More on the Future + Apple

How much of a difference does a hardware-accelerated buffer (accumulation buffer/T-buffer) make for full-scene AA, motion blur, or DOF?
I don't really understand the question. If the question is how much of a visual difference does full-scene AA, motion blur, etc. have on overall visual quality the answer is a very large difference! Once you've experienced the T-Buffer technology and seen it for yourself, it is almost impossible to go back to aliased-style rendering like the GeForce. It really is that visually stunning and addictive.

3dfx announced motion compensation support for DVD/Mpeg2 back with Voodoo3. What other technologies are you considering for video acceleration/playback? HDTV support?
Actually, we did not announce motion compensation for Voodoo3 because it does not have motion compensation. Compare our DVD playback performance and quality against a part which has motion compensation, however, and I bet you won't notice one bit of difference. We have incredibly good DVD drivers and very solid hardware video capabilites. Clearly with the launch of the Voodoo3 3500TV we are placing an increased importance on video functionality. We intend to be the leader in video capabilities much the same way we are for 3D capabilities.

What is your opinion of AGP? 4X? Fast Writes and Sideband support?
AGP provides a much faster bus to transfer texture and geometry data, so it's definitely a good thing and substantially improves the capability of PC-based 3D graphics. AGP 2x was better than AGP 1x, and AGP 4x is better than AGP 2x. When AGP 4x based systems are actually going to be available at real consumer-level prices is a whole separate matter entirely, however.

What do you think of Apple's new G4?
By all accounts, the G4 appears to be a very powerful processor. In particular, the AltiVec technology integral to the processor is what can really boost performance. But it should be noted that developers will need to write code to specifically address AltiVec's capabilities. Apple's done a good job getting the word out and a number of developers have already announced they'll be Altivec-enabling their current applications. Its going to be interesting to see where the actual acceleration benefits will be applied and how dramatic the benefits will be.

How much faster is their Velocity Engine over SSE or 3DNow! ?
The Velocity Engine is an Apple marketing term which refers to the AltiVec technology of course. And, again, there's a variety of ways in which it can be applied. But it's clear that it's going to greatly benefit any application that can take advantage of data parallelism and that means 3D graphics, video and image processing. I don't think we're in a position today to share any performance benchmarks comparing it to SSE or 3Dnow! but the Velocity Engine appears to very fast.

3dfx just officially announced support for the G4. Will we be seeing a Voodoo3 part for the G4?
We announced support for Apple's new PowerMac G4 along with their announcement of the hardware at Seybold. Certainly the V3's a possibility - it has both PCI and AGP 2x slots. But I don't think we're on record yet regarding our product plans for the G4.