3dfx Voodoo5 5500

This technique is used to increase the sense of motion the gamer experiences. What is done here is the object in motion is blurred to give the gamer a more realistic illusion of speed and motion.

Depth of Field Blur

Depth of field blur technique is used to get the gamers attention towards a specific part/image of the scene by focusing on that part and un-focusing on the rest. Movie directors often do this by focusing their shot on a foreground object and then blurring the background so that the object in the foreground gets the full attention of the viewer.

Soft shadows and reflections

In real life shadows & reflections normally have soft edges, but in many games and 3D applications these shadows are too sharply cut off and don’t give a realistic look. This is another area where the t-buffer can really improve the 3D gaming world.

Texture Compression

With the advanced 3D content in today’s games it necessitates the use of more textures at higher resolutions to render more detailed and realistic images. Simple it may sound but the problem is it takes much more memory to store those large numbers of textures. Increasing the size and number of textures used in a scene also increases the amount of memory bandwidth required for texture lookup. By use of texture compression technology it allows content developers to create textures at higher resolutions and use more textures in a given scene, while simultaneously reducing the memory bandwidth required for texturing. As compression reduces the storage required for a given texture it’s possible to store more textures in a given amount of memory. FXT1 is 3dfx’s open-source, cross-platform compression technology that gives developers a good compression rate and an efficient set of compression algorithms.