A New Interview with Bubba from 3dfx

[Mikewarrior2]

http://www.diabloii.net/features/3dfx-24july00.shtml

very interesting, to say the least...

one quote that i thought was quite imaginative on his part

"3dfx: LOL! Actually, one of the areas that we seem to be undisputed "King" is 2D image quality versus our other 3D competitors"

LOL indeed... I thought Matrox wiped the floor with its 2d quality....



Mike

 

[Napalm]

"versus our other 3D competitors"

I don't think anyone considers Matrox a competitor in the 3D arena right now. The G400 chipset may have been a great 3D card in the TNT2 Ultra and V3 days, but it is not a 3D competitor when considering the GeForce2 GTS, Radeon and V5 5500. I assume things will likely change with their G450 and G800 products though...

 

[HaVoC]

First off, I will say that Bubba did a much better job at not inserting his foot into his mouth but I still have issues with his statements:

<< 3dfx: LOL! Actually, one of the areas that we seem to be undisputed &quot;King&quot; is 2D image quality versus our other 3D competitors. Many have mentioned that our Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 have better 2D image quality than High-end workstation GeForce Quadro's. The differences are quite compelling - even in just 2D. >>

According to Anandtech's reviews, I think he may be right about V3/V5 image quality. It is pretty darn good. However, image quality don't mean jack when the Quadro/geForce cards can pump out an order of magnitude more triangles per second than Vooodoo paired with a fast PIII in OpenGL apps. Let's not even talk about the OpenGL ICD.

<< Seriously, FSAA can make a tremendous framerate impact. For games that are fill-rate limited (like Quake 3), it can make a huge impact right now. For other games (racing games, simulations, sports, RPG and strategy games) the impact is typically minimal to non-existent. In Diablo II, you will note no slowdown enabling 2x or 4x FSAA with the Voodoo5 5500. The only difference you will notice is that your image quality has increased many times over. >>

The thing that will improve image quality many times over in my eyes is A SUBSTANTIALLY HIGHER TRIANGLE COUNT. I've said this a million times before and will continue to say it..smooth edged Lego men characters still look like Lego men characters!

<< Something important to keep in mind regarding FSAA and T&amp;L is this: When you add more detail and triangles to a scene (T&amp;L) you are also adding more aliasing and overall &quot;ugliness&quot; to the scene. Our approach is that before we add more geometry detail through T&amp;L (which will in turn really increase the amount of aliasing), there is a definite need to &quot;clean&quot; the image first. >>

This is completely ridiculous! How does more triangles make the jagginess worse? I can see this being an issue when looking at wireframe-only views, but take the example of a shaded, textured sphere. Model A can have a triangle count of 250 so you can still see faces on it like it is a gem. The blockiness will be noticeable. Next, increase the count to 10,000. Now it gives a much better approximation of roundness on the sillouette. I will argue that the aliasing is MORE noticeable with the lower triangle count model. You have longer lengths of straight lines that show the &quot;stair-steps&quot; of aliasing. I'm willing to drop FSAA for substantially better performance as long as the triangle count is high.

<< 3dfx: One thing everyone needs to remember regarding T&amp;L is that both Intel and AMD based CPUs offer a hardware T&amp;L option through SIMD and 3Dnow!. As you increase your CPU speed (take for instance that you currently have a PIII 600 and in a couple of months you upgrade to a PIV 1.4 GHz CPU) wouldn't it be nice if your T&amp;L unit took an immediate upgrade as well? With a GeForce or GTS you are stuck with a static T&amp;L unit. We have shown that if you're using a GeForce, you are better off using the T&amp;L from a > 500 MHz CPU since it can process the triangles faster. What happens if you more than double that CPU speed (P4 will also be using a 400MHz bus), still want to be using that static T&amp;L Graphics Paralization Unit that could not even process more triangles than your old CPU? For the love of your computer, I sincerely hope not? >>

Please...so Bubba expects us to upgrade our computer &amp; mobos MORE often than the graphics card? B.S. These sort of upgrades don't happen as often because they often require upgrading memory, etc...I would rather upgrade the video card more often than the CPU/mobo/memory. Does Bubba moonlight for Intel or AMD? Sure sounds like he's trying to sell the need for faster and faster processors.

