While seeming a bit disappointed at not being in the X-Box, GigaPixel's booth was still upbeat with a side-by-side comparison between their GP-1 and a GeForce running Quake III Arena with AA turned on. The GeForce was running NVIDIA's newest drivers, which have a button to turn on software AA. Not only was the GeForce running significantly lower frame rates with AA on, but the software AA looked significantly worse than GigaPixel's hardware AA. GigaPixel told us the box had a 100MHz GP-1 inside.

They also told us they had three licensees. They wouldn't give any names, but since we heard Microsoft was a major investor in GigaPixel and since GigaPixel expected their technology to be used in the X-Box, we're pretty certain that Microsoft is one of those licensees.

3dfx was showing off their Voodoo 5 cards running in both PCs and Apple G4s. The most impressive demo they had was from a system running Falcon 4. Falcon 4 makes most video cards grovel on their knees for mercy, but the Voodoo 5 ran with full scene hardware anti-aliasing smoothly.

But why was it impressive? The visual difference between with and without AA was stunning to say the least. Yes, AA gets rid of the jaggies, which is nice, but it also gets rid of shimmering pixels from distant textures and objects. The overall benefit feels something like the difference between running at 800x600 versus 1600x1200.

You may have to see it to believe it, but AA will make a huge difference to the graphic quality of many if not most games. We were skeptical, but now that we've seen running hardware and not just simulations, we're quite impressed with 3dfx's AA. We will be even more impressed if they manage to squeeze AA into the Voodoo4 product.

NVIDIA did steal a bit of wind from 3dfx's sails with their release of AA enabled drivers. This is no new feature though, but was disabled because, as we mentioned before, NVIDIA's AA is software based and cuts performance dramatically. It also doesn't have the same level of visual quality as 3dfx's or GigaPixel's technology.

3dfx expects to start shipping Voodoo4 and 5 products for the PC by the end of April.