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SE: How many passes will environment bump mapping require? How much of a speed hit will using it cause?
SL: Environmental bump mapping is always done in two internal passes. In the first pass you fetch the bump texels, or buxels as they are called. On the second pass, you use these buxels to modify your texture's U and V coordinates. With these new coordinates you fetch the actual color texture.
SE: How much of a speed hit will full-scene anti-aliasing cause?
SL: With the amount of true available filtrate we have, AA will finally be usable in actual game play. Our fillrate of the G3D 2400 will be over 2 Gigatexels, which will be sufficient to implement 2 and 4 pass AA in resolutions up to 1280x1024x32 and still achieve great frame rates. It is going to be amazing. The real goal of the large fillrate is to be able to implement features like full screen AA, 32-bit color depths, 32-bit Z-buffers, 32-bit textures in all modes at all resolutions and still hold frame rate. The G3D 2400 will have an advantage of over 4 times the texel fillrate of nVIDIA GeForce and around 8 times 3dfx's recently announced VSA-100 chip which is the basis for their upcoming Voodoo 5! These performance advantages sound big, but if you really want to accomplish what we are after, then they are required. Fillrate is king in terms of performance 3D solutions, and our XBA enabled products are going to win this race hands down.
SE: Are there any plans on bringing a 3DGlaze product to the Macintosh?
SL: The silicon does support all of the requirements to address this important and growing market in the gaming community. I do anticipate at some point, one, if not more of our board partners will be serving this segment.
SE: What price range will final single and dual chip products fall into? If you cannot say, then what is the target price?
SL: We will announce all final specifications and pricing in March. However I will say that our solutions will be in the current range of what the market is paying for performance 3D gaming cards.
SE: The Bitboys web site states that Glaze3D gives "Tear-free rendering." What does this mean and how is it achieved?
SL: This refers to a GDI+ feature where you can synchronize your 2D operations to the video refresh, removing the ugly tearing of your windows when they are moved or refreshed.
SE: How will you support 3dfx T-Buffer like effects such as depth of field and motion blur? Will you be using an accumulation buffer?
SL: We do have a very efficient accumulation buffer that will support cinematic effects. I am not sure if motion blur or depth of field is where the industry will initially head however.
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