The Good News

Anyhow, the good news for 3dfx, STB, and Nvidia is plenty good. 3dfx and STB have a jump on Nvidia, and are above the milieu of ATI and Matrox. Ideal positioning that, if they capitalize on it, potentially they will reap much bigger rewards than their competitors. Nvidia, in turn, is all alone in the thoroughbred class of graphics chips when it comes to supplying the chip-agnostic board vendors. That means, if you want a value added, performance graphics board in your product line-up, Mr. Graphics Board Vendor, then you have only one choice, Nvidia. Maybe, 3dfx and Nvidia can keep their respective positioning for some length of time, although both still have to react to the PC OEMs they both crave. So, 3dfx has to become more like Nvidia, and Nvidia has to become more like 3dfx and STB. That's good news too. Healthy competition in the thoroughbred class can only help the consumer.

3dfx has Glide, and even with Direct3D and OpenGL opening up a lead in terms of support over Glide, 3dfx still gets prime content. Game developers are a conservative lot. In fact, a lot of them will tell you that they punch up a 3D game on Glide first to get it going and then switch over to Direct3D or OpenGL. Whatever. As long as Glide exists 3dfx has a means of keeping its distance from the crowd of Direct3D chips.

Nvidia has Direct3D, and does a damn good job it. Pushes the envelope of mainstream 3D graphics. That's a good thing too. Not only does it help to set a standard that everyone can aspire to, and game developers can rely on, but it also erodes the value of Glide. Only negative in this strategy is that Direct3D isn't sexy, but Glide seems to be. One's a brunette, the other a blonde, for those of you who think such wicked thoughts. People always assume that blondes have more fun. Nicht wahr? Not quite Latin, but just as difficult to master the verb tenses.

But, the best news for 3dfx and Nvidia is that 3D is a long, long, long way from being good enough. While that situation exists, the chances that 3D technology will become so mundane that it will lose its value, much as 2D performance has, is unlikely in the next couple of years. The graphics industry has nine lives. It may only have four or five players, but it has nine lives.

To come full circle, before I sold my first graphics board, I wrote a review of AutoCAD graphics accelerators for CADCAM Magazine in England. It was, I believe, the first real graphics board round-up done there at the time. I was a post-graduate student, and the editor knew I worked with CAD so, he thought another post-graduate and I could handle the job. At that time, when the so-called graphics board business was still in its infancy, we must have tested at least 21 boards from 21 diverse manufacturers, using, if I remember correctly, anywhere from 12 to 15 different chipsets and configurations. No, not all of them worked, but at least two-thirds did the job. Everyone had a chance. By the early nineties, just as Windows was taking off, the number of board and chip vendors had swelled even more. From the old CAD days, only Elsa, Matrox, and Number Nine remain recognizable.

Next week I'll get into Diamond and Creative. For more information on any of these companies, as I said before, I will keep filling up www.smokezine.com . I'll try and add information every Friday, as the need arises. It's a little bare now, but that will change over the coming month. So, keep an eye out there for background data, and of course, keep on eye on sites like www.tomshardware.com for information on products and performance issues.