We've received a ton of email over the years from GD readers, asking us about Dolby Surround in PC games, what it all means and what to look for.
Recently, we had the chance to catch up to Dolby's busy Developer Relations Guru, Jack Buser to ask him some of these nagging questions.

After we published our article about the new Far Cry 1.2 patch late last week, I had the chance to speak to Cervat Yerli, CEO and President of Crytek, the development house that created Far Cry. In addition to his official titles, Yerli served as technical and creative director for Far Cry, so he was one of the principal figures involved in making the game. I asked Yerli about Crytek's efforts in developing the new patch for the game and about working with Shader Model 3.0.

This interview confirms that 3Dc will be coming in patch 1.3, as well as HDR effects!

Last year we published an Interview with Gabe Newell where we discussed Half-Life 2's progress; recently we had the chance to catch up with Doug Lombardi, Valves Director of Marketing to find out a little more on HL2 and CS:

If (when ;) ) Half-Life 2 is successful and meets expectations will there be a Half-Life 3? More specifically; are there any plans for a part three now?

When I was over recently in Canada I had the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with ATIs CEO Dave Orton - there has been a delay in getting this on the website due to other commitments but im pleased to say at last we have this available for the community with a few more questions I asked in the interim. Id like to thank Dave for sitting with me and taking the time to answer some questions, he is a laid back guy and very approachable.

Before you ask, yes I did ask him about Linux drivers - how does a bimonthly driver release sound?

Just got word that the guy's over at ActiveWin have posted up their interview with Steve Ballmer! Here's a byte.

ActiveWin.com: In all of your years at Microsoft, what do you consider your finest achievement?

This evening (June 4th) Epic held a MOD chat with IRC chat with Steve Polge and Cliff Bleszinski off of the UT 2004 team.
The chat was a bit messy and off topic untill the mods at the IGN network got the whole "how do we do this" cleared up.
Makes me wonder why these events are never better organised. :P

ATI's Radeon X800 series completed a one-two punch of killer developments for graphics chips, as ATI countered NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 with its own 16-pipe monster capable of astonishing performance. These new chips are very evenly matched in terms of performance, so we've interrogated ATI's David Nalasco about places where they differ: shader models, OpenGL performance, antialiasing methods, and the cards themselves. We've also discussed some of the questions raised by the controversial discovery of ATI's adaptive trilinear filtering algorithm. Read on for an in-depth discussion about the hottest graphics issues of the day.

The guy's over at Beyond Unreal have thrown up their chat with Epic's Tim Sweeney about Unreal Engine 3!

BU: You are talking about dropping detail levels, what about a 3.2 or something similar?

TS: That will kind of be a low end system for our game if you look what's going to happen two years out. The technology is very scalable and will run a factor of twenty more detail on the highest end PCs currently available. It will be like running Unreal Tournament 2004 on a 1 GHz PC. It runs okay, but not nearly as good as a 3.2.

There is an interview with professional gamer mYmcoRey on Volarigamers. Corey recently won the Danish Acon4 LAN finals and got the second place in the Scandinavian Acon4 finals. He will as a result represent Denmark at the ACON4 Finals in Shanghai, China :

"How does it feel like to be a professional gamer, some people ask. Is it really a dream too good to be true? VolariGamers had the chance to catch up with Corey (also known as mYmcoRey), who is well known for his real time strategy prowess and is one of the few true professional gamers."

We have posted a question and answer session with NVIDIA's Tony Tomasi, Senior Director of Desktop Product Management and Ujesh Desai, General Manager of Desktop Graphics Processing Units. As expected, the topic of conversation is the GeForce 6 Series and some of the questions are technical in nature.

This is in from freshtekradio.com: Firstly, we conducted a live interview on our last radio broadcast with Intel’s technical public relations director Dan Snider on his take of E3 and what’s new and hot this year from the Intel camp. The audio streams from our website and can be found at this link:
Interview

During a recent visit to Toronto and ATI's HQ Beyond3D got the opportunity to briefly sit down with the man who's been steering ATI for the past few years and who is to soon assume the mantle of their CEO, Dave Orton. We discuss how ATI is now organised, how focused it is on the desktop market and chat about their latest line of graphics chips.

Hardware Zone have thrown up a no holds barred interview with MSI's Vincent Lai.

