Introduction

Up close with 3dfx

With all the excitement over 3dfx's surprise acquisition of GigaPixel, earlier this week we sent off a few questions we had about the acquisition to 3dfx's Bubba Wolford. Since then there have been a couple of conference calls that have already answered a few of our questions, but Bubba came through with the rest of the answers.

Before we get into the interview, we wanted to talk about a bit of information we left out of our conference call article a few days ago. Marco over at HotHardware called us on the omission:

Hello James,


I was one of the participants in yesterday's 3dfx conference call, and just wanted to tell ya you forgot one of the questions I asked at the very end :)

Just before I asked when 3dfx expected to return to profitability, I asked what kind of theoretical performance increase we could expect from a 3dfx/Gigapixel combined product over current technology, and their response was that barring any problems, we could expect a full order of magnitude..

Sorry to be a nit-picker, just wanted to point that out

Marco

Answers

No problem, Marco. We left out the "order of magnitude" portion because we weren't sure if Haber was just referring to the widely known 10X reduction in memory bandwidth that GigaPixel's technology will be able add to 3dfx products, or if he was actually referring to a true performance increase -everything from memory bandwidth to effective fill rates.

We asked 3dfx to clear this issue up for us and Scott Sellers told us: "obviously we will utilize the GP technology in future products but we can't talk about the specific performance targets for those products...Anything said about performance for future products is pure conjecture..." We guess that means that the "order of magnitude" estimate is pure conjecture.

In hindsight, we should have just included that portion of the CC and updated the article after we received a response. Anyways, let's move onto the interview. As always, our questions are in bold and answers are in normal font.