3dfx In A World Of Pain

3dfx needs to drop this board manufacturing shit. Just sell chips. Nvidia does that...and they are fucking soaking in liquid money. Ó

The merger with STB was stupid. The whole point of the merger was to get their graphics chips on to the motherboard, to compete with ATI. ATI already had that market sewn up. Then intel decides to come out with the i740 graphics chipset. How do you compete when the major chipset producer is adding it's OWN graphics to the motherboar? Besides, there is very little markup on that type of product. They wanted volume, they didn't get it.

The worst part is that it set them back a design cycle. Had they been working on designing chipsets rather than the actual product, they would still be number 1. They wouldn't have had to work on integrating companies.

To top it off, they made bad design choices. Lack of 32bpp color to compete with the TNT was a really bad idea. Yes, people want frame rate, but if they can play with purdy colors, they'll be just as happy at a lower resolution.

And lastly, as another really bad idea, they went with single source manufacturing. All of the fab companies that produce their own boards (S3, ATI, Matrox, etc.) are CONSTANTLY a design cycle behind NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn't have to worry about distributing or actually producing. High volume chip manufacturers are much better equipped to pump chipsets out faster (like ASUS, ABIT, etc.) and get them to market as soon as possible.

3dfx's main problem comes down to poor management decisions. At the time, it seemed like the right idea to join with STB, but the market was cut right out from under them.

Regarding this lawsuit business...
Hey, nVidia has to strongarm *someone*

Its frivolous bullshit.
They can go suck a dick for all I care.

Over all, I think 3DFX will sell its board making capabilities, not release the 6000, and bring out a kick ass chip early next year. I'm an nvidia fan boy but it looks like they are due for triping up.

181: because its fun.

188: Same thing happen with my father-in-law. I talked him into buying AMD. It lost a little and he sold it. Then the Athlon came out. I tried to get him to buy Nvidia but he wouldn't. Needless to say, I don't take guff for my finaical planning anymore from him.

I really don't expect the V5-6000 to ever appear. It's too expensive for them to make and too expensive for people to buy. And now that the GeForce Ultra made such huge waves.. who in their right mind would pay $100 more for a card with fewer features?

I fully expect 3dfx to go out of business. Their current product is a total loss, and historically they've been over a year late with new products..

Time's up, 3dfx. Time to pay for all those boneheaded design decisions you made earlier.

From the front page of Somethingawful.com:

"Why do people get so worked up over things that play no vital role in their lives? You know what I'm talking about: people who curse out other people because of their choice of video card, guys who adamantly defend video game X over video game Y, and readers who post hundreds of profanity-filled messages regarding their love / hate for a certain brand of product. To a lesser degree, the same thing occurs in sports, with fans of a particular team getting into fights (and sometimes even killing) opposing fans. Why do people attach their egos to a product or entity that they have no real relationship with? "

Couldn't say it better myself.

Some of you actually believe that $499 is a fair price for a vid card? Thats still fillrate limited in Q3 at 1024x768? You can buy a p3 650 system for the price of the card. These same people will get the newest latest card 6 months later. I suppose when PC gaming is the height of your social life you can afford to do that. I suppose some people feel they don't need furniture, a nice house, nice ride, insurance, nice clothes, savings account and fun/party/friends money when you have a 1.1 ghz rig with 512 megs of pc-133 and GF2U. I bet only a few people on the shack are rich. Bachelors making $40-60k with messed up priorities are the ones claiming they are rich.

