CSim: Could you give Combatsim a brief outline of your card specifications please.

Mika: Glaze3D(TM) is the fastest yet consumer-level integrated 2D/3D graphics processor core. Delivering 400 million dual textured, illuminated, fogged, alpha blended, anti-aliased, Z buffer pixels per second, the Glaze3D(TM) sets a new standard on 3D graphics performance.

Highlights

• Scalable architecture
• Balanced architecture
• 2D and 3D acceleration, a single chip solution
• True color rendering pipeline
• True color framebuffer
• Unmatched performance
• Trilinear mip-mapping
• Programmable triangle setup engine
• Four simultaneous trilinearly filtered textures in a single pass
• No performance penalty on translucent surfaces
• Bilinear bump mapping, also with a surface texture
• Anti-aliasing

CSim: How do you achieve that fill rate?

Mika: The main bottleneck in pixel fill rate is the memory bandwidth. We have solved this by using Rambus DirectRDRAM memories that will also be used in PC Motherboards in '99, so the memory price should be reasonable. With DRDRAM we get 6.4Gigabytes/second memory bandwidth which is required to achieve 400Mpixels fill rate in 32bit true-color.

CSim: What special features will it incorporate...anistrophic, bi-linear or trilinear filtering?

Mika: Both bi-linear and trilinear are natively supported inside the hardware, and Glaze3D can be used to do anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing with multipass techinques just like Riva TNT for example.

CSim: What is the maximum resolution @ color depth?

Mika: 1600x1200 32bit true color.

CSim: Have you tested the silicon with any games? Do you have any framerates yet?

Mika: With our proprietary PCIBuilder(TM) environment we have been able to run games like Quake on Glaze3D emulator. We have not announced framerates yet.

Click to continue . . .

CSim: Can you say in applications like flight simulations how much better they'll run with Glaze3d? What visual benefits will your chip have?

Mika: One important feature in Glaze3D is that it doesn't get any penalty from translucent surfaces. This is very important as future games will use more and more atmospheric effects like clouds, fog, explosions and so on. And of course everything is calculated in true 32bit color.

CSim: With that power, the board will be CPU-limited. What is the point of that much power if the CPU cannot keep up and therefore the game's framerate is limited?

Mika: CPU technology is always getting faster, and any extra power that CPU cannot use to drive a 3D accelerator can be taken advantage of by increasing the screen resolution. Doing so the 3D chip has more work and will be balanced with any CPU you might have.

CSim: What is the MINIMUM specification processor this card will need to work really well? We know that you can use Voodoo2 for example on a Pentium 90 but it doesn't work really well until you get to Pentium II 233.

Mika: I would say the most critical factor is the application, as the games for example that have a lot of tasks for CPU, like AI, physics modeling etc. So, just like with Voodoo2 you can still benefit by getting the maximum pixel fill rate even with Pentium 90.

CSim: Will you deliver a dedicated 3D board, which is usually more powerful than the 2d/3d combinations?

Mika: In Glaze3D the 2d/3d combination has been in our design from the very beginning, so we don't get any performance penalty from having integrated 2D.

CSim: Presumably, it will be fully compatible with Direct6 and 7 (when it appears).

Mika: We are working with Microsoft on DirectX, so Glaze3D will definitely be compatible with future DirectX releases. Our company Bitboys Oy was the inventor of the Bump mapping method that Microsoft licensed and incorporated in DX6.

CSim: What is the likely cost of the card? When will it be released?

Mika: It will compete with the products from 3Dfx, nVidia etc, so the price will be at the same level with them. We expect to see products based on Glaze3D by Q2'99.

For full specs supplied by Bitboys go to Glaze 3d