The Big 3D Fight: Part II
Written: 11/23/99
Written by: Jellebee
   
Seconds Out Round 4
We’ve seen how the past has been shaping up, let us now
look into our crystal ball and gaze into the future.
Anyone who is even half-interested in the state of the art 3D must
have by now heard of T&L. Yep, it’s that time of buzzwords again. ‘Tis the
season to be jolly and spend your money on plastic and silicon’. Why do we do it?
Because we want to be ‘the fastest and coolest.’ We don’t want to have
cotton when we can have silk .
The great 3D hype machine has been rolling again. The contenders for
the race are still old friends. NVIDIA, ATI and S3. No news from Matrox yet, nor from
Rendition or 3D Labs. Perhaps they are still sleeping? I doubt it. 3dfx has run into some
problems with their next generation video card, more on that later on in the piece.
OK in a nutshell: ATI have in their corner the Maxx Fury which is
the top of the range card ATI produced 9 months ago times two. Wonderful, it will have 32
MB RAM for each processor that they have stuck onto it and it each processor will share
the task of rendering with each other. Proposed fillrate is about 500 Mpix/sec. Kinda
cheating ain’t ya ATI? The speed of the card is sounding like it is a match for the
current generation fillrate kings the GeForce and Savage2000.
Savage 2000 promised much. Delivered? It would be massively unfair
to judge a card based on beta drivers and a beta PCB so I am going to anyway! Looks like
S3 have promised mind bending speed (again) and actually given us a below standard product
(again!). I would love for S3 to prove me wrong. One complaint is their lack of decent
drivers. Visual artifacts no one likes and that is what happen with their Savage cards.
When they did run well they ran beautifully. The display was crisp and with S3TC the
effect was mind boggling. However sometimes (and sometimes means once to often here) the
artifacts were unbearable.
Hopefully this has changed for the Savage2000 card. Speaking of
S3TC, 3dfx are promising support for it and NVIDIA already support it. Hopefully the
standard will get off the ground finally. Also Nintendo have licensed the technology for
their new Dolphin console. Looks pretty neat, especially when you consider console games
developers like to use all the features of the consoles whenever they can.We could have
games by Namco, Squaresoft, Konami and Capcom all looking ‘too gorgeous.’
Next page: 3dfx & NVIDIA
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