 10
Questions with 3dfx's Andrew Humber
Wednesday, June 07, 2000 - Hilbert
Hagedoorn
Way back in March
this year I met with 3dfx's Andrew Humber on the CeBIT in Hannover/Germany. Andrew is PR Stud/Manager.
At that time they showed us the prototype of the Voodoo 5 5000, now
just before the final release of the Voodoo5 series videocards we
still had some questions. These questions are actually dated a month
ago and have been answered this week (we had some problems contacting Andrew). Anyhow, it turned out to
be a very nice read. Here we go:
[Guru3D] Can you Describe how 3dfx's new and future products are being positioned to differentiate themselves from the competing 3D cards on the market.
[Andrew] One of the key new features of the Voodoo5 5500 is the full scene
anti-aliasing - how do we differentiate it? Simple, it's better!! But in
reality we're using a jittered subsample technique, that essentially makes
it a far more efficient way of smoothing out those jagged lines we've all
become forced to accept in 3D gaming, and takes much less of a performance
hit than other techniques being employed by our competitors. We built our
solution from the ground up and we're positive that what we are shipping out
to our customers right now is the best solution to this problem currently
available to the desktop PC user.
We've also added a T-Buffer cinematic effects engine capable of producing
movie-like effects, designed to bring the kind of computer graphics we know
and love on the big screens to a desktop near you!! As developers begin
implementing these effects you will be able to see how much more of an
immersive experience the game becomes - Motion blur, Depth of field are all
common cinematic tricks and we think the developers and the end users are
going to get a real kick out of using these.
I'd love to tell you about the future stuff, but I'm afraid I'd have to kill
you!! (I'm willing to take that chance Andrew,
now tell me!)
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[Guru3D] How does 3dfx's implementation of FSAA differ from those
used by other chipset manufacturers? And if different how is 3dfx's better?
[Andrew] I'm going to steal a quote from an interview Peter Wicher did with Voodoo
Extreme on this one - he explains the differences extremely clearly ! "3dfx's FSAA uses jittered subsamples, nVidia's FSAA uses aligned
subsamples. What they've done is a last-minute hack in their video back-end
to get a checkmark: I'd really call it "video AA." We show in detail in the
white paper on our website (http://www.3dfxgamers.com/view.asp?IOID=1984)
that our two-sample FSAA is equivalent to nVidia's video AA, and that our
four-sample AA would be equivalent to 16 samples with nVidia's method (which
I doubt their part can even do). If we wanted to focus on nVidia's 16-bit
world we believe that the image quality of our 16-bit, 2-sample FSAA is
virtually indistinguishable from nVidia's 32-bit video AA: we give users the
same image quality with 4 times the fill rate!
Hope that answers your question!
[Guru3D] Considering what nVidia accomplished
with one chip back in November in the form of the GeForce. Does the Voodoo5 line represent a good long-term
investment for gamers given that there are quite a few other chip makers
releasing cards this spring that will be able to compete with the V5 with
features and speed?
[Andrew]
3dfx has and always will pride itself on producing the most compatible
products on the market - our FSAA works with every title you own, old or
new, whether it's DirectX, OpenGL or Glide - this gives the end user a lot
of security when it comes to being able to buy and play whatever they want.
In terms of features, again, our FSAA is certainly the best around at this
time and we've shown how this technology can be implemented well and stably
as a true hardware fix.
[Guru3D] Recent V5-5500 benchmarks taken from alpha boards show
that Quake3 is extremely playable with FSAA turned on, despite the performance drop that it encures. How much will adding other T-buffer effects on top
of FSAA cost in terms of fillrate?
[Andrew]
Almost impossible to tell at this point and this is all very much down to
how the game is written and coded in the beginning. Until we start seeing
titles at a fairly advanced stage it will be hard to tell. As ever, an
evaluation based on an alpha board and beta software is generally inconclusive and may not be indicative of what the final product will be.