 

[Rudee]

3DFX needs to get rid of that putz.

 

[Soccerman]

&quot;smooth edged Lego men characters still look like Lego men characters!&quot;

well duh, that's why games are beginning to be made with T&amp;L, it would only have happened faster if 3dfx had thought of T&amp;L before they designed the Voodoo 4/5 without T&amp;L. By the time the Geforce was out, they were way too far along in the process to insert it into their card (causing further delays).

yes I'm giving 3dfx credit for holding alot of sway in the gaming industry. it's true they do. The PR is only to cover their buts.

 

[Prodigy^]

lol is that guy 15 years old?

oh well, he seems like a fun guy, and at least he's not as dry as some of those other asses in the industry.

I STILL don't have a clue what he's saying about that T&amp;L unit that can be &quot;upgraded&quot; and will be stuck on a GeForce board, but oh well...

he has a valid reason to tout the 2D quality tho.

 

[HaVoC]

Soccerman I agree with you here. 3Dfx has probably held the industry back a bit on T&amp;L development. However, if Radeon takes off, and nVidia continues to excel, their influence will drop very quickly unless they get back to innovation and performance.

 

[3dfxAlf]

HaVoc, I'd like to point out some issues with your issues.

1. The fact is, image quality DOES mean jack. And the Quadro/GeForce cards do not pump out an order of magnitude more triangles than the Voodoo5.

2. Lego men is all you get, and smooth edged Lego men look substantially better than jaggy Lego men. The day we have Pixar level animation on the home PC is still quite a few years in the future. There's not an application out there that will give you non-Lego looking characters and even if there was, the hardware to give it to you in anything approaching real-time is several years in the future.


3. It's not ridiculous, it's factual. If you had a near infinite number of triangles at your disposal that might be different, but as I said in point two, Pixar level rendering in real-time on the PC is still a fair clip down the road. The facts are that no software offers such a level of detail in real-time, no hardware could handle it if it did and the GeForce2 isn't that far ahead of the Voodoo5 in terms of what it can do in real-world situations, even throwing the GeForce2's T&amp;L engine into the mix. At this stage and for the near future, more triangles means more jaggies and even if you jack-up the resolution to minimize (not eliminate, you need FSAA for that) this, it will do nothing to address other visual artifacting issues.

4. I'm a little confused with this one. Your issue with the statement has nothing to do with the actual statement you quoted. Did you accidentally clip the wrong quote on this one? In the quote you provide, Bubba says (quite accurately) that onboard T&amp;L is actually slower than what many systems can do via the processor. Hence, if you buy a card for T&amp;L acceleration on faster systems, you are actually buying it for a feature that will decelerate your potential performance. Of course, the faster the processor, the wider this gap becomes. No where does it even remotely suggest that you should upgrade your processor and motherboard more than the video card.

 

[Czar]

3dfxAlf, you still here to save bubbas behind.

1. Triangle count makes more difference than FSAA. Look at Evolva, you can run it with a Voodoo5 card with FSAA and low poly count or you can run it on a GeForce or Radeon with high poly count and FSAA. Those two together offer the best image quality, but if anyone had to choose I know that high poly count does more to the image quality than FSAA.

2. No one is expecting to get Pixar level of quality on a GeForce board. Its just an improvement from the average 500 poly models to lets say 5000. And one question to you, when was the last time 3dfx made something new in the 3d cards world, something that developers want to use? Why do you allways ignore what everyone says, gamers and developers?

3. Like before no one expects Pixar level of quality on a GeForce, like no one expects Hollywood movie effects on a Voodoo5 5500 with T-Buffer. Lets compare how a GeForce and a Voodoo5 does in 3dsmax, a program that is designed with T&amp;L in mind, the GeForces T&amp;L unit is like 100 times faster than the Voodoo5 with software T&amp;L. 3dsmax is like I said before designed for T&amp;L, games right now are not, games next christmas will be, what 3dfx will have by then is maybe Voodoo5 6000 and Voodoo2 with a strap-on-T&amp;L that costs 4 times that a normal GeForce costs.

4. The only benchmark that have shown that software T&amp;L is faster than hardware T&amp;L are from HardOCP, they even said themselves that they were wrong. Looking at professional 3d apps and saying that software T&amp;L is faster than hardware T&amp;L and then looking at the amount of professional 3d cards that cost alot more than a ghz computer then how can it be cost effective to spend all that money on those cards when you can just buy a fast computer.

