Work at 3dfx
Márton: Could you describe an average day you had at 3dfx? You got up in the morning, had your coffee, headed towards the office, and (or... :)...
Paul: Average day. Mmm... Drive my mother to work ;) dead early in the morning and try to stay awake enough to make it to the office. Once in, stick on kettle and then walk to my machine and turn it on, and read my email until the kettle ready. By this early time in the morning (about 8 AM) there are only a few of us in the office so we generally have breakfast together. And then straight to work, grab the latest source from the source control in San Jose, using our 2 MBit internet link :). Possibly using Napster to brighten up my day. Lunch time consisted of searching the local records for vinyl versions of what I had downloaded...
Johnny: My average day... Get up early to beat the morning rush hour traffic on the way into the office. I hate nothing more than sitting bumper to bumper in traffic. When I arrive at work I normally read my email over breakfast and plan my work for the day. As Paul stated the first job involves getting the latest driver source for our source control database. There are usually quite a few changes made overnight because of the time difference between all the various offices.
Hirdetés
My day then varies quite a bit. One day I may have to fix a driver bug that occurs in a popular game. Another day I could be helping a developer with problems in a game that is yet to be released. Other times I get to work on new driver features (such as support for the next version in the DirectX API). Lunch is always a time to get some fresh air and a change of scenery. Which means a trip to the chip shop or a workout in the gym (when I'm feeling health conscious).
Márton: If I am correct, you were working on drivers/3dfx Tools for the Voodoo cards. What exactly driver development consists of? Obviously, you have to create the interface for the Glide, D3D and OpenGL APIs. Are you given a certain task of, let's say, creating a module for the OpenGL drivers, or patching a certain bug in the last release, or...?
Paul: I can only speak from the 3dfx Tools side of things. The whole tools project was initiated by the Belfast office a number of years ago, when we were still STB. It's goal was to provide a simple interface to all driver tweaks across a wide range of graphics cards.
As the tools is a long term project, it is a tight team that has been working together for several years. Initially the project was specced, with everyone having a share in authoring the documents. The whole project was split into modules that were divided into the following areas:
- driver controls,
- driver interfaces,
- common libraries for the tools,
- and the tools themselves.
I worked on the full range, but I tended to specialise in the driver controls and driver interfaces.
Johnny: Sustaining Engineering involves fixing bugs and adding new features to legacy products (Voodoo2-Voodoo5).
All bugs are entered in a bug database with a full description of how to recreate the bug and how severe the bug is. Each entry in the database is then assigned to a particular engineer. All major bugs have to be fixed before each new driver release.
The driver development work is not as modular as the 3dfx Tools work. Generally development work can be split between Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D and O.S. In the Belfast office people tend to specialize in certain areas. I mainly work in Direct3D.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
