3dfx Report

FiringSquad Life

I've got to admit, working here in the FiringSquad office keeps you on your toes. With all the cute little hamsters running around and, in my case in particular, getting lost at least once a month, coupled with the Vortex Tornado/Tornado X2 firefights; (Bob and I recently upgraded to the slightly less accurate 6-shot Vortex Firestorm) each day is truly a unique experience.

This really rings true around conference time, when last minute plane flights are searched for and hotel rooms booked. Take for instance last Year's Intel Developer's Forum, back at the time I was still working on Gamers.com, James was tired from his last trip, and Kenn was busy. That left poor Bob to find a plane flight, hotel room, and rental car for the conference. Did I mention he did all this and boarded his flight in the timespan of about an hour?

With the arrival of the New Year we've gotten a little better at planning events coverage: James booked his room and plane tickets 24 hours in advance of his CES trip, (remember to send him fruit juice jokes about his choice of hotel - Tropicana!) and we decided to sit in on the Gamers.com 3dfx meeting at MacWorld about 4 hours before it was scheduled to take place.

That's what I call progress dear readers, now if I can only find a way to keep the hamster from leaping off my desk!

3dfx in San Francisco

We've covered 3dfx numerous times since the VSA-100 was announced at Comdex, mainly because we strive to keep our readers informed with the latest information on upcoming technologies and also because we just like talking about cool hardware. After all, with 3dfx's claims that the Voodoo5 6000 will break the Gigapixel barrier and the Gigahertz barrier being broken soon on the CPU side, you quickly realize that today is a fun time to be a gamer.

While we weren't able to visit the 3dfx booth at MacWorld, we definitely noticed the 3dfx press release proclaiming VSA-100's migration to the Apple platform. While 3dfx hasn't stated the specific board configurations yet we do know that the product(s) will be available sometime shortly after the PC boards' debut.

Since Gamers.com had 3dfx on hand, we decided to discuss their progress on the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 cards announced last year.