Q&A con nVidia

Q2: Now let's switch to some more timely issues. Your introduction of the world's first GPU into the PC graphics market was regarded by many analysts as a revolutionary step forward in the development of 3D accelerator chips. Some graphics manufacturers decided to follow your footsteps, others - and here I mean especially your, most probably, greatest competitor, 3dfx - did not. Recently Alf Covey from 3dfx has justified his company's policy saying "There are many reasons why we chose not to implement T&L with the Voodoo5 (lots of which are public knowledge. WE feel that there are some logical steps that need to be followed to arrive at the 3D solution. By adding more triangles, you add more edges, creating more jaggies. It seems logical that you need to solve the FSAA problem, first, then add more triangles in the future. The processor is doing a great job of T&L right now, and out performing the current T&L engines in most cases." How would you comment on this argumentation?

A: Anti-aliasing is far too controversial these days and certainly doesn't deserve all of the discussion. All current implementations (ours and others) are extremely simple, basic implementations. In almost all cases, users end up preferring to run in high resolution versus anti-aliased since the performance impact is the same. Even so, GeForce2 MX supports full-scene, order-independent, high performance hardware anti-aliasing.

As for T&L...if you look at the Isle of Morg demo or our special Quake level you can see how T&L can be implemented to afford gamers an incredible level of detail. Take a look at our list of T&L enhanced titles www.nvidia.com and you will see that support from the developer community has been terrific. This feature allows art to become a defining factor in game design.