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."
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...
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
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
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
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.
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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
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.
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.