MSI is one of Taiwan?s largest motherboard manufacturer and they have captured the hearts of many users around the world. One of the top-tier motherboard manufacturers in the world, MSI has grown to be a company that produces not only motherboards, but a whole lot of other interesting hardware as well. Today, we talk to one of their top executives, Vincent Lai, Manager of MSI?s Marketing Department. This interview was conducted late of last year and due to the sensitivity of the topics discussed, we were only allowed to release the interview today.

AS NVIDIA'S VICE PRESIDENT OF Technical Marketing, Tony Tamasi is more than just a marketing guy. He listens to customer feedback, helps define product specs, and then once the products are ready to roll, he acts as NVIDIA's liaison and chief technical evangelist to the rest of the world. As you might imagine, he's had his hands full with the launch of the GeForce 6 series of GPUs, but he was kind enough to take time and answer some of our questions about NVIDIA's impressive new graphics processors. Among the subjects discussed are pricing and availability for the GeForce 6800 family, the uses of Shader Model 3.0 for real-time apps and games, the NV40 architecture, and some intriguing clarifications about those Far Cry screenshots that recently hit the web.

Interview with Henrik Sebring of Massive Entertainment on the game Ground Control 2.

Read More for a log of the Chat session.

Just got word from my good mate Anton Nilsson over at Nordic Hardware that their Interview with ATi's Terry Makedon is out! Here's a snip.

[NH] How do you prioritize what games/applications should get the most attention? Do you simply go by sales figures, the graveness of the problems or perhaps some other preferences?

With the recent release of Epic?s Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo we thought we?d catch up the Unreal?s engine developer Tim Sweeney at Beyond3D. We ask Tim on his thoughts on the current generation of 3D graphics technologies, what he expects to see in the future and how that will be useful for games development.

TweakTown's Thomas Simmons got on the phone with Rahul Sood, the CTO of VoodooPC, recently and quizzed him regarding their new fanless Rage f50 desktop line of products and the company's goals for the future in the performance systems OEM market. Sit back and take a peak behind the scenes of VoodooPC

The ATI Multimedia chat Rage3D held earlier today was another great success with many very good questions answered by ATI.

If you missed the chat, you can view an edited log here.

Tonight ATi had a live chat with Rick Bergman from ATi.

I was there and took a transcript and asked a couple of Q's.

About the Speaker: (from ATi.com)
Rick Bergman is Senior Vice President of Marketing & General Manager, Desktop Business, ATI Technologies Inc. He is also a member of the Company's Executive Management Team.

Read on...

FiringSquad recently had the opportunity to chat with ATI's President and Chief Operating Officer, Dave Orton. Mr. Orton and his team from ArtX are largely credited for ATI's reemergence in the high-end graphics market. Over the course of the interview, Orton addresses the K8 market, PCI Express, DirectX 10, and ATI's partnerships with Microsoft and Nintendo on their next generation console. Read all about these topics and more inside!

DriverHeaven recently had a chat with Valve's Gabe Newell about Half life 2 and apart from being a very nice guy to talk to he made some very interesting comments. Here is a snip: Driverheaven.net: From a developer's perspective when creating Half-Life2 how did the major graphics card companies assist in resolving any issues? Were they quick to respond with driver fixes or technical responses, and would you have hoped for more input from them? Gabe Newell: If you look at the surveys we've done of the hardware our customers have (on Speakeasy.net), there are two companies that dominate - NVIDIA and ATI. We've spent a lot of time working with both companies. Right now for the DX9 generation, ATI is significantly ahead in terms of absolute performance and price/performance. We are working pretty hard with NVIDIA to try to optimize the situation with regards to getting their performance up to snuff. We spend more of our time with ATI working on new features like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR) which is a new technique to create more life-like lighting.

Grant Collier, a developer of the game Call of Duty, which already seems to be a success even though the game is only being released later this week, has been interviewed by HomeLan Fed about the game.

Here's a snip:
HomeLAN - Did you expect that Call of Duty would receive this much pre-release attention?

Grant Collier - No way! We currently have 30+ fan sites and 50+ mods going. If we were a sequel to the #1 First Person Action title, then maybe. But for an unknown contender that hasn't even shipped, this is all beyond our wildest dreams.

Head over to Homelan Feds for the interview

Just got word from my good mate Zardon at Driver Heaven that he's thrown up their interview they recently had with Gainwards Wayne Tritton and they also have up coverage from Lanwar20!

Veridian3: The recently released Cool-FX range of Gainward Geforce FX's is a radical change to the cooling provided by all other FX manufacturers. What prompted Gainward to make such a bold move and do you expect to see other companies following your lead?