NEWSPAGE DEUTSCH RIVASTATION - There´s something FISHY when you can read this!

12.01 - Voodoo 4/5 doch erst in April?

Thresh´s Firingsquad made a report from the MacWorld 2000. In this report he speaks about the status of the Voodoo4/5 basis-chip VSA-100. It seems that there are only samples available yet. This would mean the we´ll see retail cards in early april. It´s also unknown yet what card versions will come first.

That's what we were wondering once we learned that cards based on the VSA-100 chip weren't on display at MacWorld. We learned that 3dfx has just taped out first silicon on the chips, they haven't received any samples yet. Keep in mind this is for the PC unit, not the Mac product which is even further behind. We pressed the issue a bit further and learned that 3dfx still feels they can have cards based on the VSA-100 processor available in retail channels by April for the PC, but exactly which Voodoo lines that will be is still unknown.

This is very disappointing news indeed. If you recall the introduction of the Voodoo3, limited samples were available just in time for Comdex, and Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 cards were selling at retail in early April.

If early VSA-100 samples are good and 3dfx can ramp up production quickly enough, they just might make their release date. If not however, and the product could slip into the second quarter, cutting revenue for the first half of 2000.

As mentioned earlier, since samples of the VSA-100 don't exist yet, 3dfx is still unsure which products will be available at launch. It's possible that all cards in the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 line will launch simultaneously but it's also possible that 3dfx may delay the launch of certain models like the more expensive Voodoo5 6000. Nothing has been determined yet. Over the next four weeks, 3dfx should have a clearer picture of the status of the VSA-100 cards, but until then it's anyone's guess.

Read the whole stuff here.

11.01 - Misc Reviews

Mouse Pad Wars - 3D Wars
Ten Maxx Detonator cooler - The Techzone
Ricoh RW7060A CDR - Gamewire
ASUS P3C-E - Riva 3D

11.01 - Video RAM chache guide

Adrian Wong sends a mail the he made a Video Cache RAM guide:

I have just posted the new Speed Demonz Guide on Video RAM Caching! Here are some interesting details about this guide :-

- Over 20 tests were conducted using 7 different benchmarks! - The whole article weighs in at 13 pages with a total of 57 comparison charts! - Total size of article = 610KB

Check out a clip from the guide :-

"Also, remember that the needless traffic through the AGP (or PCI) bus will reduce the bandwidth for texture transfers, etc... The traffic runs both ways since for the L2 cache to store the data from the video RAM, it needs to be sent in through the AGP bus; and when that memory region is read, the data is sent back though the AGP bus to the graphics chip. Because the AGP bus is pipelined and is mainly used for texture reads from the system RAM to the video RAM, the data reads from the A0000h-AFFFFh region of the video RAM to the L2 cache will cause the flushing of the pipeline since the transfer is in the opposing direction and such data cannot be transferred via the SBA port."

Adrian's Rojak Pot

11.01 - 3dfx Interview

Extreme Hardware made an interview with 3dfx´s Peter Wicher:

Extreme Hardware: The various Voodoo4/5 cards specs look great, but could you state the full performance specifications and 3D features for a single VSA-100 chip?

Peter Wicher: Sure. VSA-100 is a major step beyond the Voodoo3. It renders two pixels per clock with a single texture per pixel or one pixel per clock with two textures per pixel. At the minimum 166MHz this provides 333Mpixels per second or twice the fill rate of Voodoo3. We improved the raster efficiency by about 20%, we increased the texture cache size, we added new texture combines and alpha blends, and we added guardband clipping, with a –4k, 4k range, which significantly offloads the CPU from doing 2D clip operations to speed up applications.

We focused on image quality more than anything else: 32-bit ARGB rendering, 24-bit depth buffer, 8-bit stencil buffer, 32-bit textures, 2Kx2K texture size, up to 64MB of frame buffer, 4X AGP, and both FXT1 and DXTC texture compression, and new alpha blends (Alpha subtract, src*src, dst*dst) are the key features. It’s important to note that our texture cache can store textures in compressed format thereby greatly increasing the effective cache size, increasing performance. As far as full-scene AA goes, a single VSA-100 is able to create two jittered sub-samples per pixel. We don’t think that’s enough to do high-quality full-scene AA or digital cinematic effects therefore those features are only being enabled when two or four VSA-100’s are linked together in SLI.

09.01 - New Linux drivers

NVIDIA released new Linux drivers. There´s a new XServer and GLX pair for XFree 3.3.5 and GeForce: NVIDIA driverspage.

