[ShortcutToMoncton]

So, yeaaaaaah. Looks like 3Dfx just got bought by Nvidia. Everything...patents, patents pending, logo, trademarks, technology... all their core assets...EXCEPT THEIR PRODUCTS AND CURRENT PRODUCT LINE. That means that 3Dfx (what's left of it) is responsible in marketing and doing the drivers for the remaining Mac products, and Nvidia is not responsible for them.

Ha. Ha. I can see where THIS is going, hmmmm? I'm no prophet, but I'd say you will probably kick yer little asses (assii...???.... ) in a year for buying a new Voodoo4/5 card. I may be wrong...but I'd say irregular updates from now on....spotty support....and slowly dwindling performance in MacOS X when compared to, say....Nvidia's offerings. Hmmmm????

I don't know much in the way of details about this yet....but I can say that I DID know this was coming. I'm actually a decent friend to a guy who works rather high-up in the 3Dfx ranks, and he gave a little circumspect warning when I mentioned looking at a new Voodoo card. Nothing concrete, of course...just a few subtle hints that I was sworn not to repeat.... I tried to warn a few o the boards, but others wouldn't cooperate with me.... Well, I'm buying a Radeon soon, or may wait for one of Nvidia's newer cards and see how they perform.

Pfffft. 3Dfx and Glide was good while it lasted. Bring on OpenGL, people.


greg


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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Just to clarify: this actually hasn't happened YET. The board of Directors have approved the plan, and are asking the shareholders to approve as well...however, they still have to do the vote thing, and it looks like it will go ahead.

In the meantime, 3Dfx has this major restructuring plan going on where they lay off people and cut back and yadda yadda yadda...it's over, looks like.

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

[ginoledesma]

Yes, bring on OpenGL. We definitely need something better than RAVE, which pales in comparison to MS's Direct3D.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

I wonder what effect this will have on game developers...will they now want to do Glide optimization???? It definitely wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, because there is going to be an increasingly smaller number of people with cards that support it. I'd say that new games coming out within the next year will be OpenGL, if Apple can get its butt together and actually work on optimizing the damn thing so it performs decently....say amost as good as Direct3D.....

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

Originally posted by ShortcutToMoncton:
I wonder what effect this will have on game developers...will they now want to do Glide optimization???? It definitely wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, because there is going to be an increasingly smaller number of people with cards that support it.

Glide was already on its way out. 3dfx had even said that they didn't expect it to live on. The only Glide support that you've been seeing for the past year or so was for legacy reasons, and that's not going to change.

Nevin

[ShortcutToMoncton]

What about you Voodoo card owners out there?!?!?!?!? I figured you'd be screaming about the great sale, but so far haven't heard a peep. What on the go, guys???? Is anyone upset about spending $400 on a new card that might very well not even work properly with MacOS X (probably will, but you never know...)????

Ca$h? You're always the big 3Dfx supporter and ravemongeror...what now? Whole switch to ATI or Nvidia????

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

[gorefan68]

Definatly Nvidea. Unofficially, they're going to start to make cards for the mac. Exciting times my friends. The good news about it, is that the Voodoo cards, even the newer ones, will become a LOT cheaper ( i think). This is good for UT players.

Anyway, since Nividea has all of 3dfx's technology, LOOK OUT. This is gonna be one bad mamma jamma. >

Ca$h

You don't have to go out of business to stop
doing updates for your product, just look at
Matrox, they haven't updated their software
in the last couple of years.

I not quite sure what my point is, but I still like my V4.

I read somewhere (sorry, no link) that 3dfx was about to win a patent lawsuit against Nvidia prior to the buyout. This is supposedly Nvidias standard way to win a lawsuit...when they are about to lose in court, they just buy out the company doing the suing. Ouch! And you thought W. was playing hard-ball in Florida. This would be analogous to Bush senior buying out Gore so his son could be president.

I'm glad I opted for Radeon now. This is the reason I chose Radeon, not that I forsaw 3dfx being taken over, but I felt more secure knowing that Apple would be working with ATI on driver development.

[Misha]

The difference here is that nVidia isn't buying out 3dfx, per se... it's not a hostile takeover. 3dfx HAD to sell itself out, or face going under completely (read: more loss for shareholders, who are already being screwed). nVidia happily agreed to buy them out... and for a damn cheap price, at that.

Just a thought, but even if you have a card, you could always use it for a second monitor when the new ones come out anyway. I'd imagine that most of the users that bought these things in the first place would want to be the better cards when they come out. Hopefully, the'll support DVD, too. That's why I never bought one myself.

P.s. Maybe the Voodoo driver will go the route of the IXmicro drivers in that some people somewhere keep writing updates even though the company is defunct.

Well, I for one got my Voodoo 5 for $200, and having gotten 2 months of amazing gaming out of it for my venerable B&W G3 (Deus Ex, Myth II, Diablo II, etc.), I'm still pleased as punch with it regardless. Aside from some OpenGL incompatiblilties with certain apps -- like SoundJam visual plugins and Setting Sun -- my 2D productivity has also benefitted from the card -- large Photoshop and Illustrator files redraw/scroll amazingly fast. That said, I am very sad to hear support for it may dwindle. However, I never intended for my G3+Voodoo machine to run OS X -- waiting to for OS X to release before buying a new machine to meet it's req's. I'm sad to see 3Dfx go, though I know financially it was their only option, and can't complain that nVidia's the one who bought 'em. It may be a blessing in disguise for Mac video cards... fingers crossed.

