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Metabyte published a White Paper on its new website that explains the new 'Stepsister' or PGC called Technology. In addition there´s a small list that shows the perfomance increase in  games using this technology.

Wicked3D announces revolutionary technology for parallel graphics processing

This technology will allow Metabyte to run graphics cards in a parallel configuration using any existing chip on the market. It will also have the capability to be applied to any future chipset that comes to market. Specifically, the application of this technology to an existing 2D/3D chip set will yield a 40+ percent increase in performance and will double megapixel per second fill rate of a dual card configuration over a single card. A white paper outlining the benefits of this technology in more detail can be found at http://www.wicked3d.com.

Wicked3D has successfully implemented this technology on current 2D/3D AGP and PCI architectures. Presently, demand for this technology has proven overwhelming as a result of unauthorized leaks on the Internet that have lead to customers demanding to pre-order Wicked3D parallel graphics boards. The company is reviewing a number of options to bring its technology to market in the coming months because of the tremendous response of consumers and companies within the industry.

The implementation of this Wicked3D driver technology requires very minor modifications to existing hardware. The process of rendering images from two sources will separate the images being rendered into sections. The driver then sends the render information to the appropriate board so that rendering occurs in parallel on the two boards. Such rendering is still the biggest performance bottleneck performance with current graphics hardware especially at high resolution so this approach provides a big win.

Wicked3D is reviewing which chipsets would best be supported by this technology in the high-end consumer graphics market, and will be making announcements shortly regarding products that will be using the Wicked3D technology. The company is targeting an aggressive retail launch for this technology.

"We have chip vendors, board vendors, the large retail chains, and even tier one OEMs knocking on our door now, and this is before we have even announced the technology." Says Dennis P. Raquet, General Manager of the Wicked3D Board Company. "The response is truly phenomenal. We are now brining forward our plans for introducing this technology, and scaling up our ambitions accordingly."

Currently there is diskussion in the web that you can´t name this technology SLI - as you can see Wicked3D doesn´t name it this way. They speak of a Dual Board Solution and , so you should say DBS or something else...

Frage: I just noticed on SE the pre-release info about Metabyte releasing a TNT SLI rig in the two forms of AGP+PCI or PCI+PCI. Furthermore, Metabyte claims this technology can be easily used on other chipsets, including the upcoming TNT2. So, I am wondering what you think of the whole thing and where does that leave 3Dfx (out in the cold)? This technology was not developed by nVida, but Metabyte. Thus, this clearly illustrates what an OEM and offer to a manufacturer. Something that 3Dfx never counted on, hehe.

Antwort: Honestly, I think there is either some serious misinformation or wishful thinking going on. If an actual press release materializes, I'll take it more seriously. The article itself had some questionable comments (I don't recall Carmack making claims of 25% speed improvements for SSE) and flat out inaccuracies ("256K x 256K" and "2000K x 2000K" texture size limitations...you mean "256x256" and "2048x2048"? And SLI configurations should not have any bearing on CPU performance since the work is done at scan out time, i.e. by the hardware).

And the conjecture about Q3A frame rates was WAY out there -- guessing framerates for an unreleased game on unannounced hardware is, well, stupid.

3DMark 99 MAX edition is a major update that includes following enhancements and new features:

- Cutting edge optimizations for AMD 3DNow! instructions
- Cutting edge optimizations for Intel Pentium III SIMD instructions
- Analysis tools for comparing different optimizations
- Bump mapping tests
- Comprehensive Batch Run feature
- Updated Game Content for faster accelerators
- Updated for Microsoft DirectX 6.1
- Hardware Upgrade Feature and Internet Interactivity

In addition to major features, MAX edition also includes numerous fixes and minor improvements.

The benchmark will be available for public download during March 1999 from www.3dmark.com .

All existing 3DMark 99 Pro users will be pleased to learn that their license will be upgraded to include the 99 MAX
version free of charge.

