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SE: It seems that NVIDIA and 3dfx are 'opposite sides of the same coin' in an attempt to improve upon image quality. With both companies' engineers coming from SGI, who's 'Germans' are better?
Scott Sellers: Well, clearly ours are!
SE: NVIDIA has looked at increasing the complexity of a scene's geometry by increasing the amount of polygons on the screen, whilst 3dfx has gone for taking polygons and smoothing them in an effort to strive for realism. What do you make of hardware T & L? Do you foresee 3dfx coming out with a part that is capable of geometry on-chip and also has the T-Buffer capabilities?
Scott Sellers: Hardware T&L and the T-Buffer technology really are completely different areas of 3D acceleration. We're here today to talk about the merits of the T-Buffer. What other 3D acceleration features that are actually productized alongside the T-Buffer will be discovered when we announce the actual product.
SE: DirectX 7.0, what's the story with anti-aliasing? Will it simply be a case of all current/past and future D3D, Glide and OpenGL games being fully AA'd?
Scott Sellers: We will have a control switch that allows a user to enable full-scene spatial AA on all current games. It doesn't matter which API is used for the current game - the control panel applet will work for all. There are already formal mechanisms in all 3 APIs which allow the application to enable full-scene AA, and of course we'll be evangelizing the use of these mechanisms to developers…
SE: The T-Buffer is "a tool rather than a technique. 3dfx expects software developers will take full advantage of this new technology to add effects beyond the ones it was developed to accelerate". Can you elaborate upon this and comment some more on this "double vision" feature that was accidentally discovered. Are there any other untapped features?
Scott Sellers: Well, the point is that the T-buffer is a general solution to the problem of undersampling and there are lots of effects that you can do. The way the T-Buffer is exposed is not like API entries like "addMotionBlur()" and "introduceDepthOfField()"…Instead, it's a very general purpose interface that allows the developers the creative freedom to implement effects like motion blur and depth of field, but also allows them to invent their own cool new special effects…
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