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

04.02 - T&L Part III

HardOCP made a third try in his T&L Benchmarks test. This time with Test Drive 6:

Well, live by the sword, die by the sword. Here is a real world app that to the best of my knowledge does use T&L and has the option to toggle it on and off. THIS IS A REAL GAME YOU CAN BUY. Remember that. We see from the screens above that T&L on the nVidia GeForce is in NO WAY a help whatsoever. In fact it totally hinders the game in 32 bit if in fact the D3D HAL is running 32 bit. That is why I took the screenshots from the demo above in 32 bit. There is a big performance hit but not image quality enhancement that I can see.

Now is this the fault of the card or the game? Well I don't know, but still, it is a game that people are going to be playing that says it utilizes T&L and it does not do dick for the game. Now what we need is a REAL GAME to show us how well it CAN be utilized. Not a synthetic benchmark, because NOBODY is gonna be happy with that one apparently.

Until I see that, I have to think that the T&L hype that nVidia is simply that, HYPE. Please someone prove me wrong soon. We hardware freaks really want to know.

More about that here.

04.02 - ELSA Erazor X(²) Bios

ELSA released a new Bios for thier GeForce cards Erazor X and Erazor X²: ELSA Erazor X Bios

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.