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FS: Why did you go with a multi-chip solution instead of a single mega-chip, like Nvidia or S3?

Petri: Flexibility. A mega-chip is mega-expensive for users who don't need all the available performance. Extreme game players can take advantage of the multi-chip configuration.

Are you concerned about power issues with the AGP bus? Will your 4-chip solution require an external power supply similar to 3dfx's "Voodoo Volts" for the V5 6000?

We are not concerned with the power budget of the AGP slot with our architecture. We are focusing on our single and dual chip configurations and have both our thermal and power issues well under control without external power supplies.

FS: Speaking of the V5 6000, how will the Glaze3D 2400 stack up against 3dfx's gigapixel solution? The V5 6000 and Glaze3D 1200 will have close to even fill rates, how much of an advantage will eDRAM give the Glaze3D in terms of Quake 3 performance?

Shane: We will have to see, I don't want to speculate at this point. If you believe that both products are viable and will do what they say they will do, than 3dfx will need the V5 6000 four-chip solution to even stay close to our single chip Glaze3D 1200 in terms of texel fillrate performance. The 2400 being double again that performance level at over two gigatexels! Do they have an 8-chip solution yet announced? We do feel very confident that our architecture is superior, but to limit being flamed again by some as "vaporware" we will let our hardware do the talking.

FS: How much does eDRAM cost compared to normal 5ns or 6ns SD/SGRAM?

Shane: We know that we will have a major total solution cost advantage over our competitors that must use very high speed DDR to even have half of our current bandwidth.

FS: Does Glaze3D completely remove rasterization/memory bandwidth from the bottleneck? What resolution and framerate do you envision for 3D games by the end of 2000?

Shane: The frame rate is a constant, 75 Hz. Although you could have more, it doesn't make that much sense. Same goes for resolution when we have 1280x1024 and true color and 1600x1200. Monitors have to improve before users have a need to go up from there. What people sometime forget is that peak fillrate requirements can spike as games go from a depth complexity of 4 in general use to as high as 20 due to effects such as explosions, light maps, etc. This causes the 3D engine to either be able to handle the peak needs or drop frames. XBA allows us to meet the demands of even the most complex game fillrate requirements and still deliver consistent frame rates at killer resolutions and color depths.

We will definitely have even more bandwidth in our next generation so saying that the bandwidth bottleneck is complete eliminated would be wrong. But for the time being, 12 Gigabytes for the 1200 and 20 Gigabytes+ for the 2400 is enough. To give you an idea of our current bandwidth lead, the newly announced 3dfx VSA-100 chip, which is the basis for Voodoo5 has less than 3 Gigabytes of bandwidth.