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SE: More Geometry Data vs. More Texture Data:
Which is more important to overall visual quality?
What takes more time/effort/skill on the part of developers?
Scott Sellers: Boy, that's a tough question. It really depends on the application. For a flight simulator, for example, where you're trying to do really photo-realistic imaging, having more texture data is probably more important. But for a first-person shooter or a sports sim, having more geometric complexity in the scene is probably more important. So, I'll "cop out" and say both are important!
In terms of difficulty for the developers, we have found that finding good modelers is much more difficult than finding good arts. So, at least based on our own experience doing our own internal demos, we have found that increasing geometric complexity with good, high quality models is more difficult than increasing the size of texture sets. Modeling in 3D is difficult, and as a result those modelers used to create 3D worlds and characters are very hard to find.
SE: T-Buffer and D3D:
How will T-Buffer effects like anti-aliasing, depth of field and motion blur be accessed with Napalm in Direct3D games?
Scott Sellers: Well, Direct3D already supports full-scene anti-aliasing, so that's not an issue. To do the more advanced T-Buffer effects such as motion blur, depth of field, etc. we do need additional support in the API. We are currently working with Microsoft to ensure that these advanced T-Buffer effects become part of the API. Whether this is through an extension mechanism or through the base API itself is still undetermined at this point.
SE: Anti-Aliasing vs. Higher Resolution:
For FPS games, more detail (higher resolution) would (generally) be preferable to smooth image quality (anti-aliasing) - will players have the option to go for higher resolution instead of anti-aliasing and what performance gains will they get over Voodoo3?
Scott Sellers: Well, we're not talking today about our next generation products, so I can't comment on performance relative to Voodoo3. However, with all our future products which support the T-Buffer capability and full-scene anti-aliasing, there will certainly be options for the user to force anti-aliasing off, so that higher resolution and/or higher performance can be realized. Just to comment on a common misconception that seems to be prevalent, we have never said that for our next generation products that full-scene anti-aliasing will come at no performance degradation relative to aliased rendering. What we did say, and we continue to stand behind, is that the full-scene anti-aliasing performance is significant and able to achieve 60 fps at high resolution in many, if not most of, the games available.
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