Questions for Gary T (yeah, that Gary T)

[Ailuros]

Hardware TnL has now been around what is practically forever in the hardware world, and yet still even the newest games such as UT2003 don't require it, even if they do allow its use to help things.

UT2003 is a fully T&L optimized game. It spends most of it's time in D3D doing transformations and lighting.

 

[Devo6486]

Optimized, but not required. Works on Voodoo3's.

John Reynolds,

Well, actually you're right. However the holders of the patents, the majority of which at 3dfx were held by Scott, Gary, the gang... are almost always without fail the majority stockholders in the company. You can't exactly recruit them.

And yes, I believe there is a way by which the corporation can maintain hold on technology held by the individuals, however, 3dfx doesn't exist anymore. It can't hold anything. And yes, the corporation is gone, it was liquidated a couple of weeks ago.

 

[John Reynolds]

Optimized, but not required. Works on Voodoo3's.

It's nice that it'll run for college students or those with limited income (at least for home PC upgrading), but 30fps at 640x480x16 and 256x256 textures? Ugh!

 

[Geeforcer]

Wrong.

All companies do it.

Hank Semenec owns the patent to SLI technology, and that's a fact.

He also owns(ed) some of the memory interface patents.

You are mistaken. When you get hired to work for a company to do anything even remotely R&D related, you contract explicitly states that anything you invent, discover develop, ALL the intellectual property you create relating you your field of work while employed belongs to the company and not to you. If that was not the case, a loss of a single employee could cripple or even doom a major corporation. The exceptions would be when the person personally owns the patents prior to hiring and negotiates or when a co-founder of the company exempts himself from that clause during the company’s formations.

I am sure that it would not be a problem to go to a patent database and fish out the patent in question, if its indeed there.

 

[Ailuros]

Optimized, but not required. Works on Voodoo3's.

Yet only because developers decided to spent time on software fallback modes to support as many cards as possible.

It´s then up to the user if the output is sufficient for his needs or not.

 

[Vince]

Vince (aka, Insider),

You've just blown your cover, slick man.

me: "Gary, can you please tell the viewers out there about Vince? wink-wink...You know, VINCE!?"

(meanwhile, 99.9999999% of those reading are like, "Who the hell is this Vince character?")

What was it you said your name was again? See, I don't see any "Vince" anywhere in the plethora of offical 3dfx documents that I have. And I have pretty much all of them.

Who are you and what do you wanta lynch me for? All I did is make a blanket statement and now look at this. I mean, It's kinda funny that I was criticizing people for being phycho about a dead comapny and now your making me into someone I'm not so you can attack me. I mean, come on,

This is official proof that Insider has never worked for 3dfx, or, if he did, was perhaps a janitor or tech support monkey who read the answers to the FAQ off his cubicle computer screen as callers reported problems he didn't understand.

Since I appear to be accused of being an insider (of 3dfx I assume), I never worked for 3dfx, nor did I ever claim that I did. I've been posting here since atleast 1999 and have never stated that, nor would I.

When did I say that I did? All i said is that this boards being infested by these people from 3dfx underground and x3dfx or whatever and it's getting old. Dunno how I made the leap to being an employee... but hey, if it entitled me to free stock options it's all good.

You are mistaken. When you get hired to work for a company to do anything even remotely R&D related, you contract explicitly states that anything you invent, discover develop, ALL the intellectual property you create relating you your field of work while employed belongs to the company and not to you. If that was not the case, a loss of a single employee could cripple or even doom a major corporation

Thats exactly what I was thinking. Casn you imagine the consequences in the console world where platorms are patented in their entirety to end pirating and hacking (legally). Like what if a person whose name as a co-founder of the N64 which is patented descided to turn against Nintendo and start a power-struggle?

 

[Ailuros]

I was just backtracking the questions so far asked and I must have missed that one:

When's he getting rid of that beard because beard is hard to render.

Rev,

Is that the only individual you´d like to ask that question?

 

[ben6]

Ailuros you must mean the goofy looking guy

 

[Geeforcer]

Oh great. Now more multiple personality disorder people...

Sure there's not supposed to be an "X7" after your name, Vince?

I think you are confusing him with some else. He has always used either Vince, Vince13 (TMF, circa 98) or Vince13131 (THF, circa 99).

 

[Vince]

I think you are confusing him with some else. He has always used either Vince, Vince13 (TMF, circa 98) or Vince13131 (THF, circa 99).

Woah... stalker... cool Good to still see you around Geeforcer, how've you been?

 

[Geeforcer]

Woah... stalker... cool Good to still see you around Geeforcer, how've you been?

How could I forget, after all the arguments we had . I am doing very well, thank you. How about you, everything alright? I've seen much less of you since Black Friday, pity since you always knew what you were talking about... well, almost

 

[Vince]

How could I forget, after all the arguments we had . I am doing very well, thank you. How about you, everything alright? I've seen much less of you since Black Friday, pity since you always knew what you were talking about... well, almost

Yeah, I'm actually great, thanks. Had alotta good times arguing you, was funny in retrospect. Been spending alot of time offline, think all of us have been. I'm still here, in a much more voyeuristic style Arguing with you guys made my hairline receed way to soon, besides the whole dynamic has changed - I mean look at this Devo guy. Couldn't even find a unique specimen like him at Tom's if I tried a year or 2 ago!! Not to mention I've forgotten so much of 3D methology and you guys seems to soak this stuff up like a sponge. The technical conversations passed me by awhile ago.

