Here is the first in a series of interviews with industry company executives, PR persons and general know-it-alls. The unique feature of this series is that you, our readers, are the ones asking the questions. The first company to come under the spotlight is NVIDIA Corporation.

In NVIDIA's own words, here is who they are and what they do:

NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), based in Santa Clara, CA., is the global leader in advanced graphics and multimedia processing technology for the consumer and professional computing markets. It's 2D, 3D, video, and multimedia capabilities make NVIDIA one of the premier semiconductor companies in the world. NVIDIA offers a wide range of products and services, delivering superior performance and crisp visual quality for PC-based applications such as manufacturing, science, e-business, entertainment, and education.

Now on to the questions:

Humus asks: Carmack has talked a little about a feature he calls "dependent texture reads", which means you get the texture coordinates for the next texture stage from the color of the results of the current texture stage [like (s,t) = (red,green)]. This way you could implement almost every function of two variables (3 with 3d textures) with linear interpolation with a texture as a lookup table. I'm personally looking into it in my development and would really like to see it implemented in hardware. Without necessarily talking about any unannounced products, are you interested in this feature and to what degree?

NVIDIA: This feature will be implemented in future NVIDIA products in a completely generalized fashion, providing the most flexibility for developers.

Olive asks: Do you plan to participate in the development of a higher level API than OpenGL and Direct3D immediate mode, with scene graph management such as Performer or game engines like Quake or Unreal?

NVIDIA: NVIDIA is API agnostic and supports both Open GL and Direct3D equally. NVIDIA is not interested in offering a proprietary API since both of these have numerous strengths. If someone were to come along and develop an API which had the same level of quality and widespread acceptance, we would of course consider supporting it.

Humus asks: Nvidia cards have sadly enough often been equipped with low quality RAMDAC filters, which has cause the image to get blurrier in higher resolution. Even though vendors are free to choose whatever filter they like, are you in any way going to push for higher quality filters in future products, perhaps promoting that in the reference design?

NVIDIA: Yes, we always try to encourage our partners to use the highest quality components. NVIDIA has a new filter design circuit methodology that we implement on all new reference designs along with guidelines for board manufacturers to follow.

Humus asks: Currently there's no texture compression mode that works especially well on bumpmaps for DOT3 bumpmapping (they get a low_quality_JPEG look). Are you looking into any texture compression techniques which could solve that issue. Currently the lack of a good texture compression mode for bumpmaps is hindering the performance significantly in my 3d engine under development.

NVIDIA: Yes, we are looking at several new forms of texture compression, both for color data, and for non-color (vector/normal data, etc.)