[Riddler]

Well, it's a terrible thing to happen all round, not just for us the users but for all the people working for 3Dfx and there families who now face an uncertain future coming up to Christmas :-(

As for us users, well not only are we loosing an excellent gfx card manufacturer but we're loosing another "Mac" gfx card manufacturer leaving us with....errr.... ATI and errr....Formac and errr....oh dear. Lets hope nVidia jumps into the melting pot in January, I'm sure they will.

I hope Glide will carry on being supported, I know it's not 32 bit and all that but dithered 22 bit or what ever it is always looked nice to me. The other reason why I hope it hangs around is that we need 3D API's on the Mac, developers need choice, and putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea. Lets hope that nVidia build Glide support into future products and the Open source community get behind the API too, then we'll have another weapon against Direct 3D (a dangerous API for us Mac users)

Well fingers crossed 3Dfx can keep the job cuts low and that they can continue to offer support for existing products, and good luck to those who leave the company.

Riddler

[denim]

Has anyone seen any sales yet? If so, for what kind of price?

[timur]

Originally posted by denim:
Has anyone seen any sales yet? If so, for what kind of price?

Wait until after Christmas. I expect a bunch of people will be offering them for sale on eBay. You better download the latest drivers now, though.

[ddukes]

Originally posted by ShortcutToMoncton:
I wonder what effect this will have on game developers...will they now want to do Glide optimization???? It definitely wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, because there is going to be an increasingly smaller number of people with cards that support it. I'd say that new games coming out within the next year will be OpenGL, if Apple can get its butt together and actually work on optimizing the damn thing so it performs decently....say amost as good as Direct3D.....

greg

Umm, Mr. Shortcut. With all your ranting and raving about us people who have Voodoo 5 and 4 cards. Have you forgotten that our cards can do OpenGl, as well as Rave, and the possibly dying Glide? Also, if you're jumping on the ATI bandwagon because of future spotty card updates look at how many updates 3dfx has put on already compared to the current spotty support of ATI.

3dfx in all is smallness has outpaced ATI in support of the Mac in every aspect.

[MrPopman]

A couple of things I noticed. First in one of the Nvidia press releases <http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/001215/ca_nvidia_.html> they stated the lawsuit would be "jointly dismissed with prejudice" which means that Nvidia basically admits it used 3dfx's technology without permission. The other thing is that 3dfx gets 15 Million in cash right now to continue operation. It really sounds like 3dfx simply ran out of money and had to bail. In the last quarter, they had operational losses of $56 Million US (over $600,000 a day!) and over $250 Million for 3 or 4 quarters (can't remember which). It is too bad, but when they switched to building their own boards, it just cost them too much money to start up and they never figured out how to make it profitable. But I do have to wonder what Nvidia is going to do once it has run out of companies to steal from. Will it be able to generate ideas on it's own and bring them to market?

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MrPopman - Anybody
want to play a game of
pinball?

[Leonard]

"Also, if you're jumping on the ATI bandwagon because of future spotty card updates look at how many updates 3dfx has put on already compared to the current spotty support of ATI."

Hmmm.... I'd rather have spotty than non-existent. From what I hear the 3dfx Mac driver writers are now all unemployed and noone is taking care of the 3dfx card drivers. The 3dfx driver writers didn't even know who to hand off their latest bug fixes to. So those will probably land in limbo. As for ATI's updates being spotty, I think this is because a lot of the updates are dependent on Apple getting MacOS 9.1 out and the new version of OpenGL.

ATI has had late, crappy, inconsistant Mac drivers for the entire ATI history

Remember the millions of colors bug in the Rage 128's

Remember the 8 months we waited for the fix?

and just how long have we Mac users been asking for an All-In-Wonder card for the Mac?


I bought a Voodoo 5 (200$) and love it! Also I am concerned about 3dfx going under BUT I expect that we WILL have driver updates and support for 8 months to a year. Even if 3dfx was still in business, a year from now I would be wanting a new card anyway.

I am sick of ATI and am hoping that nVidia gets a great Mac card out soon!

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Note: In no way did I rant and rave about you people buying Voodoo cards. Where do you see that?!?!?!?!?!? Why WOULDN'T you buy Voodoo cards if there was no real indication that this was coming (besides the rumblings of financial origin)?????

I'm just saying that now you guys are, potentially, screwed. This is a BAD thing, for Voodoo owners AND the Mac gaming industry.

Note that I very much doubt that there will be anything close to a major update in the Voodoo drivers. Things were slowing down since the card itself came out, and over the last few months the expected speed increases that were initially promised with the first drivers has failed to materialize. The Mac market was a very small market for them overall, I'd say...I doubt they will be too keen on "wasting money" by coding for it...(just a guesstimate from a business standpoint).

I agree that ATI has, to say the least, a dbious track record, but lately they have been at least as diligent as 3Dfx in driver updates and performance, and they DO work with Apple directly (DVD support, too, remember?). I'd go with buying a cheap Voodoo5 to complement the
Radeon just for the dual-monitor setup, as was mentioned....

dduke: Yes, Voodoo has OpenGL. If you'd have thought, though, you might have realized that it's kinda useless if it's not updated every once and a while, hmmmm?????

Anyway...interesting stuff.......

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Mark Adams, of Westlake:

"We are going to have a very hard time justifying even testing with those cards in future games, since we know no more will be sold and the drivers will never be updated. I'll feel a bit sad when I have to pull my V5 out of my development machine, I really thought it was a good card. But I need to have the cards in my Mac that end users have, so I'll probably replace it with a Rage 128 or Radeon. "

IMG magazine says that the next unified driver release might hit in a few days (1.1.3). but that's it. Nada. Nothing else, no one working on it, toot toot.

greg

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Though the day's been
really long
I still feel I'm close to
nowhere....