Posted by
emmett
on from the go-do-that-voodoo-that-you-do-so-well dept.
Ant writes: "Yahoo
posted the press release that 3dfx Interactive® Inc. has temporarily delayed the release of its Voodoo5(TM) 5500 AGP. The press release states that the company is taking this action to ensure that it meets its own high standards for product quality."
Shouldn't this be termed...
by
subtraho
·
· Score: 3
Shouldn't this be termed "pulling a Blizzard" by now? They've honed it to a fine art.
-- -subtraho
Let's.... applaud them!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5
Yes, let's applaud them. I have to post this anonymously, because I still care about my job, but I just wanted to say how much I hate the practice that has become standard in software industry in general and at my company in particular - if you promise a release date, you HAVE to ship it, no matter what the quality is - who cares if marketing underestimated the time needed? And then every two weeks after that we ship "patches," everything gets fucked - who wins????? customers?! no way! developers? hardly! but hey, marketing promises got "delivered"!!!
I hope sooner or later more and more companies (and shareholders, analysts, etc.) will begin to realize that if you delay your product by two months, NOTHING bad is going to happen, but if you ship crap, it's not going to improve your customer relationships.
I suggest we write polite and GRATEFUL e-mails to 3dfx THANKING them for caring about quality and expressing support - who else if not/. crowd can "feel their pain"? I'm sending an e-mail right now...
... Ok, let's say they release crap. We'd go on and on badmouthing them for incompatibility, lax Quality Assurance Standards, and all the glitches because of "rushing the product to market too quickly".
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Let's cut them some slack, and not judge until we have a final product in our hands. I'm telling you, this is the only forum in the world where we can badmouth company's no matter WHICH choice they make. =)
I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
I mean, really. I wrote GLIDE-only games and everything. When the Voodoo cards first came out, they blew everything else completely out of the water: They kicked ass.
But times have changed. Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about. The guy that sits next to me at work, has one in his machine to check compatibility with our product. When the GeForces first arrived in the office, there was a bit of "Hey! I wan't that in my machine!" going on, but when the Voodoo 5 arrived, noone even really wanted to install the thing.
Actual quote from a coworker: "OK, I tell you what. You run up the demo, and I'll see how big my yawn is."(1)
Why the lack of interest? Well, what's to get excited about? Sure, it's fast, but, as someone else pointed out, no games max out on the card's speed because they need to still run on slow-ass machines without crawling, and as you start to add scaling functions, you start to add overhead -- remember, the CPU still has plenty of work to do.
Now, the GeForce (and IIRC ATI's new card, the Radeon) has hardware to take some of the geometry strain off the CPU. Plus, newer cards are adding sexy new stuff such as cute pixel-shader features. When you get down to it, these sorts of things are far more interesting than raw fill rate / card tri rate, which is all the 3Dfx cards actually offer.
This is because when you get down to it, texture-mapped triangles are not very interesting. Sure, they make a good building block, but there are things you just can't realistically represent that way, unless you generate textures, texture coordinates, and do interesting things with them, on the fly.
It's with tricks like these that we can improve lighting models, reflectivity effects, and volumetric effects, to bring the otherwise rather flat, plastic world nearer to the more realistic and impressive world of raytracing, but in real time. Sure, you use cheap hacks, but at 60fps, noone notices...;-) And then the gamers are happy, and us game developers are happy too:)
(1) the yawn was medium-sized, by the way. Their full-screen anti-aliasing is quite good quality. Nothing else startling to look at though.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
barleyguy
·
· Score: 3
3DFX's FSAA is superior to the GeForce's. The way the G-Force does anti-aliasing is to render at a higher resolution and interpolate back down. It cuts your performance immensely, and only works with games that support the higher resolution.
The way 3DFx does FSAA is to render slight variations at the same resolution, and then average them. It is better quality, and works with more games. It is also faster, in the case of 2x. This also allows for 4x FSAA, which is even better quality.
I will probably go with 3dFX for my next video card, because I use a multimedia projector for gaming, which has the advantage of size, but the disadvantage of lower resolution (800x600). FSAA is great for this type of application.
If you use a high resolution monitor, though, you can just set your resolution to 1280x1024 and turn off FSAA. It's not noticable at high resolutions. In this case, I'd probably go for the GeForce 2.
-- ---
"So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
LordNimon
·
· Score: 4
Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about.
It is if you are a Macintosh user. The Voodoo 4 and 5 boards blow away anything else available for the Mac. Granted, some Macs can't take the boards because they don't have any free PCI slots (a big problem in the Mac world), but I have a PowerMac 8600/300 for which the Voodoo 5 5500 PCI is perfect. I'm more than happy to pay the $350 for that card.
