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

03.02 - Glaze not shown at CeBit

Bitboys Oy told me that we won´t see their new hot baby Glaze 3D at CeBit this year:

Bitboys are now really busy with real work of finalizing the new chip for market. Boys are not attending Cebit this year. There will be more press information available in March-April. We are expecting a great deal to happen before summer.

03.02 - T&L Games

Activision sent me a copuple of screenshots of their upcoming games Vampire The Masquerade - Redemption and Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force:


Screenshots, zum Vergrössern auf Bild klicken

Vampire The Masquerade - Redemption is based on a Real-Life rolle-playing game that also has many fans in Germany. The game uses a 3D Engine that was made for the game by Nihilistic Sofware. More very impressive screenshots can be found here.


Screenshots, zum Vergrössern auf Bild klicken

Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force uses the Q3A 3D-Engine to let us life the advantures on the spaceship Voyager. You play in the role of an officer that is in a special forces commando to protect crew and ship.

Both games can be found on NVIDIA´s T&L game titles list - so they´ll take advantage of graphic cards with geometry acceleration (GeForce, Savage 2000).

02.02 - Quake3 TC

S3 bzw. Diamond Underground offers new custom Quake3 Arena maps with high detail compressed textures. These Textures do only work on Diamond Viper II, Diamond Stealth III S540, Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme or other S3 Savage chipset cards. It does not run with GeForce. The reason is that NVIDIA could´nt implement S3TC in thier OpenGL part due to licence problems. You can download the levels here.

02.02 - Team Alligator Demo

GT Interactive released a demo of Team Alligator. The Demo allows us to fly a bit with russias new batlle-helicopter KA-52. The game runs in Direct 3D. The steering can be modified for skilled players in several steps. It´s a bit hard to learn all the keys you need to get the bird into the air - the part with the keyboard settings is missing in the readme file and the manual folder is a bit hidden in the archive. But you can download a keyboard layout from SIMHQ.



Screenshots, zum Vergrössern auf Bild klicken

The shots were made on an ASUS V6800 DDR Deluxe in 800x600-32Bit. Download: Fileleech - The demo shows some drawing faults at high banks with v3.72 reference drivers.

02.02 - ASUS V6800 Deluxe review

RIVA 3D reviewed the V6800:

Even though it was delayed due to unforeseen circumstance, our review (and I think the first on the 'net) of the ASUS V6800 Deluxe is now ready for public consumption.
And of course, it's chock full of good information on every feature of the card, plus benchmark comparisons with the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro. Here's a teaser:

"A short while back, I reviewed the ASUS V6600 deluxe video card. In the review, I gave the ASUS card a perfect score of 5 out of 5, and deservedly so. The only thing
that I felt could possibly be better than the V6600 Deluxe was the upcoming V6800 Deluxe, which features DDR RAM, but an otherwise identical design and layout to the
non-DDR V6600.

So does the V6800 deservedly offer enough over the V6600 that the difference in price is worth it?" (mehr)

02.02 - 3D Prophet DDR Test

RIVA Extreme reviewed the Hercules 3D Prophet:

The one thing that is quite appealing, however, is the price of the 3D Prophet. I was able to find it for a measly $169 online and $199 for the retail box version. If you are someone who is looking to get a great quality GeForce card on the serious cheap tip, grab the 3D Prophet. It will provide you with an awesome piece of hardware to smoke your online friends with, and you won't have to whine to your parents/boss/spouse for video card $ for a great while. (mehr)

02.02 - Bitboys Interview I

Anandtech made an interview with Bitboys Oy about thier upcoming 3D chip Glaze 3D:

The Glaze3D originally sounded great on paper when it was announced long ago, but by the time it's actually available, 3dfx should have their Voodoo 4 & 5 products, while NVIDIA will be looking to NV11 & NV15 to keep them going. How do you see the Glaze3D stacking up in such a competitive market?

We feel that the part will be very competitive and with extraordinary performance due to the only 8-texel engine and the memory bandwidth to actually achieve huge filtrates. In terms of texel fill rate, 3dfx will need the V5 6000 four-chip solution to even stay close and Nvidia will still only be half of the Glaze3D 1200 product. The Glaze3D 2400 being double again that performance level at over two gigatexels will clearly be the market leader in fill rate. We do believe that our architecture is superior.

...

Your online FAQ states:

"The dedicated floating point unit we have on the Glaze3D is capable of doing T&L, but we intend to leap into totally new geometry performance level with our forthcoming geometry processor."

So will the Glaze3D support T&L or not?

We will not have hardware geometry support in the first XBA enabled products.

Read the whole interview here.

02.02 - Bitboys Interview II

Also Firingsquad made an interview with Bitboys Oy:

How are your OpenGL and D3D drivers coming along? Will support for open-source Glide be included? Has your hardware simulator PCIBuilder program allowed you to develop the hardware and software concurrently?