PS. Does Tom's still have an attached forum?

I have resources you couldn't possibly know about. Every piece of reconissance available to me, and that's no small amount, shows clearly that this person and "Insider" are one and the same. It's possible that it's a fluke, that both of these people live within miles of each other, have extrodinarily similar sentence structure, posting styles, attitudes, and opinions, and share nearly if not totally identical claims to knowledge and experience in specific areas as one another.

However, such coincidences all occurring together have a possibility of about 1 in 10,000,000. Literally. Do the math.

Well if you know so much threw your 'reconissance', then get your ass in your black, unmarked helicopter and repel down here and cut my damn grass for me.

Are your serious, or are you just messing with me? I'm totally boggled by how you can confuse me with anyone else, especially someone from 3dfx - which you appear to be obsessed with. I don't even think they had an office in the MidWest. Claims to knowldge, and experiences - uhh, I don't even work in the 3D field. As anyone such as Geeforcer would attest, I work in the financial field and invested in 3dfx. I don't give a shit anymore, my monies elsewhere. There's no obsessive-compulsive relationship that you seem to possess.

 

[ArchAngelCD]

This thread is growing fast...

 

[Prime]

Are you serious, or are you just messing with me?

Sadly enough, he's serious. He's about 6 beers short of a 6-pack, and going downhill fast.

 

[MfA]

Please just go back to whereever you came from, unless you have something usefull to contribute like for instance the patent number for that mythical SLI patent (no need to publish anything from your stack of X-files, all granted patents are on display at uspto.gov).

Its damn hard to come up with any question in cases like this ... the only things Im interested in are forward looking and technical, which stand a poor chance of getting included in answers

Stuff like ...

Will we be seeing any architectural features to make shadowing easier for developers? Stencil buffer shadows have lots of issues, shadow buffers will in their present incarnation always suffer from resolution problems ... a better solutions seems desirable, so we dont need someone like Carmack to get some nice shadows outside of very restrictive scenarios (Even then only with slightly lower quality models than we have come to expect.)

Will programmability of GPUs increase to the point where scenegraph traversal could be done on it? If so would physics and AI and other tasks follow? If so does he see the GPUs transforming into a media processor which in certain settings will be able to get along without any other processor? (Perhaps even in PCs? Having 2 powerfull processors one of which is sitting around doing almost nothing when we arent playing games seems a waste ... even a 3D windowing system like m$ is said to be planning wont change that, that would represent a negligible load as far as rendering is concerned.)

How does he foresee the console market evolving? With Sony now putting enough money into the game to get process technology on the same level as the top IDMs how will the competition fare? If given the chance would NVIDIA be able to negate that advantage through architectural superiority alone while still using standard foundry services? Or does he foresee other players making simular investments and partnerships? (Hell, maybe NVIDIA will become a real man someday?

 

[pascal]

Questions:

1-With GPUs getting so big, fast, hot and feature rich then What about include a superscallar RISC CPU inside the future .9 micron process GPUs (using maybe 20% of the die space) sharing the UMA and running the OS and other applications too?

-With a high bandwith advanced architecture (LMA) UMA the CPU will not need a big L2 cache.
-The GPU could migrate to the mobo with a large UMA.
-The CPU could work at different speed of the GPU.
-x86 could be emulated.

2- Are the OS good enough for gaming?
3- What about CgOS (light real time OS for graphics) with user friendlly Interface and tools for games/entretaiment/multimedia/graphics?

 

[Nagorak]

Definitely ask if nV would consider a multi-chip or SLI solution. Wouldn't it have been to their benefit, with the NV30 rumored to arrive late, to be able to just tell people to buy another GF4 and SLI for double the performance? That way chips would be in produciton longer, OEMs would make more money as their product cycles would lengthen, and consumers could choose either reasonable performance now, and more later, or extreme performance right off the bat, for an extreme price.

I thought 3dfx made quite a bit of money off the Voodoo 2. It surprised me that they didn't continue that dual-card mentality. Particularly now that dual-monitor PCs are almost commonplace--the benefits of two separate 2D engines, as well as two 3D engines that would be smart enough to operate as one (via an SLI cable), would be fantastic. 3D speed, and the ability to simulatneously do some 2D work on your other monitor using the extra 2D portion of the second "GPU." Would the engineering hurdle be too high for such a solution? (They could always offer a dirt-cheap model without SLU capability, for the mass market.)

Think about this a second: how would this work? One of the GF4s would have to be a PCI, and you know how badly an AGP card performs in a PCI slot.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Sorry to dig up this old post and hopefully it's not too late.

I have a really good question and you have to ask it because everyone probably wants to know.. hehe

Q: Does Gary Tarolli visit/regular the Beyond3D forums?


If yes, what does he think of this community.

 

[Typedef Enum]

Sorry if I gave the wrong impression by not updating this thread...

I have already sent the questions out to Gary...I haven't made any further posts simply because I didn't know when I would receive the response(s) from him. Once I receive them, I will make a post letting people know that I will have an interview up shortly...