Is 3dfx guilty of false advertising

[Burst_R8]

Seriously why would a company ship an agp part that does not actually take advantage of any agp features, its a "VooDoo3 3000AGP" im pretty sure the AGP claim would lead most people to assume it actually supports agp features. someone should start a class action suit :P

[RobRich]

3dfx validates their claims by indicating that their AGP v3 cards use a 133mhz (2x AGP) transfer rate. They claim all other AGP functions are only Intel specified, so these specs are recommendation for vid cards manufactures to use, not concrete rules.

3dfx says that 16meg of memory is perfectly fine for fram buffering and storage of max 256*256 16bit textures. 3dfx also says AGP texturing is basically a joke, and that no game would ever we able to adequately use it.

Actually, by not using advanced AGP operations, the v3 has salvaged many super7 systems that otherwise would be able to benifit of the AGP bus's increased bandwidth without severe compatible problems.

Don't look for 3dfx to change this policy in time in the near future, theit next gen VSA-100 chips will not support many AGP options either, so it seems to be a continued trend.

[This message has been edited by RobRich (edited 01-28-2000).]

[mrdisco]

2X transfer rate of WHAT? Voodoo cards aren't using the AGP bus to store textures, so what does it matter how fast it is?

As for 16MB being enough, sure it is for 256x256x16. With the textures that are coming with today's games, however, image quality limitations are becoming more and more apparent. It's still not very noticeable now, but wait for this year's games to show up. Sure it's fast, but who cares if it looks like ****?

And yes, AGP is a joke at 2X. However, 4X is starting to approach on-card bus speeds. The next AGP standard may just make on-card RAM obsolete, unless, of course, on-card RAM speeds increase as well, which is very possible.

Face it, 3dfx'ers. Voodoo's days as the forefront of 3D technology are over. They were the item to get in their time, but they've refused to follow continuing trends. As a result, they're now playing catch-up to people like nVidia, and re-emerging industry leaders like Matrox and S3.

[Gumby]

Check their site www.3dfx.com (http://www.3dfx.com) they are coming up with new cards that should be very good