Press Releases 3D Wizard

APRIL 1998

California Graphics focuses on TV-out for its 3D Wizard Voodoo² board

California Graphics, the 3D hardware company for games, has announced that it will be focussing on providing TV-out for its Voodoo² solution called 3D Wizard. "Whilst other companies have rushed to market with a Voodoo² solution that is basically just the reference design board from 3Dfx, we prefer to provide customers with the solutions that they really want," explained Vincenzo Coccoli, Chairman and CEO of California Graphics. "The vast majority of our customers are keen to have TV-out so that they can enjoy the stunning graphics on the big screen of their TVs in the same way that they do with our popular 3D Emotion card. As a result, we are focussing our engineering effort into creating a 12MB TV-out design with special high performance memory chips. This will be available around the end of May. Our 8MB version, which does not have TV-out, will be shipping a couple of weeks earlier.

The estimated costs for the boards have dropped so that recommended price for the 8MB 3D Wizard will be $229 (£139) and the 12MB version with TV out, which is called the 3D Wizard ULTIMATE, will be $299 (£179). Street prices are expected to be around 10% less.

California Graphics went on to issue a caution about Voodoo² boards. "The market has the perception that Voodoo² is a dramatic new step forward for all gamers and this has put the market for video cards into limbo," explained Mr Coccoli. "The Voodoo² chipset really needs a Pentium II or really high end Pentium based system and its performance improvement with a Pentium, AMD or Cyrix Socket 7 processor is not so dramatic. Once customers realize this, we expect that the market for tried and tested designs, such as our popular 3D Emotion that is based on the Voodoo Rush chipset, will pick up dramatically.

We simply want all of our customers to get their money's worth, performance wise, and the Voodoo²'s heavy CPU requirements and varying performance under different APIs is an important thing to keep in mind."

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