Friday, June 2, 2000

More Marketing BS -- 10:00 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In the never-ending war to see which 3D chip manufacturer can make the stupidest comment, following up on NVIDIA's "Pixar-level animation" comment, 3dfx' Gary Tarolli posted this gem (which The Reverend copied for the world to see) on why hardware T&L will decrease the lifespan of a video card. Here's a snip:

So why would a Voodoo5 have a longer life span than a card with T&L? One reason is because it's feature-proof, as strange as that may seem. Hardware T&L cards like the GeForce have their feature set pretty much frozen. For example, the GeForce supports lerping between 2 matrices from what I understand, and no more. Developers basically cannot use this feature, and require 4 matrices at a minimum. When APIs support this, the GeForce will have to fall back to software T&L or not expose the feature. The Voodoo5 uses software T&L all along and thus can implement any feature that comes along. Basically hardware T&L will accelerate (and even that is questionable) today's features only.

This is utter malarky on several different levels:

1. "from what I understand": thus a good chunk of his argument is based on ignorance. Always a nice start.
2. "Developers basically cannot use this feature, and require 4 matrices at a minimum.": Then apparently Q3A and the list of current and upcoming titles that take advantage of the GeForce's T&L really don't exist. OK.
3. "GeForce will have to fall back to software T&L . . . Voodoo5 uses software T&L all along": So even though the GeForce 2 GTS is faster than a Voodoo5 and can fall back to this theoretical "software T&L" as well as the V5 can, the V5 will still have greater longevity? Huh?

I hope this isn't the beginning of posturing for 3dfx' NEXT product not having T&L either. At any rate, using Tarolli's logic, my TNT should have a greater lifespan than a GeForce because it doesn't have T&L. Somebody PLEASE sign these guys up for some logic classes at the local community college. Or just get them to shut up.

News for 06/02/2000

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