Here's the way the system will work:

Metabyte is going to sell both PCI and AGP versions of their TNT SLI capable cards separately for between $125 and $150 for each 16MB card. Much like the Voodoo2 SLI setups that we all know and love, the Metabyte TNT SLI system works similarly but differs with two possible SLI combos: 1 AGP TNT + 1 PCI TNT 1 PCI TNT + 1 PCI TNT

The AGP + PCI version of the Metabyte SLI rig will offer slightly faster performance (about 5 to 10%) than the 2 TNT PCI cards when linked together. This is due to the way that Metabyte has chosen to implement SLI, to maximize their driver's capabilities. Instead of rendering each 3D image's odd or even lines in succession the way 3Dfx's SLI system works, Metabyte's process separates the entire 3D image into two halves: The top half of the on-screen image, and the bottom half of the on-screen image. This supposedly reduces the CPU overhead versus the odd/even 3Dfx approach while making the whole operation smoother and more seamless.

Metabyte will be the first to deliver a 500+Mpixel per second video accelerator solution to market, which has been the holy grail of the chip R & D industry for the past twelve months.

That level of performance will deliver Quake3 Arena frame rates of between 50 - 60 per second at 1600x1200x16bpp provided you're using a CPU with a frequency of 450MHz or above. With the success that id's supreme commander (John Carmack) has publicly stated recently about his company's "20 - 25% Q3A performance boost when using a Pentium III CPU's SSE-instructions" power gamers on a PIII-equipped machine could push into the low 70s in Q3A's frame rate performance at the resolution listed above.

That's twice as fast as what the Voodoo3 3500 card will be able to hit when it debuts in early May.

The cards are TNT(-1) cards and are not based on the announced TNT-2 chip. But the solution Metabyte found also works on other chipsets, so a TNT-2 solution is not far away. But you can only use Metabyt´s for this SLI way. Other cards do not work. More about that at Sharky Extreme!
There are also rumors about TNT-2. They speak that TNT-2 will come in three versions: 125MHz, 143MHz, and 166MHz. Code names of "TNT2 Pro" "TNT2 Plus", and "TNT2 Ultra".

Check Altavista Translations to translate the text!

'Für die TV-Ausgabe auf der Grafikkarte ist der Chip BT869 der Firma Brooktree zuständig. Praktisch alle Parameter, die für die Ausgabe auf TV notwendig sind, werden über diesen Chip geregelt. Dazu zählt vor allem der TV-Standard (also PAL oder NTSC) sowie die Größe des Bildes. Mit dem BT869 kann das Bild in weiten Grenzen skaliert werden, von einem kleinen Bildchen in der TV-Mitte, bis zu Vollbildausgabe ohne störende schwarze Ränder. Diese Ränder sind also kein Fehler, wie man manchmal liest. Vielmehr sind sie das Resultat der sog. Overscan Compensation, die der BT869 beherrscht und die dafür sorgen soll, daß keine Bildteile am Rand der Fernsehröhre verschwinden. Ohne OC würde man z.B. die Start-Taste des Win95-Desktops auf einem TV nicht sehen können.

Programmiert wird der BT869 über den sogenannten I2C-Bus (sprich: i-Quadrat-c-Bus). Dies ist ein serieller Bus, ähnlich des seriellen Ports eines PCs, und besteht nur aus zwei Leitungen zzgl. Masse. Der Riva TNT-Chip verfügt über eine Schnittstelle für den I2C-Bus. Leider rückt der Hersteller aber nicht mit den Daten raus, wie diese anzusprechen ist. Daher wählte ich den Umweg über den Parallelport, der entsprechend programmiert, einen I2C-Bus simuliert. Es werden lediglich zwei Verbindungen von der parallelen Schnittstelle zur Grafikkarte benötigt, womit der BT869 dann komplett gesteuert werden kann. Es ginge natürlich auch über den seriellen Port. Da dieser einen 12V-Pegel benutzt, der I2C-Bus aber einen von 5V, wäre ein IC notwendig gewesen. So reichen zwei Widerstände'

More about that an a german languaged construction guidance can be found on the TV-Out page. It would be nicer to have good working drivers from the manufacturers. This solution shows that there IS a way to fix the borders!

