Slashdot Mirror
3DFX Not Quitting Video Card Business
CitizenC writes "According to this GameCenter.Com story, at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Wolford told Gamecenter
that the Voodoo5 6000 has not been cancelled, that 3dfx will not start
selling current chipset technology to third parties such as Creative Labs
and ELSA, that Voodoo products, including current graphics and TV cards,
will continue to be manufactured, and that the company isn't going belly-up
any time soon."
The article is a bit misleading, Several people got confirmation from Bubba after that article came out on cnet with word that 3dfx will not be bringing the V5-6000 to retail. Here's the story I posted about it a while ago with a quote from the same Bubba Wolford:
3dfx not bringing V5-6000 to retail
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
Shacknews.com
Getting WAY off topic now, but the karma lost would be worth it.
... who were denied their right to privacy by the right-wing conspiracy
Bill and Monica were consenting adults...
I don't recall anyone saying otherwise. What was at question was the collection of evidence to support the allegation of sexual harrasment. By falsifying testimony as to this man's conduct with female subordinates he not only broke the law, but denied the plaintiff a fair day in court.
A right-wing conspiracy caused this man to sexually harass co-workers? As usual, Clinton's only real enemy is the truth.
Republicans keep insisting that they are not tax-and-spenders, yet it wasn't the "tax-and-spend" Democrats who spent 70+ million dollars of tax money on an bogus "investigation" that did not come up with anything substantive on the President and First Lady...
Hmmm, I seem to recall something like 20 some odd convictions surrounding this investigation. I also seem to recall a greater sum of money being spent on that whole Iran/Contra thing. How many convictions came out of that one?
Struggling to bring this back into context, the point here is that one man and a single web site took on the President of the United States, and for his own part won! This marks a huge turning point for the US political system. Prior to the Internet, such a thing simply wasn't possible.
The guy is still reporting news not found on main stream sites. Literally you can hear questions at press conferences by "real journalists" that came directly from the Drudge Report. Note, at this moment Matt has posted transcripts from the Broward canvassing board, a few names of military personel that didn't get their vote counted, and the full text of a Lerberman speech talking about how wrong it is to protest. CNN doesn't have any of this stuff.
One man, one site really can make a difference, no matter how bent out of shape our socialist friends here may get. In it's own way, Slashdot is also making a difference in the kinds of stories it covers, and the forums in which those stories are hashed out.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
It's perhaps more tragic than Netscape's downfall. In 1995 it was generally assumed 3D-cards would be the next big thing in graphics. nVidia was one of the first with their NV1 chip. Then others followed, all with their own API, since Direct3D did not yet exist in usable form. There were so-so chips such as S3's Virge and excellent add-on cards with Rendition's Verite or the PowerVR.
But one company simply outclassed 'm all. The Voodoo 1 was somewhat expensive, but in a league of its own. With its excellent API (Glide) and John Carmack's GLQuake port it conquered the market.
I don't think they lost it because they didn't innovate, they lost it because their innovations (high fill-rate, FSAA) weren't what the market wanted. This is how nVidia after their desastrous NV1 and NV2 chips came back with the NV3 and especially the NV4 (TNT).
High fill-rate was secondary to 32-bit color and sound OpenGL support. 3dfx realised this too late and it's been downhill ever since.
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
I realize that Slashdot is not a traditional journalism site, and it doesn't have the resources to go out and verify every single story submitted to it.
But still, it's a disquieting thing when a story like this comes out, saying "Hey, looks like those rumors weren't true!" about something which we had been told was fact and not rumor.
It's so easy; just a "May Be" or "Rumored To" in the headline. And not using it makes one wonder whether someone's going the way of Harry Knowles and Matt Drudge* and enjoying their role as purveyor of information so much that they lose the intelligent selectivity that made people choose them as an information source in the first place.
* (ok, Drudge was sludge from Day One. Drudge has always been a sleazy little rumor-monger wet-dreaming that his ability to regurgitate steaming clumps of fact and fiction faster puts him in the company of real journalists. The point is, I don't want to see Slashdot go that way, do you?
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Oh, except 3DFX didn't die so quick....
But then, 3DFX wasn't competing against an (alledged illegal) monopoly...
Why does 3DFX suck now? Was it because they forgot to innovate? I don't care HOW fast it makes it, just chucking several technically old chips onto one board is hardly innovation.
