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Apparently, they don't seem to do PC products any more. And who can blame them - or Matrox? 3DLABS too has stopped developing graphics chipsets, and now develops ARM based processors, platforms and software

The ReplayTV and Rio products are what SonicBlue is perhaps more recently known for - but don't forget some of the huge companies of yesteryear that SonicBlue also gobbled up. For starters,

Diamond Multimedia, who was once one of the larger producers of mainstream video cards,

and S3, the unforgettable yet forgettable video chipset.

• my monitor hung up on my wall
• my mouse in my hand
• my keyboard in my lap
• my Internet connection in the kitchen
• my DivX movies on my television
• my MP3 receiver in my entertainment center
• all controlled by my PC in the bedroom

...of course, in a house where we can't even keep the cordless phone on its recharger for more than five minutes and stash the remote control in a new location every day, this will probably be less of a boon than some people think.

• my monitor hung up on my wall
• my mouse in my hand
• my keyboard in my lap
• my Internet connection in the kitchen
• my DivX movies on my television
• my MP3 receiver in my entertainment center
• all controlled by my PC in the bedroom

...of course, in a house where we can't even keep the cordless phone on its recharger for more than five minutes and stash the remote control in a new location every day, this will probably be less of a boon than some people think.

Sega have let their most valuable franchises die for lack of new titles (Sonic, NiGHTS, etc)

It's even worse, looks like we've got a whole new type of hedgehog around...

I think this was the intended link.

Sonic lives again. :) Is it just me, or has S3 started to remind you of one of those patchwork quilts you sew out of bits of clothing which have worn too thin and useless for anything else?

I'm half-expecting S3 to make the big Atari/Home and Commodore acquisition announcements. I'm eagerly awaiting my new Amiga hardware running TOS 3.5 with ViRGE DirectX 5 3D deceleration and maybe AdLib audio beside, all beautifully orchestrated to support the wonderfully exciting Snork Adventure launch title.* And the scary thing is - it'll work. Like those people with three and four diseases, all holding each other in check, and where if just one thing becomes slightly less horrible they'll topple - it's going to work.

* Sold exclusively at Radio Shack.

Sega have let their most valuable franchises die for lack of new titles (Sonic, NiGHTS, etc)

It's even worse, looks like we've got a whole new type of hedgehog around...

Hold on. First, you might want to consider flashing it. The Bios that ships with it isn't all that great. You can find the Bios here. I don't know which driver you're using, but you might want to try this one. I'd appreciate it if you could reply or e-mail how it turns out. I actually care about this stuff. Ya know, techsupport and all.

Hold on. First, you might want to consider flashing it. The Bios that ships with it isn't all that great. You can find the Bios here. I don't know which driver you're using, but you might want to try this one. I'd appreciate it if you could reply or e-mail how it turns out. I actually care about this stuff. Ya know, techsupport and all.

A card I recently bought is a Diamond Stealth III S540. It uses a S3 Savage4 chipset, for which there are currently Win95/98/ME/2000/Linux drivers available. More info on www.s3.com

I payed about 80 US Dollar for a 16MB AGP version. It'll cost something similar for a 16/32 MB PCI version. It isn't very fast, but it looks great.

Or better, the lack of them. The comfort of placing one computer downstairs in the living room and one upstairs in the bedroom is quite pleasing. I'm quite experienced with a product from Diamond Multimedia called Homefree. The only real problems of these cards are:
A) A bandwidth of about 1 Mbit. The next generation is supposed to have 11, but that's future music and
B) The fact that they only work correctly in wooden or at least the cheaper kind of homes. Sturdy concrete kind of structures usually block the signal.

I can really identify with you, so much.

S3 does. I guess they bought out Diamond which is where I got my FireGL card from. I must say, I really liked my FireGL 1000 Pro when I got it - still a good card for 2D applications, although its usefulness for current 3D is starting to wane... They also seem to have dropped the "FireGL" line of things.

Microsoft did us all a disservice by creating a lame new 3D api

What else did you expect? Microsoft has a huge Not Made Here (NMH) problem - if they didn't make it, they need to either:

1. Reinvent it so that it only works through MS sponsered methods, or
2. Buy whoever does make it.

Why do I believe his side of this story in this? Mostly because of all the nasty things I've been reading about Intel's *apparent* strong arming of Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers, and the *apparent* cutting of a deal with Gateway so they'd stop using AMD CPUs in their machines. Not to mention Intel's failed attempt to *apparently* force RDRAM on OEMs and the market, and a number of other Micros1~ esque tactics.

The fact of the matter is, Tom is very thorough. He was the first to publish an overclocking guide for the Athlon for example. Another example of his dedication is his yearly trips to Taiwan to talk directly with manufacturers there. I mean who does this but someone into what he does? The guy doesn't get paid to do this you know, he's a medical doctor, not an employee of some corporation.

Regarding 3dfx. They've really been acting strange lately, and not a little bit cheesy, IMO.

For example, cutting off Creative and Diamond like they did, and making their chipset proprietary. Maybe they have a right to be paranoid, what with Intel in bed with S3 and S3 now owning Diamond... but this was a bad move. Look at the hell that Apple went through as a result of it's decision to go proprietary back in the days before the Return of Jobs(TM). 3dfx will, I suspect, go through similar troubles, as major manufacturers have little choice but to either create their own chipsets (which can be disastrous, look at #9's "Ticket To Ride") or use another company's chipset, like nVidia -- who is making better 3D chipsets right now.

Another thing that 3dfx did which has lost them quite a bit of market share, (as evidenced by contrasting nVidia's 1999 profit and loss statements with 3dfx's) was essentially ship an overclocked banshee card :) What else can you call the Voodoo3 with @ 16 bit? Then there's the glaring lack of a heat sync fan on the voodoo3s (fans come with nVidia based cards), and the vast, power supply crippling, 183 MHz of the Voodoo3 3500, which I've read has *apparently* been problematic for some users with lower wattage power supplies...

These things don't go unnoticed by consumers, or for that matter by honest hardware reviewers. The benchmarks Tomas Pabst used in the GeForce article are valid, and Voodoo3 scored at zero on the 32 bit true color tests, because it is a 16 bit card. Simple as that... if you'd read the whole article, you'd see that he did list GeForce's short commings, specifically the memory bandwidth problems with the SDRAM versions of the Card vs. the upcomming double data rate RAM versions of the card (to say nothing of the *expected* 64 MB GeForce that I'm waiting for).

I have not lost faith in 3dfx, and I hope that their troubles of late will cause some restructuring which will lead to an increased emphasis on design quality, rather than throwing MHz at the problem. I do have to applaud their efforts to support the Apple community with Mac drivers for voodoo cards, although I hear poor Microconversions *might* have been forced out of the mac/voodoo card business as a result :(

Despite all this, the 3D wars are far from over, and I suspect the Voodoo4 will be quite a sight to see, but I won't rush out and buy either a GeForce or a Voodoo4 until I know all the facts, and for that I'll probably read a number of reviews. I've also found that forums where actual users relay anecdotal accounts of their experiences with specific products are truly telling. If you don't believe me go check out the forums at Intel :)

I found reason #428 why not to like S3 :-)