I´m starting to think that Steve Jobbs and Bubba are related.

 

[Pariah]

&quot;And one question to you, when was the last time 3dfx made something new in the 3d cards world, something that developers want to use?&quot;

When was the last time Nvidia made something new? Never to my knowledge. 3dfx brought 3d gaming to the industry, which in and of itself is more than Nvidia will ever be able to claim.

 

[KarlHungus]

Pariah -

&quot;When was the last time Nvidia made something new? Never to my knowledge. 3dfx brought 3d gaming to the industry, which in and of itself is more than Nvidia will ever be able to claim.&quot;

Hardware T&amp;L comes to mind.

 

[Pariah]

NVidia was not first to market with a T&amp;L engine. Permidia was. What has NVidia brought to the market first?

 

[Finality]

From an AMD interview.



<< Hardware T&amp;L is an integral part of Direct X and although Nvidia have been the first to market with graphics cards supporting it I think you will see all the other manufacturers releasing their versions soon. It will take time for the Software community to take full advantage of the technology but as usual Game Developers will probably be there first. Hard T&amp;L opens up a huge range of possibilities for Game Developers especially the ability to use all the extra CPU Horse power now available for things like extended AI/Collisions etc.... This coupled with the major difference that processor focused optimizations can make especially in the Geometry pipeline should let Games take the first real leap forward since 3D first arrived >>



Take a look at the interview http://www.ga-hardware.com/features.cfm?id=amdqa

 

[KarlHungus]

Alf -

I totally dig that you actually occasionally check up on these forums, but would you 3dfx guys please stop with the following types of quotes?

<< 3dfx: One thing everyone needs to remember regarding T&amp;L is that both Intel and AMD based CPUs offer a hardware T&amp;L option through SIMD and 3Dnow!. As you increase your CPU speed (take for instance that you currently have a PIII 600 and in a couple of months you upgrade to a PIV 1.4 GHz CPU) wouldn't it be nice if your T&amp;L unit took an immediate upgrade as well? With a GeForce or GTS you are stuck with a static T&amp;L unit. We have shown that if you're using a GeForce, you are better off using the T&amp;L from a > 500 MHz CPU since it can process the triangles faster. What happens if you more than double that CPU speed (P4 will also be using a 400MHz bus), still want to be using that static T&amp;L Graphics Paralization Unit that could not even process more triangles than your old CPU? For the love of your computer, I sincerely hope not? >>

I really cannot stand this sort of faulty logic. The &quot;static T&amp;L&quot; of the GeForce can push around 9M triangles in a best case scenario (as measured in Glperf), a 600MHz PIII can push around 1.5M. Now, assuming that performance is completely linear based upon clock speed of the processor it would take a 3.6GHz PIII to compete with the GeForce's T&amp;L unit. It should also be noted that the T&amp;L unit offloads work from the processor, so to achieve comparable performance including physics calculations, enemy AI, etc. you would need a processor much faster than just being able to keep up with the &quot;static T&amp;L.&quot;

 

[Pariah]

Permedia beat Nvidia to market by a long shot. No one realizes that because, no one viewed them as a real competitor. This isn't even a point you can argue. Permedia's boards were available before NVidia's were, they just didn't hype to feature to all hell like Nvidia did.

 

[Scorpion]

Pariah I would like a link or some sort to back up your accusation's about Permedia.

Ditto to what Karl said. I feel the same way.

 

[KarlHungus]

Pariah -

In that case you could say the same thing for 3dfx. I do believe Rendition and PowerVR both had 3D chips out before 3dfx. Given these chips were often called graphics decelerators. 3dfx put out the first popular 3D chipset, just like Nvidia did with T&amp;L.

 

[Mem]

Pariah,are you the 3dfx version of (Hardware) all you are doing is starting a flamming war.

 

[Czar]

nVidia, Premedia and ATI came first with 32bit colors, 2048x2048 textures. If they wouldnt have brought that to us then no games would have supported it. If it would be like in the &quot;3dfx PR&quot; world then 3dfx would tell the developers what would be needed and they havent brought anything new into the field, except T-Buffer and no one is going to use that anyhow.