3D Spotlight has photos from Mainboard made by the manufactorer PowerColor. The boards named DREAMRICH & DREAMCODE have a 3Dfx Banshee with 16MB SGRAM respectively NVIDIA RIVA TNT with 16MB SDRAM on board. In addition a YAMAHA soundchip is included.
OEM´s will be happy about such a high level of integration, but users will have some problems someday caused by low flexibility (No AGP slot)

Two add ons are available for Halflife. One is the new level from the Demo version. You need the full version of halflife for this level. The 4MB download is available at 3DFiles.
Another addon is Drug Barons, that starts where the gamestory ends. This pack was created by Wanted. It contains 4 playable levels: Download Drugbarons (4MB)

See readme files for installation!

Bill´s Workshop also has a Need for Speed 3 screenshot on its newspage that shows the same effect. It seems that the poorer image quality of 3Dfx cards I recognized in the TNT vs. Banshee comparsion is not an induvidual case and limited to Banshee cards.

Reactor Software released a new screensaver called Ultra Fireworks. The screensaver needs hardware acceleration in Direct 3D. 3DFiles Download page

Longbow Digital Arts finished a new version of Particle Fire. The screensaver doesn´t need a 3D acceleration. Download - Homepage

Mike of Viper3D reports about a new overclocking util for TNT cards. MaxClock v1.3 was made dor a Diamond Viper V550. There are reports that it does also work with other cards, maybe even RIVA 128 cards. Download MaxClock - Use on your own risk! Homepage

Info: The new NVIDIA Detonator reference drivers support TV Out. But this does only work with TNT cards that have a Brooktree 869 encoder Chip (STB, Diamond). But it does not work on cards with a Chrontel 7002 encoder chip, like ASUS V3400 and Canopus Spectra 2500, although the driver can recognize it.
The TV-Out mode supports the resolutions 640x480 and 800x600 at 256 colors, 16Bit and 32Bit color depth for PAL or NTSC. The menu occurs automatically with cards with BT 869 onboard.

At first glance it seems that by taking the P3 route you make substantial gains in FPS. However these claims do not live up to analysis - looking at the results with the 0.48 drivers at 333Mhz, both CPUs pump out 29.7fps on Game1. The upgrade to the Detonator drivers elicites only a 0.2 fps (33.8 vs 34.0 fps) difference between the P2-333 and P2-500 @ 333. nVidia clearly have a lot of optimisation to do to take advantage of KNI.

You can find the complete review here. Currently 3DMARK99 doesn´t support 3DNow! or intel´s KNI. This will change soon with a new version 3DMARK99 MAX.

February 19th: Modified "Detonator" Driver for Windows 95/98

In early February, NVIDIA released their "Detonator" reference driver for Windows 95 and 98. This major new release includes optimization for the Pentium III processor, as well as a brand new DirectX 6 driver. Although some users have had some difficulty with this new release, many customers have had no problems whatsoever, and have reported improved performance and greater reliability.

In our testing process, we found a few issues relating to image quality which prevented us from issuing this version as an official release. We went ahead and fixed them, as well as reporting our findings to the NVIDIA software engineers, who are addressing the issue on their end as well. At the same time, we also integrated our own BlasterControl Panel. If you follow the version numbers, you can think of this release as NVIDIA's Version 1.09 with additional improvements by Creative. We're offering it for the convenience of our customers who want the benefits of the Version 1.09 Detonator driver along with BlasterControl Panel.

I got many reactions to the Detonator testings. Many speak of a better performance of the new drivers at all even if you can´t see it in benchmarks numbers. Games run a lot smother than before. Others confirm the results.