-- And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
stripes
·
· Score: 3
Rendering at a higher resolution and interpolating down would be the same speed as 3dfx's 4xFSAA.
That need not be the case. If you render the pixel four times and avg there is no need to store those four pixels to memory, and then read them back. Rendering at 2x (four intermediate pixels per one output pixel) you need to write pixel values five times, read them four times, and have memory dedicated to the intermediate image (and not textures, or on card virtex lists).
So if any portion of your performance is limited by memory bandwidth (or availability) on the 3D card, the 3Dfx method will be faster. If not, they should be as you suggested, pretty much the same (all else being equal)
That's not saying that's what actually happens, but it is quite possable.
3dfx's implementation cuts performance quite a bit as well.
Could be.
I find it sort of odd that nVidia's method, as you describe it, does not produce the exact same image. It is essentially the same operation. 3dfx renders the same frame 4 times, with pixel offsets of (0,0), (0,0.5), (0.5,0), and (0.5,0.5). After averaging, that should look the same as just rendering at a higher res and then averaging every 4 pixels into one, right? What am I missing here? Can you point me to a comparison, preferably with screenshots?
Beats me. Either could be taking shortcuts which change the result image. It is also possable, but unlikely that the FSAA actually takes more samples if the originals arn't "close enough" in color space. Many software 3D renderers (like POVRay) can do that. It can be fairly expensave in terms of runtime (depending on how you define "close enough", and how busy the image is), but can produce some stunning results.
If they don't do that, I expect some future 3D card will.
Re:I used to be a big 3Dfx fan...
by
LordNimon
·
· Score: 4
My 8600 is an established system with lots of memory, several SCSI devices, and a huge SCSI hard drive. I couldn't just get a new G4, I'd have to spend $1000+ in upgrades to make it as capable. And even if I did get one, I'd still keep the 8600 as a backup computer (our business runs on Mac technology). Besides, I could always transfer the Voodoo 5 to my G4 and use it in a dual-monitor setup.
One thing I forgot to mention in my original post is that there is a petition that asks Apple to include AGP Voodoo 4/5 cards as a build-to-order (BTO) option for G4's. If you're a Mac user, I strongly suggest you sign the petition. We all know that ATI's monopoly on Mac video doesn't encourage them to make good drivers.
-- And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Re:Windows drivers much Linux?
by
cronio
·
· Score: 3
I asked Daryll about this recently on the dri-devel mailing list...here is was he said:
3dfx does have a high-performance OpenGL implementation. They put a reasonable amount of manpower into it. I think this is showing you the performance improvement you can get by putting real resources behind the project.
The nVidia situation is interesting. In that case, they are using essentially the same code base between Linux and Windows. The question to ask is why the Linux version is then slower? It could be an OS issue, a compiler issue, a driver issue, or something else entirely. If we close that gap, whatever it is, all the implementations get better. By the way, 2.3 kernels have been signficantly faster, so the 2.4 release may help with the difference.
The argument is that Open Source efforts can do it better, but you have to qualify that a bit. What defines better? In some cases we're not concentrating on the same focus. For example, Mesa tries very hard to be a complete and conforming version of OpenGL. In some cases that may mean losing some performance compared to tweaking of Q3A at the expense of everything else. Some of the security and stability fixes in the MGA DRI code mean we lose a bit of performance. The 3dfx in-a-window implementation under Windows is quite a bit slower than their full screen mode.
You also have to compare manpower efforts. 3dfx and ATI put a lot of people on working on their drivers. They are each paying PI for one engineer. That limits not only how fast the drivers can be produced but how good they will be. We're also really not seeing much help from the community. We'd love to have more people contribute.
The 3dfx driver has remained mostly unchanged (except for bug fixes) for the last year. That's because I've been payed to get it running on different boards (V3/V4/V5), to fix some bugs, and improve the infrastructure (DRI). We really haven't had the resources to spend doing optimizations and to rewrite some of the really ugly parts in the code.
The bottom line is that there is room to improve. I have no doubt that with the right attention all the drivers would be very close to their windows counterparts. We just need some good people to do the work.
One Microsoft Way
--
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
-- --
"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I wonder how much of this was a quality concern, and how much was the sudden realization that the nVidia GeForce 2 is faster, cheaper, available NOW,and doesn't require a freeking AC adapter to be plugged into its rear-end?
From what I've read, the V5 6000 is the only card from 3dfx that has any chance of beating the GF2, but only in a few select situations, such as running older games at super-high-res with 4xFSAA. And then it is only a little bit faster. (yes, the GeForce 2 does FSAA.) Add to that the fact that the 6000 will cost US$600 (when it finally comes out) as opposed to the GF2's current price of $300, and you have a sorry situation indeed...