We currently have a team working on Windows, Linux, OpenGL and DirectX drivers. They have been using our PCIBuilder for a while with good results. We intend to add a second team shortly to work on the drivers as well.

We will probably not ourselves support Glide drivers and other lesser or dying APIs. Perhaps a third party will be interested in doing drivers for Glide, but all of our new software that is currently being released is for DirectX and OpenGL only. (Petri)

...

FS: Can you explain the programmable FPU for the Glaze3D 1200 and 2400? Does this count as a "GPU?"

See below…

FS: How does this FPU this differ from Nvidia's GeForce, and how does it differ from Thor?

Petri: Thor is the project name for our geometry engine project. It will not be part of the initial launch of XBA products in the third quarter of this year. Intel is handling the geometry quite well today, and the AGP bus is really one of the key limitations. We have seen better utilization of the silicon by implementing an optimal host interface.

The Thor project is a more advanced in its design and is capable of techniques that are not possible with today's brute force geometry processors.

FS: Why will the Thor geometry processor only available on the 4-chip solution?

Petri: We are discussing how to implement Thor into the XBA architecture based chips and not release the separate geometry processor. This will allow us to distribute the geometry load for multiple chips and support Thor in various configurations.

Read the whole interview here.

02.02 - GeForce Probleme auf ASUS P3C-2000

Hardware.fr got hands on a document PDFDocument that explains that ASUS new i820 Mainboards P3C-2000 have some problems in combination with GeForce. It seems to be no voltage problem. It a problem of signal noise that occurs with 100/100Mhz CPU´s:

Some distributors reported that systems built with ASUS P3C-2000 motherboards and NVIDIA GeForce256 based AGP VGA adapters seemed to expose system malfunction running 3D application when the systems were heavily loaded. After looking into the problem, we have with the following conclusions:

This problem was not found with systems built with 133MHz FSB CPUs. Neither was it observed with other AGP 4X capable graphics controllers such as Matrox G400 and S3 Savage4. But for 100MHz/100MHz CPU FSB/SDRAM configuration, the problem would occur with the noise introduced by the combination of GeForce256 AGP graphics controller configured in AGP 4X mode and part of the P3C-2000 motherboards delivered before end of January. It is recommended to enable the reserved test mode by bridging the cap on 2-3 first for the JP5 jumper on the motherboard whenever applicable. The test mode is designed to increase the noise margin and most systems were proved in our lab to workaround this problem in the test mode.

You can DL the PDF-Document here.

29.01 - once again 3DMark 2000

HardOCP´s 3DMark 2000 benchmarks started new diskussion about the benchmark. Now Beyond 3D made an article about that:

Now, a big misconception is that people think this is a benchmark for testing in-game performance. It's pretty obvious that this scene is not at all representative of a game. A normal game is not built from one single object repeated several times. A real game has numerous different objects, some much more dynamic (more than just translating, rotating and scaling) than others. If this scene is not a representative for a game, then what is this? Well, this is a peak throughput test, something that tests the maximum T&L performance of a system. So, it is essentially a synthetic test, just like a fill-rate test is. The fill-rate test in 3Dmark also contains a scene that is not at all representative for a game. It contains a scene that allows you to test the maximum peak fill-rate of an accelerator.

Read the stuff here.

29.01 - GeForce card by Gigabyte

Gigabyte made a TNT2 Pro card and now they start to sell GeForce cards, the GA-GF2560. The cards comes in a pretty cool blue board layout (as always). You can find the specs of the card here.

29.01 - Erazor X W2K

ELSA now offers an Windows 2000 Beta driver for the Erazor X series for download. The drivers are based on reference v3.72 drivers: Erazor X Windows 2000 drivers

28.01 - SoF Ghoul Rendering System

If you want to know more about Raven´s Ghoul Rendering System that was used in their new game Soldier of Fortune: Click here.

Hardware Lighting

Takes advantage of 3D Accelerator cards that have hardware lighting capabilities, such as the GeForce 256. This increases rendering performance and also allows GHOUL to use more lights to represent the world.

28.01 - WXP about D3D and OGL

Voodooextreme found a message of WXP´s (Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens (WXP's nVidia tech demo)) Patrick M. in a message board where he makes a commenton Direct 3D and OpenGL:

My impression is that D3D on the GeForce is slightly faster than OpenGL. However, the GeForce OpenGL drivers are VERY fast and I think the difference between the two is probably not noticeable to most people.

We chose DirectX because when we spec'd the project out (about 2 years ago) many card manufacturers had fast, stable DirectX drivers, while OpenGL was still struggling to catch on (full implementations, at least).

Thanks to John Carmack, OpenGL is now an almost required element in a video card driver package. Some companies have still lagged behind in their OpenGL support, but for the most part they are equivalent.

