NVIDIA's Lead Scientist Interviewed

rtt writes "bit-tech.net has up an interview with NVIDIA's chief scientist, David Kirk, about the PlayStation 3, next-generation architectures and what to expect in PC gaming. From the article: 'We're going to see the next generation of shader-based games. At the first generation, we saw people using a shader to emulate the hardware pipeline, and finding "Hey - this really is programmable". After that, they tried to do a few things with more lights, using perhaps eight instead of ten. Then they started to write material shaders, and they made great cloth and metal effects that we saw. People are now starting to change the lighting model, and are exploring the things that they can do with that.'"

Comments

Re:The issue of power consumption

[Chirs]

Actually, they already are considering it. The 7800GTX has 50% more transistors than the 6800 Ultra, but runs cooler.

Basically they're shutting off portions of the chip when not in use to cut down on power consumption.

This is mentioned briefly at http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07/07/g70_clock_ speed/
and also at http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Nzg0LDI=