Do the people at 3DFX have anything new coming at all beyond piling old tech onto one huge card?
(And: external power?! To an internal component of your PC?!? What happens if your 3DFX video card accidentally gets unpluged, but the rest of your box doesn't. That's always midly interested me...)
It's 2am. Mistakes can be blamed on that....
you might check the register
they have a very interesting article about this as well. apparently the plant that they're getting rid of is not necessarily going to be completely outsourced. at the worst, it appears that 3dfx would pick a single company to manufacture the boards for them.
right now, the only fact we have is that 3dfx is selling it's facility in Juarez, Mexico. - who's to say what that will lead to.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Slashdot: Rumors for Nerds. Stuff that Matters
or:
Slashdot: Rumors for Nerds. Stuff that Might Matter if it Pans Out (TM)
or because nerd is something of an epithet to some people:
Slashdot: Rumors for Geeks. Stuff that Doesn't Matter for Most Other People (TM)
I am glad to hear this bit of news. Frankly my interpretation of the first bit of news about them leaving the market was somewhat skeptical. based on the way I interpreted it, they were still in the market, just shifting their focus away from 3d and into more diverse markets such as TV cards, etc. Up intil very recently I had been a long standing fan of 3dfx cards, I finally got a Matrox G400 and I really love it. I still think that my voodoo3 was better at 3d stuff than the matrox is, but neither of them really have a patch on the GeForce from what I have seen.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
From Anandtech's article on the future of video card manufaturers, 3dfx is basically going to license Quantum3D to manufacture the cards, nullifying the entire purchase of STB, which started the whole process of 3Dfx (with a capital D back then) creating their own cards... Nothing will change, 'scept 3dfx will be able to focus more on creating the chipsets (which'll be a GOOD thing, since their latest ones have been pretty shoddy).
I think that 3dFX should sell off it's plants and go back to being just a chip designer that leases it's tech to anyone that wants to use it. There are a couple of good reasons for doing so:
1. so much of their resources are being funneled into production and sucked away from design. Put it all into design and a new marketing/sales department to sell it to every PCB manufactur they can.
2. By selling the chips to many manufacturers, 3dfx can saturate the market with their chips all that much faster. Think about it: there are more chips on more different boards, how can this be bad for 3dfx?
nVidia does it, why can't 3dfx?
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
If they don't get their act together, and fast, the market is surely going to abandon them.
Marketing is a two way deal between the supplier and the consumer.
Now, the fact of the matter is that I have a brand new V4 in my box, but I have special reasons. The only game I spend any real time in is an old glide optimized, 16 bit color, hard coded to a limit of 36 fps old timer.
The entire VooDoo line is now an obvious kludge. The V5 6000 is kludge taken to the max. I wouldn't go near one of these things with a ten foot video bus. Obviously I didn't even go near the V5 5500.
I hope their engineers are burning some serious midnight oil or they are, very simply, and f*cked company, no matter what their " intentions " are.
Oh boy, I guess I'll be the first to bite at this one.
Drudge has always been a sleazy little rumor-monger wet-dreaming that his ability to regurgitate steaming clumps of fact and fiction faster puts him in the company of real journalists.
Since you've apparently got all those "fact" things straight, I'm sure you'd be happy to step away from the propoganda podium and clue to the rest of us in to all the "fiction" that Matt Drudge puts up on his site.
Yes, I am aware of the single lawsuit against him still pending from Blumenthal about a story that was retracted in less than 24 hours after it's posting, and before Sid got to complaining about it. Unlike "traditional" left-leaning media, Matt put the retraction of the story right on the front page. Do I need to list here just how many law suits for libel are pending against the LA Times, NY Times, and other major papers across the US?
My reasoning for defending Matt has a lot to do with the fact that he really lead the way for citizen journalists to get news up on the web, without the backing of a large corporate office. He showed that one man and a web page really can expose a sex offender for what he is, even if he's the president, and even if "real journalists" at Newsweek sat on the story for over 3 weeks.
So yes, I happen to like the fact that Slashdot takes on the stories that others ignore. I happen to like the fact that Slashdot provides us the links to where the stories originated as to leave us the audience to research things further, rather than blindly accept what is being fed to us.
Ya know, prior to blindly following the left-wing herd, perhaps you should read the site that you have spent time on to ridicule as baseless in fact or substance. Judging from your post, you're not doing much here but parroting what you've already been told.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.