GamePC heeft een verslag gepost van de Game Developers Conference 2000, die afgelopen week 10.000 game developers in San Jose bijeen bracht. De grootste aankondigingen op de GDC kwamen ongetwijfeld van Microsoft en ATi, daarnaast was er ook minder prominent nieuws van Sensaura en Aureal, nVidia en 3dfx. Laatstgenoemde demonstreerde de mogelijkheden van full scene anti-aliasing:
3dfx was showing off a few Voodoo5 boards with alpha hardware and alpha silicon. T-Buffer effects, including demos of full screen spatial anti-aliasing (FSAA) and temporal anti-aliasing, were shown on a variety of games including legacy titles like Test Drive 5 and Falcon 4.0 and newer titles like Quake III Arena. I was very impressed with the image quality of FSAA gameplay. Even at a resolution of 640x480, FSAA makes the resolution appear much higher and very clean. FSAA will be application independent (the game doesn’t have to be programmed for it), API independent (Direct3D, OpenGL and Glide will all be supported) and OS independent (3dfx was showing this on a Mac as well).One thing to keep in mind about FSAA is the fact that the chip needs to constantly keep generating 2 or 4 frames at all times for the function to be effective. This eats up a lot a memory when enabled. A 32 MB card will allow for 4 sample 800x600 anti-aliased screens, while a 64 MB card will allow for 4x 1024x768 with FSAA. While this may seem like a limitation, the quality increase under FSAA is really incredible even at the lower resolutions. 3dfx reps stated that FSAA is a requirement for high polygon models, as smaller polygons and textures tend to create visual artifacts when rendered on the screen. In their opinion, hardware T&L is the logical step after FSAA. Expect the Voodoo4/5 boards to hit around the April timeframe.
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