I was cruising through the forums looking at what the readers of 3DGaming had to say when I came across some derogatory posts from some hard core 3Dfx fans in the PowerVR section. As always, it was annoying to see messages that have no constructive point, but it also irritated me due to the lack of thought that many gamers use when looking at the current and upcoming technology.

The rabid 3Dfx fans just keep forgetting that they are a rather small group in the larger scheme of things. They also should pay attention to the signs of the times. I have to admit that due to my love for a few glide specific games I will not replace my Voodoo2 card for anything else; however, new Glide games are on the decline, the hottest new arcade games are now being developed with PowerVRSG chips rather than Voodoo chips. I don't see a Voodoo console on the horizon that will change the trend away from DirectX v6 and back to Glide. I don't see any major design wins for 3Dfx at any of the major OEMs either- a very important factor in order to maintain market dominance.

While nVidia has received a healthy amount of design wins, they have not dominated the industry. In fact nVidia has not received the design wins for any of the high volume PC models from the larger OEMs. nVidia is still a high end niche chip that is hampered because it is not significantly faster for gamers, and is not as fast in Windows NT (important for corporate business) than the Banshee is.

In short there is no clear performance winner between the two chipsets. Both of them are only marginally better than the Voodoo 2, and neither of these high end chips are as good with DVD or TV-out than either ATI, Matrox, or S3.

Again, while surfing through the forums I found a message from Fang Hsiang Yoong, from PowerVR Generations, and found the remarks in his message totally on the mark:

"Things are going to be rough for 3D card manufacturers as profits are declining. From a business point of view, VDO/NEC made the right choice to go for the console market first."

OK, the guy is biased, but has anybody else thought about how companies are making money these days? A 16mb Banshee is going for $99- in May a Voodoo 2 8mb was $199.

Memory prices have gone down significantly, but not that much!

It seems to me that too many people are looking at how well a chip is doing in the PC world and translating that into overall success in the gaming world.

This is totally ridiculous! I remember when nVidia announced that they had sold 1 million Riva 128 chips into the channel last winter- it had taken them about four months to do it, and then it was pretty much downhill from there.

Contrast that to the 3 million chips that NEC must provide to SEGA by the November 21st 1998 launch date of the Dreamcast in Japan. The console business is a completely different ball game with larger volumes and more avid fans. Lets face it- for every user that boast how awesome their PC plays games at 1024x768 there are 10 kids that couldn't care less. These kids just want their parents to buy that next Nintendo or Playstation game advertised on TV- BTW how many PC games do you see advertised on TV?

While I don't believe that 3Dfx has lost their magic, and while I do believe that nVidia is certainly doing a great job with their silicon, I don't think that this is a time for too much boasting- not yet!

Sincerely,

Jack