Now that both the R300 and NV30 series of board have been around for some time we are getting more familiar with the major differences between the two architectures. The biggest differentiator between the competing architecture lies in the choices the two main IHV’s made with their Pixel (Fragement) Shader model - ATI’s general purpose Pixel Shader utilises a single high precision mode that covers all prior shader models, whereas NVIDIA picked multiple Pixel Shader precisions with varying performance levels. We talk to a number of developers, Including Epic’s Time Sweeny and Muckfoot’s Tom Forsyth, to find out about how they are dealing with multiple precisions and even whether they actually want to.

"Tim Sweeney: Let's distinguish games that are designed for a broad spectrum of hardware (say DirectX 7 to 9) and games designed from the ground up for DirectX9 and later. If you're supporting DX7-9 then you're happy with whatever new features you can get out of the hardware, and can work around the precision limitations, because you have to anyway for DX7 and DX8. If you're targeting DirectX9 as the bare minimum, then you simply won't want to bother deal with the lower-precision formats."