3dfx Interview (September 1999)

Well first off you have to realize that much of the 3D technology available for consumers today was first productized in very expensive workstation products in the past. That being said, the T-Buffer is a much more cost effective way to implement many of the effects which previously required a very costly Accumulation Buffer, which was only found in high end professional graphics solutions (note that even though OpenGL has supported Accumulation Buffer for some time, no mainstream PC graphics hardware has ever had hardware support for it). The T-Buffer is much more efficient, both in terms of amount of memory required and the amount of bandwidth required relative to an Accumulation Buffer, however, so it lends itself much more readily to consumer applications. But just because something was introduced in the workstation market first doesn’t diminish in any way how exciting that technology can be for consumers who are now able to experience it for the first time.

The same point can be said about nvidia’s claims of "changing the world" with their hardware transform and lighting capabilities – hardware transform and lighting has been done in professional workstations for years so the capability of doing it in hardware is certainly not revolutionary by any stretch. Nvidia has simply migrated the technology into the consumer space.

Well, as I think most people recognize, 3dfx has always been the king of fill-rate. There is no doubt that utilizing the novel T-Buffer capabilities requires additional fill-rate. As we said during the T-Buffer technology disclosure, enabling the T-Buffer capabilities will lower overall fill-rate. However, we believe we have sufficient fill-rate in all products which include the T-Buffer technology such that even with the T-Buffer enabled games will be able to sustain 60 fps at 1024x768 resolution. Of course, fill-rate requirement is very much dependent on the game itself, so while we can’t guarantee that every single game will be able to achieve this level of performance, we certainly think that the grand majority will be able to.

Sorry, mum’s the word until the product announcement. We’re very excited to tell the world though when the time is right!