IGN AU: Crysis is probably the other really big DX10 example. We've heard a few reports about the performance of that under DX10 and we have an expectation of how this game will look, based on all the screens that have come out. Can you comment on the performance of that? Will we get to see all of this eye candy running on today's hardware?

Keita Iida: We have nothing but pure confidence - especially with 8800-series cards - that with Crysis, you're going to have a tremendous experience. Again, since they're developing with 8800 as a reference, their target is going to be 30, if not 60, frames per second at relatively high resolutions. With DX10, given that it's a clean break from DX9, there are a lot of new art assets that need to be created; there are a lot of special effects that need to be written. Usually what they do is, when they take the DX9 engine and port it to DX10, they need the underlying renderer to support the DX10 features, and then they add the features on top of it - whether it's art or game-building.

What happens is, first, you need to get the game up and running; get the features implemented. Right now, Crytek, with Crysis, is in the process of adding new features and will soon be at the optimisation stage. That said, we would love to show you the game running on 8800 hardware, but we're bound by NDAs, and that's a decision bound by EA and Crytek; but we have every confidence that, by the time it's ready to be demonstrated to the public on DX10 with the 8800 or whatever advanced hardware is available at the time, it's going to run perfectly fine.

IGN AU: Can you comment on what happened with NVIDIA's Vista drivers? You guys have had access to Vista for years to build drivers and at the launch of Vista there were no drivers. The ones that are out now are still basically crippled. Why did this happen?

Keita Iida: On a high level, we had to prioritise. In our case, we have DX9, DX10, multiple APIs, Vista and XP - the driver models are completely different, and the DX9 and 10 drivers are completely different. Then you have single- and multi-card SLI - there are many variables to consider. Given that we were so far ahead with DX10 hardware, we've had to make sure that the drivers, although not necessarily available to a wide degree, or not stable, were good enough from a development standpoint.

If you compare our situation to our competitor's, we have double the variables to consider when we write the drivers; they have much more time to optimise and make sure their drivers work well on their DX10 hardware when it comes out. We've had to balance our priorities between making sure we have proper DX10 feature-supported drivers to facilitate development of DX10 content, but also make sure that the end user will have a good experience on Vista. To some degree, I think that we may have underestimated how many resources were necessary to have a stable Vista driver off the bat. I can assure you and your readers that our first priority right now is not performance, not anything else; it's stability and all the features supported on Vista.