Monday, November 1, 1999

T&L at Beyond3D -- 10:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Beyond3D has an excellent article up explaining the inner workings of hardware-based transform and lighting (as used on NVIDIA's GeForce and S3's Savage 2000). The article concludes with interviews with NVIDIA's Nick Triantos and 3dfx's Scott Sellers.

This article is not light reading by any stretch of the imagination, but it's definitely worth the effort.

Having read through Q&A's it seems to me that the Q&A with Sellers was a chance for 3dfx to take pot-shots at the GeForce. Two things to remember: 1) A number of Sellers' arguments are based on conjecture, not on actual tests; 2) 3dfx's next chip (Napalm) will not ship until February, the GeForce is here now. Four months is an eternity in the 3D graphics biz, and even once Napalm ships it still won't have T&L, putting 3dfx almost two full product cycles behind NVIDIA and S3 in this regard.

I know that 3dfx is and always will be on the mega-high-fill-rate bandwagon (which isn't a bad bandwagon to be on). It will be interesting to see how much fill-rate that full-screen anti-aliasing takes up, not to mention if 3dfx can actually put out a chip that can do 32bit color (and a true OpenGL ICD, for that matter).

News for 11/01/1999

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