To make a progress in this industry hardware makers must bring technology to the developers before they are needed. Software developers just take whats on the current market and design software for that technology. If then 3dfx says that it doesnt have to have this and that untill software needs it then the industry would stop, and we would still have Glide only games, 16bit colors and 256x256 textures.

Because of all the other companys we can enjoy 32bit colors, larger textures, more textures, more polygons and real bump mapping, no thanks to 3dfx.

 

[Pariah]

3DLabs apparently doesn't like talking about non current products, since there is no mention of any noncurrent products except on the drivers page.

The best I could find was here:

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/oxygengvx1/

This article is dated July 99. I'm almost positive that that previous generations of Permedia based products had T&amp;L as well.

I own a CLAP2 mem, so let's end that debate right there. The only reason why I compared NVidia to 3dfx, was because the quote I responding to used 3dfx. NVidia was not first to market with hardware bumpmapping (matrox was), they were not first with 32bit (I don't remember who that was, might have been ATI). Does that make me a Matrox and ATI zealot now? I think not. Until the V5, 3dfx hadn't innovated jack since the Voodoo1. Even the V5 is simply an evolutionary piece of hardware with extreme fillrates to enable some new features. I'm very interested to see what they do with Rampage though, which should be their first &quot;new&quot; product since V1.

&quot;I do believe Rendition and PowerVR both had 3D chips out before 3dfx. Given these chips were often called graphics decelerators&quot;

You killed your whole arguement there, Karl. They were 3D accelerators in name only, as they did little to nothing in speeding up 3D graphics. The 3DLabs boards are fully implemented and optimized T&amp;L engines that do what they say they will,not just a checkmark on a box to fool the uninformed.

 

[Michael]

Czar - But we can thank 3dfx for introducing consumer level 3D chipsets that really made games better. That validated the idea and forced other companies to keep up. They also brought GLIDE to the market that exposed more hardware effects faster and easier (and in some cases, better) than D3D and OpenGL could at the time (including at the DOS level).

Competition is good and that is what I thank for the innovation. To tell you the truth, 3d has reached the point where that vast majority of computer buyers don't need what they buy.

I don't thank NVIDIA, I thank the normal technology development curve. Nor do I blame 3dfx for &quot;holding the industry back&quot;. With the two year + development cycle and the normal replacement rate for computers (3+ years for people who do not visit sites like this one), the most successful games seem to target lower end computers and components.

Michael

 

[Soccerman]

but you know, 2048X2048 isn't even a new feature... just an expanded one. like increasing the Mhz count. 32 bit, same thing.

EMBM is NOT implimented on the NV15, or any of it's predecessors. it has CUBE bump mapping.

hardware acceleration for T&amp;L, and for 3D graphhics, yeah I consider those to be something new. T&amp;L was around for a while not only in the lowly permedia, but it's been used extensively in movies and computers of that caliber. In other words, nVidia brought to us, lower power T&amp;L then those machines, but also alot better then what CPU's can do while crunching everything else (physics etc).

I recently noticed that the N64 has a fair amount of FSAA, in games like Perfect dark, when you get slapped, or get you're weapon stolen from u, as well as in the WWF warzone 2000 (I think that's what it's called), the game that introduces the WWF charecters to one of the greatest wrestling engines I've seen, which has been included in 2 WCW vs NWO games.

The effects I'm talking about are the blurring of individual frames into one. it looks phenominal. I'd love to see games use that more often.

 

[KarlHungus]

Pariah -

The Permedia is a workstation card! T&amp;L has been around for quite a while in that market segment. The GeForce was the first gaming card with T&amp;L.

I really don't think performance diminishes the fact that 3dfx wasn't the first one out with a 3D accelerator. 3dfx just snatched the performance crown in the first round.

 

[piku]

You guys have it all wrong! The Playstation was the first with T&amp;L!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hehe, I'm not making it up either. Thats why it could pump out some amazing looking graphics with its 33mhz chip - it's GPU does all the 3D work

 

[Rudee]

Don't discount the possibility that 3DFxAlf may be Bubba himself, as it's safe to say that with all the flack that Bubba has faced over his comments, he certainly wouldn't be posting under his real name.