[Guru3D] Assuming top-of-the-line consumer 3D cards will remain at
a $150-300 price point, how many years do you believe it will take to get
Episode I-quality graphics into real-time 3D video games for the consumer PC market?
[Andrew]
As I mentioned, the T-Buffer is a positive step towards integrating
movie-like effects into real-time 3D gaming , but to achieve the kind of
graphics you're talking about requires enormous amounts of fill-rate and for
the moment this is out of everyone's reach. I've heard of research done into
what kind of hardware performance would be needed to achieve this kind of
reality and it's far and above what everyone is working with right now.
Ballpark - at least 5 years - but that's really a wild guess!!
[Guru3D] How long will gamers have to wait for the quad-chip
V5-6000 graphics board? Will it be a viable commercial product or a niché gadget?
[Andrew] The 6000 should be available as early as next month, we showed first samples
at E3 and the response from the press was fantastic - I've never seen so
many open mouths when we showed Quake 3 running at 2048 X 1536 at stunning
framerates - it's going to be one hell of product! High-end cards such as
the 6000 won't necessarily appeal to a wide consumer market, but we already
know of a lot of people that are just waiting for it - the price tag at $599
is more than your average graphics board, but for 4 X VSA-100 chips and
128MB of RAM it's a strong price! You also have to think back to Voodoo 2,
when that first came out, it carried a $299 price tag and a significant
amount of people bought two so that they could SLI them together - if you
think about that, I'm not worried about the 6000 selling, particularly with
the fill and frame rates I've seen it achieving!
[Guru3D] FSAA works out of the box on all games. What level of
support to game developes need to give so that the other T-buffer efffects
can be used? Can you name any developers who are planning to use T-buffer
= effect's in their upcoming games?
[Andrew]
I'll defer to our Developer Relations Manager for this one - Rory Duncan
"Other T-buffer effects include : Motion Blur, Soft Shadows, Soft Reflections and Depth of Field. Different things need to be done at the
coding level to enable these effects, but the work required is actually
relatively minimal, compared to other effects/optimizations with our competitors. For example, motion blur could be implemented by an engineer in
1-2 weeks, depending on the title. Depth of field effects will vary in
complexity and therefore in time-to-code due to their very nature so it's
hard to say. However, we are not in the habit of asking developers to re-write their graphics routines."
[Guru3D] With so many games coded in DirectX or OpenGL, what does
3dfx see for the long-term future of Glide?
[Andrew]
And this one!! "Glide will continue to be supported by 3dfx for the conceivable future. By
open-sourcing Glide, more developers will have easier access to this technology, which we hope will be of benefit to them. It's clear that for
certain types of games, Glide offers some unique and powerful ways of coding
particular routines, e.g. there is at least one MS published game that I
know of which was developed in Glide because it was the only API that could
create the realistic movement and effects desired."
"In general, the more standardization, the better, especially when it comes
to API's. For PC game players, compatibility is a big issue, and it's no
good having multiple OS's and API's if you need to have multiple versions of
a game. However, it is true to say that no-one has produced the absolutely
perfect API - yet. Therefore, it is good to have a little bit of divergence
in order to keep API engineers creative in their work!"
[Guru3D] Will the drivers for the Mac Voodoo5 products include
support for the Altivec commands seen on the G4 based apple products?
[Andrew]
It's certainly possible, however this is yet to be determined - as we get
closer to the launch of our Mac products, you will see more information
being issued on the exact details.
[Guru3D] How does one get a job as a 3dfx executive so that they
to can play "gab-ass" with the Lara Croft model at trade shows? (j/k!!!)
[Andrew]
What can I say - just lucky I guess - oh, and extremely bright and talented
:))))
Andrew - Where's your hand going. And lara ... is that a pistol in
your hand ?
Thanks Andrew, we all appreciate your
answers. A couple of questions where actually questions from users. I
hope this clarifies up things a bit.
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