by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford

Q) Some people are beginning to question many of the features in the GeForce 256. Cube Environment mapping is a nice feature but will take several renderings (six to be exact) from different perspectives thus completely bogging down the FPS and making the game seemingly unplayable when enabled. T&L is a nice feature but even with DX7, games must offer specific support for the feature. The number of games that will support T&L by the time DX7 is released will not be exactly plentiful. HDTV support has also been mentioned by NVidia.

Ed. Note: T&L is currently supported by OpenGL. Most games that run under the OpenGL API will instantly benefit. In addition, DX6 games that do their transforms in API instead of in the graphics engine will also benefit immediately by DX7 and geometry hardware. These games are rare, but include Looking Glass Technologies Flight Combat and Jane's USAF. Team Alligator is being modified for hardware T&L and will probably ship with full support. We'll have information soon on Flanker 2.

Again, I live in one of the top 5 populated cities in the US and I only know of one TV station that even has support for broadcasting HDTV. Given that all these features are nice to advertise and while video card are running in a 6 month cycle, do you think consumers are getting benefits from features that have virtually no support out of the box?

A: Well, I think you can tell by the other answers I've given here that we believe Nvidia has not delivered a compelling product to market that addresses today's gamer needs. We don't think consumers will appreciate having to wait 6-9 months before games take advantage of a new piece of hardware.

Instead, with the T-Buffer, we can make today's games look and play substantially better with the full-scene spatial anti-aliasing capability, and also allow compelling future games with the extended T-Buffer capabilities of motion blur, depth of field effects, soft shadows and reflectance, etc.

This is what I was referring to earlier. Of course if you upgrade often this should be something that you consider long and hard before you buy. What am I getting for my money TODAY? If you upgrade once a year or less, then you really need to make an intelligent choice and consider all the options that each board brings to you. Of course, we encourage everyone to wait until we can benchmark them for you!

Q) Could this argument be made against your next generation card? What about T-Buffer?

A: See my other responses in discussing the T-Buffer. The T-Buffer not only offers the user an amazing "out of box experience" by dramatically improving the visual quality of today's games with full-scene anti-aliasing, but also allows for exciting new games to be developed which take advantage of the real-time cinematic effects we've discussed.

So, by focusing on awesome fill-rate and T-Buffer effects, we believe we have listened to the gamer needs and delivered a product that not only plays today's games second-to-none, but also has substantial "legs" to afford it technology leadership in the future as well.

Of course, this argument can be made against 3dfx. While spatial AA will offer fantastic "out of the box" support, Depth of Field (DoF) and Motion Blur will be on the same 6-9 month cycle that T&L is going to be riding. Another issue is with the FXT1. Offering the code for free was a brilliant decision IMO. They get implementation as soon as possible for the code, it is native to Glide and all the other API's and while offering it for free, they get universal adoption! Plus, they encourage advancement since anyone can write code for it!

Q) In San Jose, 3dfx mentioned that they wanted to continue with a product based like the 3500TV on the next generation card. Can you talk about what new features the new "TV" product might have and if you will bring back support for flat screen monitors?

A: Sorry, I can't really talk about our future multimedia products at this time. But just as the 3500TV is truly a "best of breed" card in all its capabilities, we expect to continue this trend as we add new multimedia capabilities moving forward.

Well, we hope they can launch the new "TV" card soon after the introduction of the next generation card. This is another area that 3dfx has decided to keep close to their chest.

Click to continue

Q) Can you comment about the tea-cup demo? Is it really something that fairly compares real-world benefits of T&L over fullscreen AA?

A: I doubt it, but quite frankly I haven't seen it so I shouldn't comment on it…Canned demos are simple to do for almost any effect - it's whether you can do that effect in real-time at 60 fps in a real-world game that is important, and that's what we have focused on with the T-Buffer technology.

Perhaps we should have included the demo in our email so Scott Sellers could have seen it. He is correct though, the hardware implementation that 3dfx is doing simply cannot be imitated by a basic software driven demo. I can say that once you have seen spatial AA, you will understand why 3dfx is so excited about this technology. We would love to see a true game demo (F4 please) of what Nvidia or S3 is doing but they don't seem to want to share.

Q) Creative Labs has admitted that the GF256 probably won't be able to sustain 1600x1200x32 at 30fps in Quake3. Can gamers hope to play Quake 3 at this high a resolution and color depth with your next product at 30fps or faster?

A: You'll have to wait for our next generation product announcement to find this out….

Scott Sellers would not comment about this so neither will we. If a Christmas release is still what 3dfx has in mind though, it won't be too much longer before we will know if this is possible.

Q) What's your stand on the importance of bump-mapping as a feature in today's games? Do you feel that NVidia and S3 both made a mistake by failing to incorporate hardware EMBM in their new products since we're now seeing developer support for this feature in some of today's games?

A: It is really tough to say whether EMBM is going to take off. If you look at the number of games which support it through Matrox's efforts, it's really quite a small number. And perhaps more importantly, even those games that do support it only support it in a very limited manner. So, I think the jury is still out on whether EMBM is really going to take off…

We here at COMBATSIM.COM™ are all secretly praying for Environmental Bump Mapping support. It looks awesome, but I do agree that 3dfx is King in terms of supporting those features that grant an immediate benefit. EMBM is not yet a standard by any means and only Matrox has support for this feature. Hopefully, we will see this become a standard down the road when we can actually play it in more than a couple of games.

Q) John Carmack has stated that he might add an additional notch in Quake 3's settings for GF256-based cards. Care to speculate what this extra setting might entail?

A: Probably want to talk to John C. directly on that one….

We have no idea but we thought we might get lucky. No luck fishing today..

Q) It was mentioned in San Jose during the T-Buffer demo that a new version of Glide would be introduced with the new card and that some features in the new version of Glide would be proprietary to Glide. Can you speculate on what features might be reserved for Glide only?

A: You'll have to wait for our next generation product announcement to find this out….

I was hoping we might get some more Glide information but I guess 3dfx wants to remain secretive in this area too.

Q) Who would you rather apply fullscreen, real-time, spacial AA to: Rosie O'Donnell or Roseanne? ;)

A: I agree!! Whose question was that anyway?!?!

Thanks Scott!! We really appreciate your taking your personal time to answer these questions.

Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking HERE.