------
Anybody worried about nvidia going Redmond?
by
MyAss
·
· Score: 4
If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft the 3d card. Or maybe Intel would be a better example. Think about it... Because no one (until recently with the Athlon) could touch intel in the PC cpu market they thought they could force consumers to buy what they wanted at their price. Which is why they went with RDRAM (they have alot of money invested in RDRAM... so if you have to buy RDRAM to use intel chips they make even more money) It didn't matter the RDRAM wasn't as good as promised and that it cost tons of money you had to buy it because that was all that the newer Pentiums could use... Then came AMD and the Athlon, which forced intel to stop being lazy and lower prices create the MTH and push the coppermine cpu out earlier. So what is the moral of the story?
Competition is good dammit! I hate it when people who own nvidia chips get all happy when a competitor stumbles. Don't you understand that competion keeps prices down and increases inovation... Look at Microsoft, no competion is why they can charge rediculous prices for their shit OS. If 3dfx comes out with a card that is just as fast or faster than the Geforce2 then prices would be even better.
Moral? There is no reason to be happy that 3dfx is having trouble even if you are a stalwart nvidia fan. (unless of course you own stock in nvdia) Less competion just means higher prices and slower less inovating releases of hardware later.
--
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
OT: 3dfx tells nVidia to "F**k off and Die!"
by
Guppy
·
· Score: 4
3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die" San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".
3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.
"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."
Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't this be termed "pulling a Blizzard" by now? They've honed it to a fine art.
-subtraho
Yes, let's applaud them. I have to post this anonymously, because I still care about my job, but I just wanted to say how much I hate the practice that has become standard in software industry in general and at my company in particular - if you promise a release date, you HAVE to ship it, no matter what the quality is - who cares if marketing underestimated the time needed? And then every two weeks after that we ship "patches," everything gets fucked - who wins????? customers?! no way! developers? hardly! but hey, marketing promises got "delivered"!!!
/. crowd can "feel their pain"? I'm sending an e-mail right now...
I hope sooner or later more and more companies (and shareholders, analysts, etc.) will begin to realize that if you delay your product by two months, NOTHING bad is going to happen, but if you ship crap, it's not going to improve your customer relationships.
I suggest we write polite and GRATEFUL e-mails to 3dfx THANKING them for caring about quality and expressing support - who else if not
... Ok, let's say they release crap. We'd go on and on badmouthing them for incompatibility, lax Quality Assurance Standards, and all the glitches because of "rushing the product to market too quickly".
.. who knows) to withhold a product until it meets higher standards.
So, for once, a company decides (for whatever reasons: technical, political, financial
And yet, somehow, we find a way to bash them for this, claiming that they need to "pick up the pace" and that they're "already behind nVidia in the video card wars".
Let's cut them some slack, and not judge until we have a final product in our hands. I'm telling you, this is the only forum in the world where we can badmouth company's no matter WHICH choice they make. =)
But times have changed. Voodoo 5 isn't much to get excited about. The guy that sits next to me at work, has one in his machine to check compatibility with our product. When the GeForces first arrived in the office, there was a bit of "Hey! I wan't that in my machine!" going on, but when the Voodoo 5 arrived, noone even really wanted to install the thing.
Actual quote from a coworker: "OK, I tell you what. You run up the demo, and I'll see how big my yawn is."(1)
Why the lack of interest? Well, what's to get excited about? Sure, it's fast, but, as someone else pointed out, no games max out on the card's speed because they need to still run on slow-ass machines without crawling, and as you start to add scaling functions, you start to add overhead -- remember, the CPU still has plenty of work to do.
Now, the GeForce (and IIRC ATI's new card, the Radeon) has hardware to take some of the geometry strain off the CPU. Plus, newer cards are adding sexy new stuff such as cute pixel-shader features. When you get down to it, these sorts of things are far more interesting than raw fill rate / card tri rate, which is all the 3Dfx cards actually offer.
This is because when you get down to it, texture-mapped triangles are not very interesting. Sure, they make a good building block, but there are things you just can't realistically represent that way, unless you generate textures, texture coordinates, and do interesting things with them, on the fly.
It's with tricks like these that we can improve lighting models, reflectivity effects, and volumetric effects, to bring the otherwise rather flat, plastic world nearer to the more realistic and impressive world of raytracing, but in real time. Sure, you use cheap hacks, but at 60fps, noone notices... ;-) And then the gamers are happy, and us game developers are happy too :)
(1) the yawn was medium-sized, by the way. Their full-screen anti-aliasing is quite good quality. Nothing else startling to look at though.
