Interview: 3dfx Bryan Speece
by Tuncer Deniz
3dfx's recent release of Voodoo 3 Glide drivers for the Mac signals the company's strong support for the Mac and is good news for gamers hungry for faster 3D for their Macs. I recently had a telephone interview with Bryan Speece, Director of Macintosh Marketing and Business Development about 3dfx's renewed involvement in the Mac market and what we can expect from 3dfx in the future.
Deniz: We're all very intrigued and excited that 3dfx is developing their products for the Mac. Can you talk about 3dfx's sudden interest in the Mac market? Does Apple's turnaround having something to do with it?
Speece: Certainly the turnaround of Apple is something that everybody has noticed. However, I don't want to characterize it necessarily that 3dfx is 'suddenly' interested in the Mac market cause we certainly have been here. Voodoo 2 and Banshee-based products have been selling on the Mac market for a long time. What you're seeing in the announcement is that there's now a much broader level of commitment from 3dfx and we're working with game developers to bring game titles and we're working with integrators to bring Voodoo 3 boards to the Macintosh. But we've been here for a while with our technology one way or another.
What 3dfx has announced here is a win for developers and we definitely want to support our developers. It's going to bring more games to the Mac, that's a win for end-users. And those end-users are going to have the ability to play those games and titles faster and at a higher performance. That's an overall win for the Mac platform, so that's the overall message we're trying to get out.
Deniz: 3dfx released Voodoo 3 drivers yesterday that are mainly for developers. You also announced that MacTell would be providing a Voodoo 3 solution for end users. Now, I've noticed that on the PC side, 3dfx develops and sells its own boards in retail. Why doesn't 3dfx release its own boards for the Mac?
Speece: 3dfx wants to make sure it has a broad-based strategy on the Macintosh platform. The developer drivers we released are just that, developer drivers, they're Glide only. They bring Glide 2 and Glide 3 capability for Voodoo 3 cards to the Macintosh that brings a high level of performance and it brings, particularly, the Glide 3 library to the Macintosh to the extent that games can be ported across to the Mac. We want to make those boards available on the market and we're working with integrators.
At this time, we feel that MacTell is a very good partner to bring boards to the market and there might be some others that we may announce in the future. But we absolutely want to promote MacTell as the place to go for the consumer to get a Voodoo 3 card that is fully supported and that has potentially more drivers in that product then you're going to see from 3dfx. What we released is just Glide-based reference drivers for developers so that they can get a head start on developing Glide-enabled games for the Mac.
Deniz: The now defunct Micro Conversions, which used to sell Voodoo 2 based boards, charged an incredible premium for their Voodoo 2 cards. From what they told us, they simply couldn't compete with PC vendors who had huge economies of scale advantages over them. As a result, they had to charge a premium for the Voodoo 2 cards. In the end, customers balked at the high prices and the company went out of business. Will this same scenario affect a company like MacTell? Will Mac users have to pay a premium for Voodoo 3 cards?
Speece: Well, there's a lot of cost of development for the Macintosh integrators. You have to do some work to make these boards work on the Macintosh. We're talking about the drivers that are necessary like the Glide, Rave, and OpenGL drivers. Now that's a lot of work, and not to mention the support, the documentation, and the other unique things that you have to do to support these boards on a Macintosh.
So to some extent, I think a higher price is justified. And certainly an integrator who is going to bring these kinds of products to the Macintosh knows going in that his volume is going to be lower than a PC integrator's with a similar product. So, the PC integrator will have the ability to live on less margin because the volume is so much higher.
I think the Macintosh consumer is a pretty savvy person. And I think they can tell when they're supporting a Macintosh company who is covering the costs of developing the product.
Deniz: Now that you've released Voodoo 3 Glide drivers for the Mac, consumers are going to go out and buy PC boards, flash it for the Mac, and run them on their Macs. Is that going to cut into MacTell's Voodoo 3 business?
Speece: Yes, that's possible, but obviously we're not promoting that. I think an end user should be getting a complete Macintosh solution that is offering support and a complete Macintosh package. And that not what we're trying to do here. What we're trying to do is make sure that the developers have a head start working on some titles for the Mac.
3dfx has a very long history and legacy of developer support and this pretty much falls in line with that.
Deniz: Right now the Voodoo 3 drivers don't have support for Rave and OpenGL. Will your drivers have support for these APIs?
Speece: I think MacTell is on record on what drivers they're going to release. From 3dfx's standpoint, again, the release that we've made is a reference driver release and what we're interested in is supporting our Glide developers. We're not going to announce today that we're going to be doing Rave or OpenGL drivers for the Voodoo 3. Clearly, that is not the intent of this release, it's to bring game developers over and to service the public for their needs for retail boards through MacTell.
Deniz: Our hardware guru, Frank Bernier, had a more technical question. Will the next 3dfx products correct the 565 pixel issue in thousands of colors?
Speece: Yes, the Macintosh in 16bit color mode is different in how it processes pixel format than on the PC. There is an issue there on how the pixels are processed, but with regard to talking about any specific features for the future, we really can't talk about that right now.
Deniz: MacTell is coming out with their own Voodoo 3 cards. The press release yesterday alludes to other possible vendors. Can you talk about any of these other vendors?
Speece: We're not going to preannounce anything that other vendors might not be ready to announce. So, right now, no.
Deniz: Understood. A recent CBS MarketWatch article mentioned that Voodoo 4 would be coming in October. Is this true and is there a Mac version planned?
Speece: We're not making any future announcements right now.
Deniz: Well, I had to try. Let's switch gears and talk about hardware. The lack of AGP on the Mac certainly seems to be a problem in terms of gaming. In 3dfx's opinion, is AGP something Apple needs to include in future Macs?
Speece: Well, I think there is potentially a bottleneck of performance that will be reached with the PCI bus and I think that it's very probable that today's graphic processors have the ability to overwhelm the bus on a Macintosh. Certainly to move forward to provide the highest level of performance to the Mac platform, it would be easier to do that if there wasn't a bottleneck at the bus. But of course Apple is going to go where Apple wants to go in terms of their machines. But definitely there is a limitation in the PCI bus.
Deniz: Can you talk about any relationship or talks you've had with Apple. Have they been supportive in bringing Voodoo 3 to the Mac?
Speece: We talk to Apple all the time and continuously. A lot of those efforts has to do with bring titles to the Mac, cause, again, our developer relations and our ability to evangelize in that way is pretty strong. But really, we can't get into any specific conversations with Apple.
Deniz: Apple has been really pushing OpenGl with developers. But from what I've heard it is more difficult to implement OpenGL than Glide. Do you think developers will continue to make Glide versions of their games?
Speece: At 3dfx we have a lot of developers out there who use Glide. They're comfortable using it and is any easy API to use. And right now in terms of cross-platform it's the ultimate cross-platform API to use and makes it the ultimate catalyst for gaming on the Mac.
OpenGL is clearly in Apple's future but there aren't a lot of OpenGL titles yet. There is difficulty in implementing that right now. The Glide titles actually come across quite easily. The amount of ease for a game ported from a Windows machine to the Mac depends on how much it adheres to the Glide specs and how often a programmer has to go outside of Glide. The thing is, Glide calls port over really easily.
Deniz: Will Glide eventually support 32bit rendering?
Speece: Right now we can't comment on that.
Deniz: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions!
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