Apathetic sheep. The lot of us. Felt like saying the lot of you, but I resisted the temptation.

I can't believe it. Could be that it's July. Summer. You're all out on the sundeck, at the pool, the beach, or somewhere sticky. Maybe getting a tummy tuck now that you have time on your hands, or finally learning the cello just like you promised yourself all those years ago. I don't know. Me, I am all a flutter, filled with girlish glee at the prospects for 3D graphics, got Siggraph coming up in August, which has me cooing, and I feel like the world has curled up and died.

You don't care, do you?

I could stick a million 3D pipeline articles in your face, and talk about Vertex Buffers 'til I'm blue in the face, declare war on the Maldives, but you just don't care.

Well, seems a certain Mr. Stanley cares, at leat I think he does, "What the hell happened to you and your column? No more smoke?"

Or, maybe he's just hoping "No more smoke?" Say it with yearning, and add a deep sigh afterwards. So difficult to tell with email. Then, there's Trey Hutchinson, he writes in response to the ATI R200 story , "... Here is a segment that you wrote stating the importance of the next generation 3d game engines:"

"The most important thing is going to be how the big 3D engines from the likes of Id and Epic take advantage of DirectX 8.1 hardware features in ATI and Nvidia products. These engines will play a crucial role as they are licensed to many other developers and drive the 3D performance market."

"... My point here is that Half-life, by any standard, is a very old and tired engine. I bought a gefore2MX just for this game, and saw my fps go from around 30 to around 50. Then I went from a PII-300 to a PIII-450, and my fps went all the way up to 70 to 90 (apparently the engine maxes out at 99, or never reports more than 99 fps). I am perfectly satisfied. My next upgrade is going to be for my development machine, which I will not play games on. My gaming needs are taken care of for the moment. I love reading about the new hardware, but it's just not worth it to me to increase my FPS from 70-90 to 99 constant. And that's all a new CPU or vid-card would do."

Where have all the rabid 3dfx fans gone? At least they cared, how they cared, about their graphics. Which leads me to believe that not only are frame rates max'd out, but so are consumers.

Or is it just that no one really understands what's happened to the 3D pipe. Hmmm.