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Little-known Finish company Bitboys Oy splashed on to the 3D graphics scene back in Q2 of 1998. During the Voodoo2's heyday, the company announced the 'Glaze 3D' which 'on paper' (being the key term) was capable of 400 Million dual-textured pixels per second- approximately four times the fill rate of a single Voodoo2. Unfortunately for Bitboys Oy (and for end-users) said announcement did not actually transpire into hardware.
There were no takers. Chip manufacturers weren't willing to take the project on. A year on and a chip-short, Bitboys announced two new versions of the Glaze 3D chip earlier this month. Once again, the fill rates being mentioned are nigh on staggering. 600 million dual-textured pixels/second for the 1200 and 1200 million dual-textured pixels/second for the nippier 2400. In the same breath Bitboys Oy has gone on the record by saying that 200 frames per second should be possible with Glaze 3D 2400 in the Quake 3 Arena test. This time around, Infineon (formerly Siemens Semiconductor) is going to be chipping in by getting the Glaze 3D into silicon. With silicon due in January 2000 a 'product' is 'expected' to ship by Q2 2000. Thus, we took the opportunity to talk with Bitboys Oy's, Mika Tuomi, Scandinavia's hottest property since Bjorn Borg and Anders Hammervald.
SE: With only 9Mb of Embedded frame buffer memory how high will the supported maximum resolution be on the Glaze 3D?
Mika Tuomi: Here is a list of supported resolutions and how the buffers are arranged between internal and external memory.
SE: What exactly are the advantages of using embedded DRAM?
Mika Tuomi: We can choose the bus width freely, compared to the external memory where going up from 128bit bus makes the chip package expensive.
SE: 3dfx has hyped up their T-Buffer technology to the roof, now you are also saying that you will support the same features. Is this just a counter move to show 3dfx s new technology to be less than what people expect or were these features planned from the start?
Mika Tuomi: 3dfx has now specified that T-Buffer is just an ordinary Accumulation buffer with some modifications. We wanted to point out that we support accumulation buffer. Accumulation buffer has been part of the OpenGL spec for years.
SE: What is the target price once the Glaze 3D retails? When do you expect it to be available on the retail market?
Mika Tuomi: We expect Glaze3D to be in retail market Q1/2000. And the final board price is hard to estimate exactly at this point, but I can tell you that it will compete with 3dfx & nVidia in pricing also.
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