Video Cards in 2001: Preview

3dfx: Learning from mistakes

Our first graphics related meeting took us to 3dfx, the company that was once considered to be the king of 3D graphics, and now ridiculed for not being in touch with the future of the industry.

3dfx had very little to show off at their suite, they aren’t going to be making the same mistakes they made at last year’s Comdex and hype up their next generation product without a guarantee that it will be on store shelves on time.  This definitely a step in the right direction from 3dfx. 

The Voodoo5 delay hurt 3dfx quite a bit, if it had been launched at last year’s Comdex when it was announced we would be dealing with a very different situation.  If you look back to our original Voodoo5 review, the card would be a perfect competitor to the GeForce DDR however against the GeForce2 GTS, especially with the latter being priced below $200 now, the comparison is clearly in favor of NVIDIA.

Needless to say that 3dfx has learned from their mistakes, and they will definitely not be talking about their next generation product, codename Rampage, until very close to its official launch.  In spite of this, we did gain quite a bit of information from meeting with 3dfx. 

The main theme of our meeting with 3dfx was that the company has done a serious amount of reevaluation internally.  This was obviously necessary as there were definitely some decisions made over there in the past year or two that have put them in the situation they are in today. 

The influx of new executive staff members into the company, at least according to 3dfx representatives, seems to have produced much more of a focus on reevaluating their direction on a regular basis.  In the “old” 3dfx, there was very little evaluation of direction and that translated into a number of features being executed without much thought to the public’s interpretation of them.

The biggest one, of course, is FSAA and in general the T-Buffer effects that 3dfx touted so much over the past year and a half.  As the company stands today, there will still be a focus on T-Buffer and FSAA however they will “quit worrying about features that are great.”  We took that to mean that they will actually focus on what the public is asking for instead of giving the market a feature that wasn’t specifically demanded.

In spite of this, 3dfx is promising that their Rampage will feature an improved FSAA implementation, indicating that they really are focused on FSAA as a feature and aren’t willing to drop it just because the public response to their T-Buffer technology wasn’t as great as they anticipated.

All this talk about Rampage does bring up a few questions, the most obvious being when can we expect to see it?  While 3dfx is obviously reluctant to set an actual date, as to avoid a repeat of the Voodoo4/5 launch, they are sticking to their 6 – 9 month product cycle.  If we assume that the Voodoo5 was their last product and it was on store shelves in June, we can expect to see the Rampage as early as January of next year or as late as March/April of 2001. 

The Rampage will be 3dfx’s first DirectX 8 part, and they are quite confident that it will be the most feature rich DX8 part on the market at its release.  While this is a bold claim from 3dfx, the fact of the matter was that with the exception of Matrox, all three manufacturers (3dfx, ATI and NVIDIA) promised that they would have the most feature rich DX8 part and all three manufacturers cited their incredible relationship with Microsoft as the reason. 

As far as technology is concerned, the Rampage will not be using the Tile Rendering technology 3dfx acquired from Gigapixel in July of 2000.  We have heard the explanation behind this quite a few times but it bears repeating, basically the Rampage was too far along in its development to incorporate any of Gigapixel’s technology at the time of the acquisition.  This may unfortunately hurt 3dfx quite a bit, as we will have to wait another 6 – 9 months after the Rampage’s release before we see what we really want to see from 3dfx, a solution that makes use of Gigapixel’s Tile Rendering architecture.

In comparison to the tile-based rendering architecture we saw with the Kyro, 3dfx states that their solution will be in a completely different league than what we saw with the Kyro.  And they also told us that they are very confident that any sort of Hidden Surface Removal or HyperZ like technology that NVIDIA could bring to the table wouldn’t even begin to match up to what their Gigapixel technology will be able to bring to the table. 

Unfortunately for 3dfx, the fact that Gigapixel’s technology won’t surface until 6 – 9 months after the release of the Rampage, while ATI and NVIDIA will both have a chance at an improved HyperZ or Hidden Surface Removal technology may make the release of their first Gigapixel based product too little, too late. 

What 3dfx needs to hope for is that the performance improvements offered by ATI’s next-generation DX8 part as well as NVIDIA’s NV20 are incremental enough that the Rampage is able to hold its own so that their next product, based on Gigapixel’s technology, may have a chance to compete.  If, however, 3dfx can’t compete early next year when the rest of the DX8 parts hit the streets, it will be very difficult for them to pull the company out of that hole.