Wave Issue 9711 5/9/97 Article 5-01

***3Dfx - Developer's Conference before CGDC
by John Latta

For the second year running 3Dfx had its developer's conference in
advance of CGDC. Last year we estimate there may have been 50 but this
year it was 350+.

3Dfx tested 6 games which used D3D. We found some of the results
surprising. For example, of the six none used the Z-buffer capability and
only one used RGB Texture with Fog and one other RGB Texture with Alpha.
The observation made by 3Dfx is that the game development community has
yet to leverage the capabilities being made available in hardware.

Some of the game developers described their experiences with both Glide
and D3D. The developer of Formula 1 for Psygnosis stated that they wrote
one version for Glide to maximize performance. However, for D3D they had
to create 4 versions for each card that they were to run on. The
observation was that optimizing for accelerators under D3D is less
general than card specific API. To them D3D has not yet isolated the
developer from being card specific.

www.3dfx.com/