Wavey: Speaking of Drivers. 'Mad.Dugan' (we know who you are) on the 3dfxgamers message boards mentioned that Rampage, although being an entirely new architecture from Voodoo, may still have Glide compatibility. How will this transpire? We know that historically the Voodoos were built for Glide / Glide was built for the Voodoo and OpenGL has been layered over the top of Glide - presumably this won't be the case with Rampage?

Future products still have the capability to run Glide, as they are not that fundamentally different than past products in terms of past-product features. By that I mean they will have many new features, while paying attention to backward compatibility. Hey - we're still rendering texture-mapped triangles and not voxels!

Whether OpenGL is layered on top of Glide or not, is really an implementation detail for 3dfx to worry about, and not reviewers or consumers. Consumers should care about performance, visual quality and stability. There are pros and cons to layering OpenGL on Glide, but that is for us to be concerned about, not consumers.

Reverend: Any part(s) of Windows (all versions) would you personally like to see changed that can affect 3D graphics and games for the better? In other words, any "3D graphics chains and locks" in Windows?

We have continual nightmares with gamma settings . If, as in the next question, John Carmack gets his wish, then support for these new types of surfaces will be needed.

Makram: In one of his .plan, John Carmack said that he is pushing higher bit precision and wants full 16bit floating point colors throughout the graphics pipeline. What is your opinion on this subject (is it good or bad)? And when can we expect to see products supporting it?

It is good, very good. I have spoken many times about the value of high-quality pixels, so we are in agreement. No comment on future products, sorry.

Wavey: We've seen a number of times on the Voodoo 3/5 newsgroups that you were very keen to see people's reactions to V5's FSAA looks. Now that Voodoo5 has (finally) been around for a few months, are you pleased with the reaction? Or do you feel slightly cheated because of the lateness of the product and that so much PR had to go into pushing the feature while the card wasn't available (and the competition 'adopting' the feature in the meantime as well)?

Yes, I am pleased. Those who have seen it are usually very impressed, and as we claimed - once they see it, it's hard for them to go back. What disappoints me is that due to the nature of the FSAA quality improvement, it really has to be seen to be appreciated. Even though we've tried hard to show people what it can look like with various static and dynamic pictures on the Web, there's no substitute for taking a Voodoo5 for a ride. So there are still many people out there who have not seen FSAA in action and who don't understand what it really means to the gaming experience. There are also those who have seen it and still don't think it's that great - and that is fine - that is their opinion and they are entitled to it. I've seen more than enough people who are ecstatic about FSAA to make it all worthwhile.

Makram: In a past interview you said that FSAA, Massive Multi-Texturing and Overbright lighting are features that developers are looking for. Now can you tell us what Overbright Lighting is and why developers want it so much?

Reverend: Yes, and is this still the case with developers? Other than the possibility of using multiple lightmaps, if we have T&L, why would we need massive multitexturing?

Yes. We constantly talk with developers and I am still convinced that these features will result in a better game experience than any other set of features. Overbright lighting is defined as allowing for colors to exceed the normal [0,1] range within the 3d pipeline and perhaps even the framebuffer. This means the graphics pipeline can better represent the huge dynamic range of lighting that exists in the real world.

Having T&L doesn't change the equation - T&L allows you to have more triangles in the scene, which would typically be used to add more objects. It doesn't improve the quality of the rendered pixels. Thus, T&L and the features I mentioned are really very different and independent. Even with T&L, you still need massive multitexturing and other features such as overbright lighting to improve the quality of the pixels.

Reverend: If I were to design a graphics board with T&L in mind, would there be any benefits in having separate and individual Main and T&L processors instead of an all-in-one-chip integrated design?

There are advantages and disadvantages to each design. But I'd rather not go into the details of such a discussion, it's a very complex area where assumptions such as die cost and driver architecture play key roles.