09.01 - Reviews

ATi Rage Fury Maxx - Anandtech
ELSA ErazorX - 3DColony
Hercules 3D Prophet - Firingsquad

09.01 - NVIDIA´s & Audio

There are more and more rumors that NVIDIA wants to get into audio sector. It´s unknown yet if that are single audio chips or integrated graphics/audio solutions. Techweb made an article about that:

By designing audio products, the company can continue expanding beyond the PC and follow a path it struck through a recent development deal with workstation maker Silicon Graphics. Executives this week said they plan to bring an audio core to market late this year or early in 2001, but have not yet committed to either a discrete audio chip or an integrated graphics/audio IC

09.01 - ELSA Gloria II Review

GamePC reviewed the ELSA Gloria II with NVIDIA Quadro and 64MB RAM. Quadro is for high end applications on Windows NT and owns a modified cache architecture and is able to generate antialiased lines in OpenGL.

At first glance, we thought we were looking at the wrong card. The GLoria II is astonishingly small for a 64MB video card, usually 64MB+ professional video cards take up full length slots and barely fit in most cases. This card, with twice the RAM as a normal GeForce, is quite a bit smaller than any we've tested. Elsa's custom card design, combined with large 8MB memory chips (most video cards have 2 or 4 MB chips) allow for this card to be nice and small, while staying just as powerful. The heatsink/fan combination is a little larger than your standard video card cooling set, seems the higher clock speed calls for a slightly larger heatsink than GeForce cards.

Read the review here.

08.01 - English Forum part

I´ve made an english language are in the forum! Check it out. The new forum is great! :)

08.01 - AGP Sideband

Some perople reported me of a registry key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\System] - "DISABLEAGPSIDEBAND"=dword:00000000 which should enable AGP Sideband on GeForce cards.

I´ve tested it and AGP List does not show me any sidebanding. A test with 3D ExerciZer also showed absolute no performance changes. Another point is that Sidebanding with v3.xx works without such an reg-entry on TNT and TNT2 cards!

This key seems to be useless

08.01 - New forum is up!!

The nre forum is online - this means it´s not new at all... it´s an update from DCForum99 to DCForum2000. There are many new things lile new smilies, a thread hit counter and a vote system (you can vote threads from 1 to 10(best)). There are also new Admin Functions (Admin (me only) can check IP adresses!).

There´s also a new E-Mail function that sends mail to registriered Users. But only registered users can send mails! I´ll maybe change some icons to the old forum look soon.... too tired now :)

07.01 - Forum Upgrade

I´ll upgrade my forum from DCForum99 to the new version DCForum2000 tonight. So I´ll shut it down from 23:59 - 27sec to 06:07-34sec (or when it´s done). Another question is: Currently the most (only) spoken language in the board is German. Do you want an english language part? And if so... what boards would you like to see? (Graphix, Overclock.... ) Write me a mail with your opinion.

07.01 - New Voodoo3 Overclocker

Uh.. 3dfx News. There´s a new version of the V3 Tweak Util Voodoo3 Overclocker. You can DL it here.

07.01 - Quake3 tuning guide

nV News made an update to its Quake3 Tuning-Guide. There are detailed benchmarks with a Creative Annihilator and Annihilator Pro: Quake 3 Tuning Guide

07.01 - ELSA 3D Revelator reviews

FullOn3D made a review of the ELSA Revelator shutter glasses:

While there are alot of ways to spend 60 or so odd bucks on computer related items, few, if any of them, will have the instantaneous affect, of making virtually all of your games worthy of a second look. The first time that face sucker in Half Life takes a leap atcha, and you fall out of your chair, you'll understand what I'm talkin' about.

The whole article can be found here.

Another Revelator review was made by Rush3D:

From the games & programs that I tried; I had amazing results with Midtown Madness, Episode 1 Racer, 3D mark 2000, Final Reality and Homeworld. Unreal Tournament and other 3D action shooters looked OK. Freespace just didn't look right. I found that in racing games, the games become easier to play because of the depth perception of roads . 3D stereo will add a kick to your 3D action shooters but it will also make them harder to play. The reason for this is that when you add depth perception to a 3D game, another element is introduced: Focusing. Just like real life, focusing on a object in front of you (such as a gun's cursor) means a lost of focus of further objects (such as the enemy), and a focus on the enemy will mean a lost of focus of the gun cursor. A lost of focus will result in a "double vision" which is not a good thing when it comes to aiming. That's why is easier to shoot a real gun with only one eye open, since closing one eye will get rid of the focus-loss double-vision effect. The bottom line is that in almost every game will look better with the 3D Revelator.

This review is here.

06.01 - Scientific Code - Performance comparsion

CPU Review made a perfomance test with 'Scientific Code' on Athlon, P2, P3, Celeron and SGI systems. Here´s the result:

AMD is faster than Piii (about 1.3x) even considering the extra MHz it is still faster.
Dual Piii is nearly 1.8x faster than single therefore Linux SMP works Piii's do perform significantly better than Pii's
Older SGI O200's are actually quite good considering they are 2.5yrs old.

