Nvidia Meeting Continued

What's up?

We really didn't know what to expect from the meeting because Nvidia had already laid all its cards on the table with the GeForce boards (SDR & DDR), and video card companies never talk about their next-gen stuff right after launching a product. You don't want to tip off the competition, and you definitely don't want to hurt sales by convincing people to wait for the next-gen instead of buying now.

Let's get though the basic information first. We asked about the status of the GeForce 256 DDR cards, and Windows 2000 drivers. The first DDR cards should appear around December 1st and it looks like Creative's going to be first to market. As for Win2K, Derek confirmed that the next driver release will contain drivers for Windows 2000.

How about that Voodoo stuff?

We moved onto the Voodoo4 and 5 because 3dfx was the hot topic of the day with the announcement and all. We asked Derek about his opinion of 3dfx's new multi-chip solution, and he responded that 3dfx's having to resort to a multi-chip solution shows the difference between the quality of the design teams of both companies. If a company only has a handful of good engineers, it'll be easier for them to have a multi-chip solution than actually designing a new single chip architecture.

That sounded like a clear challenge to us. We'll have to wait and see how 3dfx's next-gen "formerly known as Rampage" card performs against Nvidia's NV20. Speaking of the NV20, we asked Derek about Nvidia's next generation product. While Nvidia will have a higher clocked GeForce chip for the spring product cycle, they are still hard at work on their new graphics chip. With ATI's Rage Fury MAXX and 3dfx's new Voodoo5, a few have speculated that Nvidia might also be working on a multi-chip solution for their next generation.

What's next?

We asked Derek about the possibility of Nvidia's next-gen being a multi-chip design, and he immediately responded that it would be a whole new architecture: no multiple chips here. By this time, we had to leave for our next meeting. Sometime during the meeting one of us had put down one of our 3dfx backpacks, but it had accidentally fallen down with the logo side up. When Derek caught sight of the logo, he quickly flipped the bag over with his foot - we'll have none of that in Nvidia's house. =]