I asked Daryll about this recently on the dri-devel mailing list...here is was he said:
3dfx does have a high-performance OpenGL implementation. They put a reasonable amount of manpower into it. I think this is showing you the performance improvement you can get by putting real resources behind the project.
The nVidia situation is interesting. In that case, they are using essentially the same code base between Linux and Windows. The question to ask is why the Linux version is then slower? It could be an OS issue, a compiler issue, a driver issue, or something else entirely. If we close that gap, whatever it is, all the implementations get better. By the way, 2.3 kernels have been signficantly faster, so the 2.4 release may help with the difference.
The argument is that Open Source efforts can do it better, but you have to qualify that a bit. What defines better? In some cases we're not concentrating on the same focus. For example, Mesa tries very hard to be a complete and conforming version of OpenGL. In some cases that may mean losing some performance compared to tweaking of Q3A at the expense of everything else. Some of the security and stability fixes in the MGA DRI code mean we lose a bit of performance. The 3dfx in-a-window implementation under Windows is quite a bit slower than their full screen mode.
You also have to compare manpower efforts. 3dfx and ATI put a lot of people on working on their drivers. They are each paying PI for one engineer. That limits not only how fast the drivers can be produced but how good they will be. We're also really not seeing much help from the community. We'd love to have more people contribute.
The 3dfx driver has remained mostly unchanged (except for bug fixes) for the last year. That's because I've been payed to get it running on different boards (V3/V4/V5), to fix some bugs, and improve the infrastructure (DRI). We really haven't had the resources to spend doing optimizations and to rewrite some of the really ugly parts in the code.
The bottom line is that there is room to improve. I have no doubt that with the right attention all the drivers would be very close to their windows counterparts. We just need some good people to do the work.
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I wonder how much of this was a quality concern, and how much was the sudden realization that the nVidia GeForce 2 is faster, cheaper, available NOW,and doesn't require a freeking AC adapter to be plugged into its rear-end?
From what I've read, the V5 6000 is the only card from 3dfx that has any chance of beating the GF2, but only in a few select situations, such as running older games at super-high-res with 4xFSAA. And then it is only a little bit faster. (yes, the GeForce 2 does FSAA.) Add to that the fact that the 6000 will cost US$600 (when it finally comes out) as opposed to the GF2's current price of $300, and you have a sorry situation indeed...
------
If someone doesn't produce a competitor to nvidia it just a matter of time before nvidia becomes the Microsoft the 3d card. Or maybe Intel would be a better example.
Think about it... Because no one (until recently with the Athlon) could touch intel in the PC cpu market they thought they could force consumers to buy what they wanted at their price. Which is why they went with RDRAM (they have alot of money invested in RDRAM... so if you have to buy RDRAM to use intel chips they make even more money) It didn't matter the RDRAM wasn't as good as promised and that it cost tons of money you had to buy it because that was all that the newer Pentiums could use... Then came AMD and the Athlon, which forced intel to stop being lazy and lower prices create the MTH and push the coppermine cpu out earlier. So what is the moral of the story?
Competition is good dammit! I hate it when people who own nvidia chips get all happy when a competitor stumbles. Don't you understand that competion keeps prices down and increases inovation... Look at Microsoft, no competion is why they can charge rediculous prices for their shit OS. If 3dfx comes out with a card that is just as fast or faster than the Geforce2 then prices would be even better.
Moral? There is no reason to be happy that 3dfx is having trouble even if you are a stalwart nvidia fan. (unless of course you own stock in nvdia) Less competion just means higher prices and slower less inovating releases of hardware later.
They misunderestimated me. -- George W. Bush
3DFX One-Ups nVidia: "Fuck Off and Die"
San Francisco, CA - In a formal press release read to major gaming sites, 3DFX has "one upped" the video card war by telling nVidia to "fuck off and die".
3DFX, known for its revolutionary line of "Voodoo" based video cards, has been under fire recently for losing its competitive edge to nVidia, who's GeForce 2 line of cards is speculated to be slightly faster than the upcoming Voodoo 5.
"Quite frankly, I'm sick to death of sidestepping the issues and trying to be 'Mister Nice Guy'. I hate nVidia and every fucking asshole that works there," quipped Brian Burke, 3DFX's PR spokesperson. "I hate their engineers, distributors, advertisers, executives, and janitors. I especially despise Derek Perez, who I formally challenge to a knife fight in the parking lot after this meeting..."
Anybody who thinks the 3dfx vs. nVidia wars are getting increasingly ridiculous should go read the rest of this article, at SomethingAwful.