We'd like to welcome you fine folks to this new column 'Sharky's Private Eye' (readers from Great Britain will have heard of Private Eye), which we're hoping will become a regular feature here at SE over the coming months. The purpose of it is to sum up latest/greatest happenings in the hardware world. We talk to lots of engineers, game developers, booth babes (er… never mind them) and personalities in the industry and usually end up with a barrel full (sometimes two) of information. Lot's of rumors tend to fly - some that stick and some that do not. We'll try our best to stick to the ones that stick…What we absolutely won't do however, is break any NDAs. Sorry. As Bruce Hornsby & The Range (no we are most definitely NOT fans) sang in the '80s, "That's just the way it is".

NVIDIA, 3dfx, Matrox, S3 & VideoLogic were all present at the recent Microsoft Meltdown show in Seattle, with bits and bobs to say on future technology (much of which must be kept quiet). What we can say is that NVIDIA were showing off a Transformation & Lighting demo on a 'TNT2 board', which obviously looked rather delightful.

The demo we were shown was a lake with ripples (yeah always a good bet with engineers) and waves made up of a bloody plethora of polygons (we didn't count 'em but there were a lot). Although T&L is incorporated into DX7 and NVIDIA will have the first hardware T&L part (3dfx, VideoLogic & Matrox won't be doing T&L for a while yet), there's obviously some way to go before we're wading through rippling water in 'Quake 4'. What the demo did show was that a Pentium III coupled with a TNT2 won't cut it - you're going to need a hardware T&L part, which offloads work from the CPU (yes even a Pentium III) and instead makes use of the next-gen on-chip capabilities.