Applications like 3D Studio Max&Co are running al lot faster with Detonator now. Some speak of double fast as before.
A developer which is making applications for OpenGL reports that textures are now rendered in 16Bit in OpenGL, no longer in 24Bit as before. But I couldn´t verify that yet.
More hints, like disabling the support for Next Generation CPU´s did´nt effect any better results. Others spoke of the timedemo problems with Halflife that´s always running a scene at the same speed. The Framerate is dependent from the CPU Power, not from the graphics card. But why is the Timedemo faster with the Detonator drivers!?!
I got some words from Synetic that can explain the surprising VSYNC issue at N.I.C.E.2. The game is faster with VSYNC ON than with VSYNC OFF. It seems that tripple buffering does no longer work if VSYNC is disabled or the card than only can do double buffering then. So you should enable VSYNC in games that support tripple buffering to get an advantage of the third buffer.
I got a couple of other hints that could increase the performance that I couldn´t test yet. But i´ll report if they effect any changes.
Other asked for the system I used for the testings. You can find it here. I used the Pentium II 450MHz system for the review.

You shouldn´t think the new Detonator drivers are bad at all. The drivers got internal redesigns and some parts were replaced completely. It´s a bit disappointing that the new drives are not faster in all cases but they offer nearly the same performance than the 'old' drivers - aside from some 'old' DirectX 5 games like Forsaken. 3DMARK99 shows that the drivers are a lot faster in features like multitexturing. It´s a progress if this faster performance can be seen in future DirectX games that support these new features. But no progress without victims !?!

V-SYNC OFF
N.I.C.E.2	NVIDIA v0.48	Detonator	Detonator Mipmap=12
800x600 16Bit	71,3	65,1	70,4
1024x768 16Bit	55,5	40,2	56,2
800x600 32Bit	56,8	42,9	50,0
1024x768 32Bit	33,7	26,5	32,5

V-SYNC ON
N.I.C.E.2	NVIDIA v0.48	Detonator	Detonator Mipmap=12
800x600 16Bit	70,8	66,9	71,2
1024x768 16Bit	60,2	44,1	60,8
800x600 32Bit	57,1	48,9	57,3
1024x768 32Bit	36,6	31,6	39,7

These results are suprising. VSYNC ON effects that the graphics card draws the next rendered frame not before the last is completely shown. This can effect in lower Framerates, depending on the current possible framerate and the refreshrate you set for your monitor. So I run all tests with VSYNC OFF to get the max. possible framerate of the card. You can get some wrong images because of frames that are not completly drawn by your monitor in a game with VSYNC OFF, but you can´t really notice that at framerates of 30fps and above. (The german magazine c´t for example runs its benchmarks with VSYNC OFF, the PC Professionell with VSYNC ON!)
The values of other benchmarks show that VSYNC OFF seems to be the better choice. Incoming drops from 72 fps to 48 fps, Tirtanium drops about 2-5 fps with VSYNC OFF.
It´s a interesting fact that N.I.C.E.2 is faster with VSYNC OFF, but that´s not a feature of Detonator! The v0.48 drivers show the same effect! But one Detonation is there: Detonator is faster in 1024x768 in 32Bit color Depth! (wow!)

The new NVIDIA reference drivers v1.09 Detonator are currently the topic in many diskussion boards in the web. After the big announcement of NVIDIA and the first public 3DMARK99 results many gamers had big expectations.

You could see a couple of benchmark runs that showed no detonation at all. Others speak of a decrease in some games.....Time to check that out.
I made a comparsion of the v0.48 reference drivers with the new v1.09 Detonator drivers on a STB Velocity 4400. The following Benchmarks were used: GLQuake1, Quake2, N.I.C.E.2, Incoming, Forsaken, Tirtanium v1.2, 3DMARK99 and Halflife: v0.48 vs Detonator - Where´s the Detonation!?!

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