Mike Andrawes, bekend van AnandTech, heeft een interessant interview afgenomen met Shane Long, president en CEO van Bitboys Inc. Uiteraard veel info over hun Glaze3D superchip, die in het derde kwartaal in massaproductie zou moeten gaan. Hieronder vast een paar vragen:
[Q] Tell us a little about the Glaze3D and what makes it so special.[A] We have designed a completely new approach to 3D acceleration, Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture. XBA technology was invented during the design of our current 3D-graphics architecture. XBA consists of the eight-texel/four-pixel rendering pipeline, extremely wide 512-bit memory bus and our memory management logic. The memory management logic works as a highway system tying together the embedded DRAM memory, the external SDRAM memory, AGP memory and all units, which want access to the memory. A lot of the XBA inventions are behind this memory system, which handles 768 bits of data (eDRAM+AGP+SDRAM) every clock cycle, resulting in the massive bandwidth of 12.5 GB/s.
This huge bandwidth enables us to do everything in true color; we are not really interested in any 16-bit performance and dithered images. The bandwidth also allows us to do full-scene Anti-Aliasing with real supersampling. Although rendering game graphics at 1024x768 true-color resolutions requires around 2.5 GB/s of memory bandwidth, doing this with anti-alias enabled requires 10 GB/s of memory bandwidth! To say this in another way, products equipped with only external SDR or DDR memory are not able to do full-scene anti-aliasing at realistic speeds. The XBA architecture based products are really the first chips capable of improving the image quality with Anti-Aliasing.
[Q] The Glaze3D originally sounded great on paper when it was announced long ago, but by the time it's actually available, 3dfx should have their Voodoo 4 & 5 products, while NVIDIA will be looking to NV11 & NV15 to keep them going. How do you see the Glaze3D stacking up in such a competitive market?
[A] We feel that the part will be very competitive and with extraordinary performance due to the only 8-texel engine and the memory bandwidth to actually achieve huge filtrates. In terms of texel fill rate, 3dfx will need the V5 6000 four-chip solution to even stay close and Nvidia will still only be half of the Glaze3D 1200 product. The Glaze3D 2400 being double again that performance level at over two gigatexels will clearly be the market leader in fill rate. We do believe that our architecture is superior.
Net als 3dfx mikt Bitboys met de Glaze3D meer op gigantische fillrates dan onboard T&L oplossingen, zoals nVidia op dit moment doet. In ieder geval, als videokaarten gebaseerd op de Glaze3D echt in september verkrijgbaar zijn is de NV20 van nVidia ook alweer bijna klaar. Ik ben benieuwd hoe dit gaat aflopen 
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