Here’s two big interviews. Guys from “Papervision Daily” and “Dreaming in Flash” (be sure to have both links among your bookmarks ) had the good idea to take an interview from Ralph Hauwert (from Papervision3D core team) and Rob Bateman (from Away3D core team).
Both interviews are about what’s next to new Astro features and what kind of benefits is PixelBender (AIF) giving to their engines.

I highly suggest to take a look to those interviews, just to be aware of what’s going on

here’s the links:

• http://dailypv3d.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/interview-with-ralph-hauwert/
• http://www.dreaminginflash.com/2008/05/21/interview-with-rob-bateman-away3d/

..and here’s the little summary:

1. Features such as native 3D APIs won’t affect both engines because they’re based on drawing triangles (skewing)
2. Otherwise, new drawing APIs will strongly improve both engines performances, vectors of drawTriangle instruction will replace arrays of very long drawing instructions
3. PixelBender will enhace shaders’ performances, Ralph talks about 10 times faster… Both are quite sure this technology will be used on shaders.
4. Both are assuming it would be great (but not a priority) to implement vector render (as Five3D already does)

stay tuned,

byez