Another feature being pushed at Meltdown, this time by ATI, was volumetric textures. Volumetric textures are textures with an extra dimension. Their main use appears to be as light maps, where they are well suited to per-pixel drawing. They can also be used for detail textures and volume visualization. Volumetric textures are one of the features that will be used by programmable pixel shaders.

Another new feature being pushed by ATI is called N-patches or Normal Patches. N-patches can increase the geometry of a model and smooth out the blockiness thereby providing better-looking graphics. You can think of N-patches as tessellating a model to higher complexities using bezier curves to calculate how the model will be modified. N-patches could theoretically make a relatively simple piece of character geometry look much more complex and smooth. One weakness of N-patches is that they cannot be done with any of the new sophisticated skinning techniques. This may kill future adoption of N-patches. N-patches are done inside a programmable vertex shader.