Shack: What thinking went into the recent Mac support announcement? Do you see the gaming market there increasing, or are you maybe hoping to help drive such an increase?

Steve Nix: Well, Apple has obviously been doing well. iPod sales have been strong, and that's driving a new audience of people who have never owned Macs before. There was that existing audience of people who have always been Mac users, but now you're getting new Mac users too. At the same time, with the new Intel architecture, it's really easy to get that code over there. Plus, we use OpenGL, and Macs use OpenGL, so the rendering path was already there. We've been very pleased with the performance results on Mac.

Shack: How about less nitty-gritty developer-side things? What can people expect out of the engine on the front end?

Steve Nix: Sure, I mean first and foremost it runs really well across the core platforms we're addressing--Mac, PC, Xbox 360, PS3. We're already at a high framerate on all those platforms with the exact same assets. There's no stepchild platform, it runs equally well across all of them.  We'll share more very soon, but it's also an extension of our MegaTexture solution, to where it's not just MegaTexture on the base terrain anymore. The MegaTexture extends to the entire world, including objects and characters. Really, you're completely eliminating texture constraints, and for console developers it's one of the major constraints they deal with. Everyone makes the game look really good at the beginning--they pile on textures, pile on textures--but then you make the game look worse and worse as you approach ship. You absolutely don't have that concern with id Tech 5. You can make the game look better and better--you can lock gameplay and just have artists go to town, with six artists working a map simultaneously with zero impact on performance or stability. That's a huge win.