AGN Hardware heeft een interview gepost met Mike Buchanon van S3, over de Savage2000:
Q: Your Four Texel Architecture sounds quite interesting, but also a bit confusing. With the current dual-texture processors, you are only able to take advantage of the extra power with games that support them. This is only a smaller level of games such as Quake 2 and others. Have you worked out a way to have all Direct3D games and OpenGL games work with the four texel architecture, or will the games still have to support them within their engine?A: The architecture is really designed to sustain high fill-rates in a multi-textured environment, so it is primarily designed to be able to handle 2 textures at 2 pixels per clock at a very high sustained fill-rate. A byproduct of the design is that it can handle 4 textures as well. Most content today and in the future will at a minimum have a high percentage of their polygons supporting 2 textures per polygon and we expect this to move to 3 and 4 textures per polygon as we move forward. Once again we will be working with the ISVs on this and we expect that they can take advantage of this through the standard APIs without any special hooks required for our architecture.
Q: S3TL is quite impressive, thanks to the ability of Tranformation & Lighting to bring a new level of image quality to games that is equal to the latest Disney movies. Can you tell us a little bit about your decision to carry the S3TL? Also will you be working to have more S3TL supporting titles coming out from game developers?
A: I cannot really comment on the T&L that will be on NVIDIA's next generation chip. We did not consider NVIDIA when we were designing this. We looked at the APIs (DX7 & OpenGL) and we designed our geometry acceleration engines to be compliant with those APIs and what they were doing. So we intend to support the feature set as it is provided to us as it is provide to us by the two standard APIs that everyone is using. (DX7 & OpenGL)
