Tuesday, November 2, 1999

Napalm Announcement -- 10:09 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3dfx will be holding a press conference at Comdex on Monday to formally announce their next chip, currently codenamed Napalm. Here's a snip:

Chief among these features will be a focus on fill-rate and the ability to achieve over one billion pixels per second. With fill-rate come benefits such as higher resolution, faster speeds, greater application complexity and the ability to display high quality 32bpp rendering at 60+ frames per second (FPS) at ultra high resolutions. All of these attributes equate to better image quality and highly realistic environments.

One billion marketing pixels per second is certainly very impressive. It will be interesting to see if they can keep a chip that fast from burning down your house. Of course, the Savage 2K was supposed to pump out 700 million marketing pixels per second until recently.

Remember that the T-Buffer will require massive fill-rate for its full-screen anti-aliasing. It seems that the NVIDIA image quality vs. 3dfx speed will continue to be the topic of debate. But if 3dfx can get decent image quality and a fully-functional OpenGL ICD, they could make things VERY interesting. I would also assume that Napalm would have to be the first 3dfx produce to fully use the AGP bus (at 4x to boot) to get this kind of fill-rate.

I like competition. It means better, cheaper products for everyone. Thanks VE via Blue.

News for 11/02/1999

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