Bitboys interview @ FiringSquad

Naast AnandTech heeft FiringSquad ook eens lopen babbelen met de mannen van Bitboys, die momenteel de Glaze3D chip in ontwikkeling hebben. Het complete interview is hier te vinden. Hieronder wat meer speculaties over de performance die hij zou gaan moeten leveren:

Whenever a new high-end video card is released, we like to talk about what resolutions and settings become "free" i.e. little or no framerate hit for higher resolutions and/or settings. The GeForce 256 DDR was able to make the 1024x768 Fastest and 800x600 High Quality settings "free" in Quake 3. What settings will become "free" with the Glaze3D?

1024x768 will definitely be "free", as will 1280x1024, and 1600x1280 is fast becoming within our reach. We can of course go up to HDTV resolutions.

True 32-bit color, 32-bit textures, and 32-Bit Z-buffer will also become free, as well as Anti-Aliasing with the XBA architecture. (Petri)

Does Glaze3D completely remove rasterization/memory bandwidth from the bottleneck? What resolution and framerate do you envision for 3D games by the end of 2000?

The frame rate is a constant, 75 Hz. Although you could have more, it doesn't make that much sense. Same goes for resolution when we have 1280x1024 and true color and 1600x1200. Monitors have to improve before users have a need to go up from there. What people sometime forget is that peak fillrate requirements can spike as games go from a depth complexity of 4 in general use to as high as 20 due to effects such as explosions, light maps, etc. This causes the 3D engine to either be able to handle the peak needs or drop frames. XBA allows us to meet the demands of even the most complex game fillrate requirements and still deliver consistent frame rates at killer resolutions and color depths.

We will definitely have even more bandwidth in our next generation so saying that the bandwidth bottleneck is complete eliminated would be wrong. But for the time being, 12 Gigabytes for the 1200 and 20 Gigabytes+ for the 2400 is enough. To give you an idea of our current bandwidth lead, the newly announced 3dfx VSA-100 chip, which is the basis for Voodoo5 has less than 3 Gigabytes of bandwidth. (Shane)