3dfx was on hand earlier this week to showcase some technological features of its next-generation video card, commonly referred to as the Voodoo4 (code named Napalm). While company officials wouldn't divulge any details about the board itself, 3dfx executive VP and CTO Scott Sellers spoke face-to-face with GameSpot News about some of its more eye-catching features, which 3dfx calls the "T-Buffer."

　　The T-Buffer technology is a proprietary visual special-effects engine that 3dfx hopes will blur the line between the graphics you see on most PC games today and those found in Hollywood blockbusters. While that hope might be slightly out of reach for now, T-Buffer technology does bring real-time computer graphics a step closer to the prerendered cutscenes found in many of today's games.

　　In layman's terms, T-Buffer technology will enable 3dfx's next-generation card to execute five distinct visual effects previously unavailable to other 3D accelerators. These effects are: Full-scene Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur, Depth of Field Blur, Soft Shadows and Soft Reflections. Let's take a closer look at T-Buffer.

　　Full Scene Anti-AliasingSince the first board to use T-Buffer is still months away, 3dfx ran most of the demonstrations on a US$50,000 Quantum3D Mercury emulator box. The first demo shown was Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (AA), a process that smoothes the jagged edges found in 2D and 3D games. AA has always been considered the Holy Grail of 3D gaming, as it has yet to be accomplished without taking up precious CPU overhead. T-Buffer's technique, however, not only provides full-scene spatial AA with no performance hit whatsoever, but it's also completely compatible with almost every Glide, Direct3D and OpenGL game on the market today. Simply select it from a control panel, and suddenly your favorite game boasts all the visual niceties that come with true AA.

　　Sellers ran through a series of pictures and noninteractive demos to showcase T-Buffer's AA, including several "before and after" slides of Quake II and Barrage. None, however, showed off the technology's full potential like Need for Speed III, which was shown in playable form with T-Buffer AA enabled, running alongside a standard version of NFS3. Both games ran at the same speed, but the version with T-Buffer enabled lacked the other's jagged edges and flickering polygons. And all the visuals looked remarkably polished.

　　Motion BlurWhile not nearly as sought after as Full-Scene AA, Motion Blur is another feature of real-time rendering that had previously been unattainable. 3dfx used its own proprietary demo depicting two futuristic drag racers to display T-Buffer's implementation of Motion Blur. In essence, the technology simply takes several increasingly transparent snapshots of the moving object, in this case a dragster, and trails them behind it, much like a comet's tail. The end result, while amusing to watch, seemed a bit unrealistic.

　　Depth of Field BlurMovie directors have always used Depth of Field Blur, or Focal Blur, to direct the audience's attention around the movie screen by shifting the focus of their cameras on and off certain objects. 3dfx, using the same drag race demo, showed T-Buffer's ability to perform this same visual trick. The camera showed the two dragsters revving their engines in the background, then suddenly shifted its focus to a policeman on a hover bike in the foreground. The technique used was impressive, and did a better job mimicking real-life Focal Blur than the previous demo did for Motion Blur.

　　Soft Shadows and Soft Reflections3dfx didn't show off T-Buffer's ability to perform Soft Shadows or Soft Reflections, although the company assured us that objects in future games running on T-Buffer technology will cast shadows and reflections that gradually diffuse and become fuzzy, instead of the hard and jagged shadows created by stencil buffers.

　　The first card to implement these T-Buffer features isn't scheduled to arrive until fall, according to 3dfx, which leads us to believe that this whole announcement could be a reflexive maneuver against the recent nVidia NV10 news and speculation that has been surfacing on the Web lately. It's interesting to note the different roads these two companies are traveling in their quest to improve visual quality. Loyd Case, Contributing Editor, Technology for GameSpot and Computer Gaming World, explains, "3dfx is focusing on rendering quality with its new, proprietary T-Buffer technology. NVidia, on the other hand, is supplying a chip that will allow game designers to radically increase the triangle count in their games, provided they use OpenGL or the DirectX 7.0 transform and lighting engine. In both cases, you get better image quality. NVidia is solving the ‘square neck' problem (if you've ever played Dark Forces, you know what I mean). 3dfx wants to make 3D rendering more visually attractive."

　　And from what we've seen so far, T-Buffer is indeed an attractive, if not curious, technology. More details are sure to emerge about T-Buffer and the Voodoo4/Napalm in the very near future. In fact, don't be surprised if 3dfx announces more visual enhancements to T-Buffer in the coming months. We'll keep you posted.