Tim Sweeney Q&A

He reminds me of carmack

Don't care too much about his technical predictions...

His predictions during the Quake 3 era:
Tim Sweeney: "2006-7: CPU's become so fast and powerful that 3D hardware will be only marginally benfical for rendering relative to the limits of the human visual system, therefore 3D chips will likely be deemed a waste of silicon (and more expensive bus plumbing), so the world will transition back to software-driven rendering. And, at this point, there will be a new renaissance in non-traditional architectures such as voxel rendering and REYES-style microfacets, enabled by the generality of CPU's driving the rendering process. If this is a case, then the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in 1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution of CPU-driven rendering."
Source: http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/interviews/sweeney.shtm

One more question that was answered via email.

Jacob- Will UE3.0 support predicated tiling to make use of 4xAA on Xbox 360?

Sweeney- Gears of War runs natively at 1280x720p without multisampling. MSAA performance doesn't scale well to next-generation deferred rendering techniques, which UE3 uses extensively for shadowing, particle systems, and fog.

I've always found Tim Sweeney's interviews to be a lot more informative/relevant than Mark Rein's...I mean Mark Rein comes off as likable but full of shit; the king of hyperbole. Sweeny comes off as competant (I mean he's no Carmack in terms of mind boggling tech speak...but he comes close enough)...and doesn't say stupid shit like "graphics==gameplay" in interviews.

Why is that goddamn interviewer chewing gum? I had to stop watching the video and read the transcript instead. Enjoy your gum in hell you gum chewing bastard.

Reminds me of George Costanza when he says chewing an apple on the phone makes him sound more casual.

"Don't do the apples. It's enough already with the apples."

Sweeney: Haha, well that’s hard to say, I don't know much about AM2, but Conroe is a really fantastic chip. The funny thing is very few people in the industry have been willing to come out and say that the Pentium 4 architecture sucks. It sucked all along. Even at the height of it's sucking, when it was running at 3.6GHz and not performing as well as a 2GHz AMD64... People were reluctant to say it sucked... so IT SUCKS! But Conroe really makes up for that and I am really happy to see that, that Intel is back on this track of extremely high computing performance at reasonable clock rates. Not having to scale up to these extremely hot running systems that require a lot of cooling. I think they are on a good track there and if they scale the Conroe architecture up to four and eight cores in the future, then that will put the industry on a really good track for improving performance dramatically at a faster rate than we have seen in the past.

Jeez, Tim looks happy just to be out in the Sun. I'm wondering if Mark Rein has him chained to his PC like some Hindu child in a sweatshop....