A New Interview with Bubba from 3dfx

[Imperium97]

I believe Ben Skywalker knows what he's talking about. Alf clearly doesn't, unless he does infact know he posts crap.

Update-- I ran some MDK2 demo benchmarks on my GF2 MX(175/183)
32bit color
HW T&L
mimap
fullscreen

800x600 85fps
1024x768 60fps
1280x1024 35fps

That's with my severely memory crippled MX

 

[Soccerman]

"From the sounds that we have heard over and over on this aspect it sounds like you guys are planning on having a RISC based CPU(or perhaps a modular unit combined with the rasterizer?) on board the Rampage to handle T&L instead of true dedicated hardware."

are you saying they just slapped on a programmable DSP chip and designated it the T&L unit? HA! for proper T&L (ie speed wise) you need the chip to be hardwired. 3dfx will NOT do something so stupid as to have crappy T&L speed.. I just hope games don't require specific TYPES of T&L units, otherwise we could have problems (OpenGL?).

EDIT: Benskywalker, if 3dfx had a video card with superior T&L, but less fillrate, would you get it? I'm guessing no, becuase AFAIK you like OpenGL right?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Soccerman-

"are you saying they just slapped on a programmable DSP chip and designated it the T&L unit?"

By reading what they have said about the limited "flexibility" of current hardware T&L over and over, it does give me that impression. I'm not saying that is what they are doing, just the various comments that they have made makes it sound that way.

"3dfx will NOT do something so stupid as to have crappy T&L speed.."

I could spin it the other way and say that a fully programmable part would be able to offload far more operations then a standard fare hardware T&L unit. With a non dedicated chip, or unit depending on the design, you could also offload IK in theory(well, in theory you could utilize the gfx card to run the whole game with proper API support). Of course, the actual T&L performance would be quite a bit lower then hardwired dedicated parts.

"EDIT: Benskywalker, if 3dfx had a video card with superior T&L, but less fillrate, would you get it? I'm guessing no, becuase AFAIK you like OpenGL right?"

If they had the most powerful T&L unit and OpenGL drivers comparable to nVidia for visualization applications I would definately chose it over the competition. I'm not too terribly concerned about fillrate, though more is nice to have, I'd much rather have faster yet hardware T&L.

 

[Hardware]

3dfx bs:
1) t&l is useless
2) any sse/3dnow cpu will crush any t&l
3) agp is useless
4) 3dfx is number one in the retail

truth:
as long 3dfx tells us such bs i am glad they should go out of business soon
the biggest joke is nunmber one in retail...........haha

 

[3dfxAlf]

Okay, I can see that it's pretty pointless to respond to this thread any more. I'll let what I said stand and just drop the subject. When people resort to saying you're spewing crap, attack you on a personal level, attack your company and substantiate personal viewpoints as hard fact, there's no point to the conversation.

I will say this to Ben, however, as he's been level-headed throughout this thing: As I said... it all depends on your own personal preference as far as what makes the graphics "dramatic." Go with the card that is right for you.

Cheers!

 

[Imperium97]

That's pretty funny. I bet Alf there is still checking up on this thread despite attempting to appear like the discriminated against good guy who no longer wants to discuss the topics above and will no longer have anything to do with it. Either he can't really back up anything he said and respond logically without admitting that certain things in the voodoo 5 series were done stupidly and it's not that great of a board OR he's overly sensitive and thinks that calling his post 'spewed crap' is somehow a low thing to do. So are we supposed to resort to euphimisms? A lot of what you said was complete garbage alf, but should I not say that? Should i come up with a happy, cheerful way of saying that a lot of what you said was dumb?

You say that some post 'personal viewpoints as hard fact'. What the hell are you doing? Don't try to tell me that what YOU said is the truth of all truth's spoken down from heaven and derived imperically and what others say to counter it is simply 'personal viewpoints'. You'll probobly fool a lot of people on this taking-the-higher-road act, but you aren't fooling everyone. A lot of what was said in response to your posts are valid points and you couldn't even comment on those.

Since i'm almost certain you're still checking up on this, you don't have to worry about posting. You can just e-mail me a response, and if you don't want it published, then i won't.

CHEERS!