ZDNet have posted a Q&A with Dave Kirk, Nvidia's chief scientist and talked to him about the future of PC and Console graphics. Here are some of the Q&A:

What is the limiting factor for the quality of 3D games?

One of the disappointing things for us is that we bring out a new piece of hardware like the GeForce3 and time passes but there still aren't many games coming along to take advantage of it. No developer can develop for a new technology before they have it, and the time between us getting a new technology (we have developed) and shipping it is only a couple of months.

Xbox is a unique (console) platform because it is not painful to program, (and) so it did not take long for developers to get competent with it. In contrast, when the PS2 launched it was so difficult to program that all the games looked like PSOne games: they had the same shading, and nobody looked at the screen and thought 'wow.'

The way I see consoles work is that the first generation games are 'learning hardware' games. With the Xbox the graphics hardware is GeForce3, so I would expect the first wave of games to be impressive but not amazing. But the second wave--that is when the developers will really take advantage of the platform.

There will always be a difference between games on a PC and games on a console, because console games developers develop for a fixed platform. On the PC, developers are always on the 'just learning' part of the curve. But consoles are a fixed platform, and this Christmas is when we will start to see games taking advantage of effects available in the Xbox and be really be amazing.

You can read the rest of the Q&A here.