Dave Baumann van 3dfx Gamers heeft een interview gehouden met Scott Sellers van 3dfx (das weer eens wat anders dan met Brian Burke...). Er komen veel onderwerpen aan bod, zoals DirectX 8&9, 8x FSAA, Rampage en Gigapixel. Er wordt ook nog even gebabbeld over nVidia, en hoe vervelend het is om een productie cycle te missen. Hieronder een paar van de meest interessante antwoorden en vragen:
OK, Lets talk about the Voodoo 5 6000! I see you’ve brought one with you; how final is that?
The board looks to be final.
We’ve gone through subsequent iterations of it along the way, and really it’s a little bit later than we would have liked, but it’s a complicated board – 50Watts of power, 4 chips, 128Meg of RAM. The power supply circuitry itself is very complicated – we use an external power supply which had to be sourced, and spec’ed out. So, everything was non-trivial about the project.
We are extremely happy with the performance, and as we’ve said all along, its going to be the most powerful, best performing high resolution accelerator out there and we continue to be confident about that.
I had a quick word with Keith Galocy [3dfx Developer relations] earlier to see how the developer situation was going. From a consumer point of view we hear a lot of talk about nVIDIA, with plenty of press releases along the line of Epic designing for nVIDIA hardware etc. and outwardly it seems that nVIDIA are where 3dfx were two or three years ago. What’s going on behind the scenes? Is it still that way with developers?
Well, Keith is the better person to ask about that. But I think much of what you are seeing now is indicative situation we are in now – when you miss a cycle not only do you miss financial opportunities, developers pull you out of their systems, and late last year, I don’t want to argue, the best board to develop on was an nVIDIA-based board.
We believe the 5500 is a very powerful product, and the 6000 an extremely powerful product, but getting those nVIDIA based boards out of the developer systems and getting 3dfx back in takes time, but that’s exactly what we’ve been working on. With the 5500 and 6000 we're making progress, Rampage with is feature characteristics and performance characteristic, absolutely will take us to the next level, and then the roadmap just gets even better from there.
I’ve had the impression for a while now that previously the hardware vendors have pretty much been able to pick and choose which features they wish to choose, and they have been pushing the API development. It looks to me, that this time around, with the radical changes in DirectX8 its Microsoft that’s dictating what the hardware vendors need to support.
I would disagree with that; I actually say that Microsoft continues to work very closely with the hardware developers. 3dfx had a tremendous influence on DirectX8, from the vertex shading and pixel shading architecture, and I would say that between 3dfx and nVIDIA probably about 90% of what is in DirectX came from those two companies. We have both been lobbying heavily for quite some time to form the API, so we are quite pleased with the way DirectX8 came out. We’re really excited about DirectX9 because we have some features in Rampage and other leadership type products that will feature heavily in DirectX9.
I think our relationship with Microsoft has never been better, quite frankly because we have fully embraced the Microsoft API as the standard. Before we were not as engaged with Microsoft because of Glide; we took the decision that Glide doesn’t make sense anymore, which is why we made it open source, and Microsoft and DirectX is the more important API for us and that’s reflected in the fact of how much we have influenced DirectX8 spec.
:strip_exif()/u/8968/Savingprivatebrian2b_60x60.gif?f=community){kind=small}
)
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/1100/crop5a1c5df8066e1_cropped.jpeg?f=community){kind=small}
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/1740/shark.jpg?f=community){kind=small}
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/9528/OMAsmall.jpg?f=community){kind=small}
:strip_icc():strip_exif()/u/6152/crop566ea4254bd3d_cropped.jpeg?f=community){kind=small}
