potential in a more professional level market.

I agree that NVIDIA did absorb the competition, but I still think that raw engineering talent has also been acquired.

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!
 
Yes, performance-wise, the Banshee was a hog. But it did work, and was technically the first 2d/3d combo solution 3dfx offered.

As for SLI in a professional level market, I don't know if I could see that, since there are workstation graphics cards with specialized chipsets that blow rings around anything on the consumer level for raw graphics processing power. Even in an SLI configuration, I still see some of the newer chipsets falling flat compared to some of the Glint-based cards out there.
Some examples would be the Oxygen line from 3D Labs. Of course, those cards excel in CAD and Rendering jobs, but fall way flat in gaming. It's a completely different market, with different requirements.

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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
heh.. i got into this last time w/ dan.. not gonna touch w/ a 10ft pole..


sidenote: S3 signed 3 big contracts w/ some companies (sony.. and 2 others).. they're gonna use S3 in their notebooks..

so.. S3 has the potential to do well.. ATI's still huge on the OEM market.. especially now w/ the radeon.. which turned out to be a fairly good chip.. heh.. i guess people's expectations were lowered after the Rage line..
smile.gif
 
Actually, I'm debating only to see what I can learn. Dan is making lots of valid points, and I am trying to throw stuff out there to see what his feelings are.

Dan, sorry I didn't clarify on the "professional" as in CAD or Gaming. I was suggesting that you could build an SLI type rig to put into a gaming type machine that only people with tons of money would buy. Kind of like the Obsidian cards we discussed that time?

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Does driving a car from Saturn make me an alien?

I'm just a quick pee. - liltaz, fastest pee in the West!
 
WaterB>
tongue.gif

I got your 10' pole right here.
lol.gif


S3 going into notebooks proved that their purchase of Diamond for the purpose of building their own cards was a failure. What graphics are used in notebooks? Integrated chipsets.

And I really wasn't disappionted with the Rage 128 line. It came a little behind the curve, but not so much that it was a performance hog. It offered a lot of features, including TV-out and DVD hardware-assist which rivals some dedicated hardware decoders.
Pre-Rage 128, I cannot speak of since I didn't use ATI cards much prior to the release of the Rage Fury.



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spidergoolash: "heh, a cup of diesel dan - mwahhha"
me: "heh, a cup of me is like a cup of heaven!"
 
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