The crowd of the 3Dfx-followers is nowadays talking a lot about 'Napalm' and 'Voodoo4'. Unfortunately the presentation 3Dfx gave last week only showed some nifty, but of course completely proprietary new 3D-features like e.g. motion-blur. The only way to make those features useful would be to talk 3D-game developers into using those, but 3Dfx couldn't even answer if they are trying to get those features implemented into DirectX 7. We can certainly remember the times when games were based on the also 3Dfx-proprietary Glide-engine. At the time when that was true the best, and for 3D-gamers only real, 3D-cards came from 3Dfx, so that it wasn't that hard for a game developer to choose the 3Dfx-engine. Times have changed though and will even change more soon. Right now, the best 3D-cards are not necessarily carrying a 3Dfx-chip, NVIDIA's TNT2 is at least as strong in the market as Voodoo3 and then there's the Matrox G400 as well. Times will get even worse when NVIDIA releases NV10, the very soon upcoming 3D-super chip. This chip will make anyone else in the 3D-chip business look damn old. Believe me, I've seen what NV10 can do and you'll find a lot of detailed information about NV10 at Tom's Hardware pretty soon. I dare to say that 3Dfx will not be able to compete with NV10 anymore, nor will anybody else I could think of right now. NV10 is that strong, that it will even be a tough product in the OpenGL-workstation market. Wait and see.

32 3D-Card Roundup

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For already more than two weeks Tom's Hardware Guide's US-Lab is working like crazy. On Wednesday we'll publish the first part of our 32 3D-Card Roundup, which will be the largest PC-Hardware article in the history of the Internet. At the same time we're testing AMD's new Athlon, to have the ultimate Athlon/K7-artcile ready next week. I do admit that I had estimated that the performance of the lab would show up earlier in time, but it took a lot of preparation as well as training sessions until we were fully operational. Brent and Sil are working extremely hard now and will be joined by more people very soon.