All companies take advantage of lack of competition. A word of advice: Video card companies don't give a fuck about you. They just want your money. Think about that next time you want to defend 3dfx or nvidia blindly.

does anyone else have this problem .. when I load up the shack i get some GPF. I had shack as my homepage and it was always crashing so now i switched to my.yahoo and everythings okay unitl i load up the shack

IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in
module MSHTML.DLL at 0167:7aead088.
Registers:
EAX=6b006300 CS=0167 EIP=7aead088 EFLGS=00010206
EBX=00000009 SS=016f ESP=0058b824 EBP=00000000
ECX=00000000 DS=016f ESI=0153ee60 FS=1097
EDX=0000000e ES=016f EDI=0000000a GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
66 89 28 89 6e 64 e9 dc fd f7 ff 8b 46 44 3b c5
Stack dump:
00000000 0153e6c4 0058d86c 0153ee60 01530040 00000000 00000002 7ae187f9 0153e968 00000046 00000000 0153e6a0 0058d898 00740068 00700074 002f003a

Man 3dfx is almost bankrupt when it looks as though they might be getting their shit together next year
Lets hope they can stay alive and compete

What you consider a resonable price for a vid card is irevelent. These "Ultra" cards cost a lot to make and serve a very small market. Therefor they must charge more to turn a profit. Sure Nvidia stuck it to us with the GeForce prices, but what did you expect them to do? Just lower prices for no reason at all (BTW the jacked up GF prices are as much the vault of the card makers as Nvidia)? Yeah right, which is why we need competition. But at this point 3dfx does not look like the company to provide it, rather ATI looks like a much more formitable competetor with thier Radeon. And Matrox should be coming out with thier new chip fairly soon. Yes, Nvidia (or any other company) having a monopoly is A Bad Thing, but that is far from becoming a reality so don't get your panties in such a wad quite yet.

Feh.

32-bit color owns you.

Hahaha... $3.81 per share and shares are under $6. ROFLMAO. You smell that? I think it's a rotting corpse.

Boycott Nvidia for their stupid DMA patent suit! Boycott 3dfx for their stupid Multi-texturing patent suit!

Hahaha... I love this. Now THIS is comedy.

32bit colour was only useful on the DDR Gforce
it was too slow on any other card.

Nvidia do overcharge
3dfx do keep making stupid mistakes

http://www.3dactionplanet.com/features/agt/agt22/
damnit i only got 19 points :( i was never a big final doom fan though.

plus i dont remember how to axs the secret on episode 2, but idont recall it being a big open level.

infact, i really remember very little of episode 2.
i do recall the secret level, but how to access it, well mmm

3dfx either has to cancel Rampage and dish out their GigaPixel technology ASAP, or they're going to be bought out. Simple as that. Sadly enough, I think we'll be seeing a replay of the situation over at Aureal, judging how blind 3dfx seems to be about their current financial / market status.

hmmm, i think anything over 200, or 300brand spanking new is too much to pay for a video card....

these $500 cards are rediculous, I don't know how many of you are millionares but I sure can't/won't pay that much for one component

wow... TDFX at 5.4 today.. Get it while its hot.. It can't get any worse than that...unless they go bankrupt. Then you're fucked.

I listened to 3dfx's investors conference call and here are a couple thoughts and observations...

Apparently 3dfx is going to start selling chips again and lessen the focus of the board manufacturing(STB) division. They may possibly sell the Juarez plant and subcontract the manufacture of boards there.

The Rampage is looking like the big thing to bring 3dfx back to profitability. They say that the developers are extremely excited about it.

They appear to have a credit line facility almost in place and they still have 41 million in cash and inventories/receivables to borrow against which should keep them going for at least a few more quarters.

I think the big thing is for 3dfx to be able to deliver the Rampage in a timely manner. If they do so, they seem positioned to return to profitablity. If they don't well, they will die.

I'm just trying to decide if I should buy some 3dfx stock... it is going for 4 7/8's in after hours trading. It almost has to go up again. This could be a decent gamble to make some green... or of course a way to lose some money.

I think I'll load up on the stock when it hits $3 a share...

hehe

http://www.bigcharts.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=tdfx&sid=0&o_symb=tdfx&freq=1&time=4


ouch

Oh by the way, I got first post.

After listening to the 3dfx conference call, it appears that they intend to issue a lot of lawsuits in the future. They intend to leverage the intellectual property gained from Gigapixel in this regard.

WAIT! Who cares about 3dfx and Nvidia anyways? I mean... we have the Bitboys Oy!! hehehe

This is off sunject,
anyone know when the shacks cs server will be back up?