The Presentation

Sony, not 3dfx

The IDF was the first public unveiling of the GeForce 256, so the president and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang, was present to help kick it off. The first part of the presentation began with the usual self congratulatory stuff; Huang mentioned how the chip was "18 months" in the making, and "more complex than [Intel's 64bit CPU, the] Merced," blah blah. Cutting through the BS, I noticed two interesting things. One is that Mr. Huang never once mentioned 3dfx or other graphics competitors at all throughout the conference. That's the sort of thing that marks the behavior of a market leader. Usually it's the guys playing catch up who trumpet how much better they are than [company x] at [benchmark y].

So what was the other interesting thing? The competitor that kept getting mentioned wasn't another graphics company or Intel. It was the Sony Playstation 2. Early in the opening speech, Huang said the goal was to turn the PC "into a platform that competes directly with Sony Playstation 2," and that by the time PSX2 comes out, the PC will have surpassed its capabilities already. On at least five separate instances, without prompt from the press, Jen-Hsun Huang mentioned how the PC was going to be better than the Playstation 2, even going to far as to call the unfinished console "an enemy." Wow!

Dan and Jen-Hsun

OK, maybe 3dfx

While never mentioning 3dfx explicitly, a lot of what NVIDIA representatives said and showed at Palm Springs was more than a little bit reminiscent of 3dfx's T-Buffer introduction. I clearly recall 3dfx's stated goal with the T-Buffer (and beyond) was to bring "Hollywood quality animation to the desktop." 3dfx reps used slides and scenes from Pixar's "A Bug's Life" to demonstrate their points.

With that fresh in my mind, I found it very interesting that NVIDIA also showed some slides from Pixar films, including "A Bug's Life." Huang even said in the opening speech that a goal of NVIDIA's was to "render life like characters," and that the computer industry was "the same as the film animation business." I seriously thought I was having déjà vu. With the two top 3D graphics companies vying to bring Hollywood to the desktop, there are some exciting times ahead for computer gamers.

How about just one more interesting coincidence? For both 3dfx and NVIDIA, 60 frames per second seems to be the magic number. That is, 60 fps is the target speed at which gameplay is considered smooth. Now that's a bit lower than the number I would have picked but definitely an admirable goal.