REad the whole stuff here.

06.01 - NVIDIA v3.68 drivers

nV News reports of inofficial v3.68 NVIDIA reference drivers. Get them here.

06.01 - Tim Sweney Interview

Voodooextreme made an interview with Epic´s Tim Sweeney (Unreal, Unreal Tournament) and asks him about future 3D API´s and graphic cards:

VE: Out of all the upcoming and released 3D cards, which in your mind seems to be the most promising? Why do you think that? Which 3D chip maker do you see becoming the industry's leader in the future? Which upcoming or released 3D card will perform the best in your engine?

TS: NVidia has already taken the lead, and has the combination of technical talent and management strength that they are capable of sustaining their lead for the next several years of 3D hardware advances. That's assuming they don't get complacent and start taking it easy after the NV20 ships! :)

3dfx has some outstanding technical talent, Gary Tarolli and crew, but I question whether the company as a whole will be able to execute to the extent necessary to dominate the OEM market, a revenue stream which will be essential to fund next-generation hardware development. "When it's done" works ok for game developers, but it's a dangerous strategy for developing hardware in the presence of agile competitors.

I see the 3D hardware market as supporting two thriving mainstream companies, a high end player: probable
NVidia, but I wouldn't count 3dfx out of the race; and one low-end, high-volume leader, currently ATI, with strong future competition coming from Intel and S3.

For our next engine, there will be a major emphasis on Hardware T&L, hardware per-pixel lighting, and procedural vertex shading -- basically, the key advancements of DirectX8 and DirectX9. We're going to be totally focused on standard 3D API's, Direct3D and OpenGL, so the 3D card makers who work closest with Microsoft are going to be supported the best. Now that consumer 3D hardware has surpassed what high-end SGI machines were once capable of, there's no longer a clear roadmap for future features, so the future is being plotted out by Microsoft, key game developers, and key hardware makers, with Microsoft's DirectX team being the de facto rallying point.

Read the whole Interview here.

05.01 - Generic Revelator drivers

ELSA released a new generic Revelator driver (for non ELSA cards) based on NVIDIA Referencedrivers v2.31:

ELSA Revelator drivers

05.01 - GeForce OC Project

If you want to see what you have to do to run a GeForce DDR with 166/355 an makeit some kilos heavier you should walk to the GeForce Overclocking Project. With a step-by-step documentation:

GeForce Overclocking Project

(But why the hell do they want to cool the RAM????)

04.01 - Quake3 Demoloop

I made a Quake3 Loop-Demo (endless Timedemo) configuration that allows you to stress your system for a longer time, i.e. to check if your overclocked CPU/Graphix card runs stable over a longer time period. Explanation in Readme.txt. Download: Quake3 Demo Loop

04.01 - Creative Unified

Creative released a new version of its Glide emulator Unified released. It now also supports the GeForce card Anihilator. Download probles with of not acepting your Annihilator serial are solved now (the number is on the card not on the box!). Download: Unified

04.01 - Athlon/GeForce and AGP 2X

Aceshardware made a news about Athlon and AGP2x:

Use powerstrip, create a shortcut on your desktop and change the target in the properties to: C:\WINDOWS\PSTRIP.EXE /AGP:2X

And his method works! I verified with PCI list and I definitly saw AGP 2x enabled. Here are the benchmarks to show you the small but existing difference between AGP 1x and AGP 2x: (benchmark system: Athlon 700, Erazor X² (Geforce DDR at 120/300), Gigabyte GA7-IX, Windows 98 SE)

Benchmark	AGP 1x	AGP 2x	Boost
Quake 3 High Quality	82.4	84.1	2%
Quake 3 High Quality at 1024x768	56.9	58.8	3.4%
3D Mark 99 Max (1024x768x32)	6545	6659	1.7%
Expendable 1024x768x32	79.8	80.1	0.3%

It seems like DirectX games don't care about AGP 2x or 1x, but you can notice a small boost in OpenGL Games. Of course the higher resolution the more important AGP 2x gets as more data is moved from the main memory to the videocard.

ThanX to Aceshardware!

04.01 - Beam Screensaver

The Bravo Interactive Group released a new version of their OpenGL screensaver Beam:

The screensaver features deep-space action taking place in an asteroid field surrounded by beautiful nebulas and living stars where small but powerful and dangerous ships fight for their lives. To give the battle some emotion and diversity camera view spins from one ship to another in numerous ways creating very eye-catching scene.

Download: Beam Screensaver (2,4MB)

04.01 - New VIA drivers

VIA released new drivers for the mainboard chipsets VT82C586B and VT82C59:

the 4-in-1 Driver v. 4.18a
AGP Driver 3.59
USB Filter Driver