The blessing and curse of DirectX is that it is constantly being updated and improved. Since we're here in Seattle it's pretty easy for us to get help from Microsoft on all the newest stuff though... =)

28.01 - Fan Sites speak about 3dfx´s new Voodoo4/5 cards

AGN asked several Fan-sites about the new 3dfx cards:

5. Do you see 3dfx's decision to disable the T-Buffer effects and Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing on single VSA-100 video cards as a good move? Should they let the user decide if they want to enable or disable the effects at the cost of a performance hit?

Dave 'Octane' Morrison (VE) - The amount of horse-power needed for T-Buffer effects just would not be present on the single chip VSA cards. What's the point of using motion blur if you're only getting 10 frames per second?

Marco 'BigWop' Chiappetta (Voodoo3.net) - As a user, I say no, it’s not a good move to disable the effects, because I’d like to have all the control over my hardware, no matter what the performance hit may be. For 3dfx though, it’s a double-edged sword…

Do you leave the features out, and have the card running at full speed at the expense of image quality? Or do you allow people to enable them and take a performance hit, at the risk of making your product seem “weak”?

Either way, you’d have people complaining. Plus, I could almost see some of the dishonest sites benchmarking a single chip V4 with all features enabled vs. a TNT2 and trying to convince everyone the TNT2 really is faster…they swear…

Mazi Bahadori (3D Wars) - Let the user decide. They may get fewer FPS, but if it's what they want, let them have it. The whole idea of a video card is to make games
more enjoyable. If that means cutting out the stair case effect in straight lines, then so be it. If they want to cut out T-Buffer and AA on a low end card, I'd make it optional. Not everyone can afford to pay a three hundred dollars for a video card, but that does not necessarily mean that they shouldn't be able to use the extra features, does it?

Read the whole stuff here.

28.01 - Soldier of Fortune

Raven released the demo to the long awaited game Spiel Soldier of Fortune. The game uses a modified Q2 engine that can´t compete with Q3 - but it delivers really great graphics at all. The demo started pretty much diskussion about violent games here in Germany. Activision Germany keeps distance to the US Version og the game - they won´t sell this version. At all the game is nothing for kids. The violence shown in the game is pretty hard. The game itself is OK and a mix between SIN and Kingpin.



Screenshots, zum Vergrössern auf Bild klicken

The shots were made on a ASUS V6800 Deluxe in 1024x768-16Bit. Download: Fileplanet.

The demo offers an option called: "Ghoul Light Method". 3DGPU asked Raven about it and it seems that this is a Hardware T&L Option:

What exactly does the Hardware option for the GHOUL lighting system do? I know it is there for GeForce cards, but does it use both the transform & lighting on the onboard T&L?

Yes, the "hardware" option uses full hardware T&L, the only title I know of that does.

26.01 - Abit ships VGA cards

Abit announced the delivery of their new VGA cards. The new cards will ship in the next days: Pressrelease

26.01 - Quadro DDR Review

Anandtech got hand on a NVIDIA´s Quadro with 64MB DDR-RAM. Quadro is clocked with 135Mhz and has some modifications to GeForce. For example a higher clockspeed of 135MHz and it can draw Anti-Aliased Lines. It is not for gaming but forusers with 3D applications running Windows NT:

The addition of the DDR configuration to the Quadro design mix further enhances NVIDIA's ability to compete with the established players, 3Dlabs, Intergraph, and E&S, in the professional graphics card market. When this reference Quadro DDR design reaches the marketplace soon it will likely be in the form of a ELSA GLoria II DDR graphics card, since ELSA has been selected by NVIDIA to be exclusive vendor for Quadro based professional graphics cards.

Read the review here.

26.01 - Outrageous 3D GeForce DDR review

3DGPU made a review with the GeForce card of the new manufacturer Absolute Multimedia: Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D GeForce DDR

26.01 - GeForce and T&L 2

HardOCP tested it again. This time with "hints" from NVIDIA for 3DM 2000. The results are still questionable.: GeForce und T&L 2

Mike of nV News asked NVIDIA´s Derek Perez about ZDNet´s 3D Winbench 2000:

Me: Now that the cat's out of the bag in regards to how 3DMark2000 handles T&L, does Ziff-Davis' 3DWinBench 2000 handle T&L as it was intended (via Direct3D exlcusively)? My guess is that it does and gives a much better indication of the performance of the GeForce T&L engine under Direct3D. Is it possible that you can verify this?

Derek: Yes, 3DWinBench is cool...

Comment: For me, 3D Winbench is not a realistic Benchmark at all. It´s much to synthetic. The old Version showed cards in performance-regions where they never were in real game situations. The new version delivers good results withg T&L but that´s not the point. BTW: RS reported about the 3DM strangeness in mid december... :-)

26.01 - W2k v3.75

nV News found a link to inofficial NVIDIA Windows 2000 refrence drivers v3.75: W2k v3.75