Saturday 11.03.2000 |
| 11.03 More about Detonator 5.08 Firingsquad takes a closer look on the inoficial NVIDIA v5.08 Detonator drivers (download from Reactor Critical). They try to find out where the performance increase comes from... is it S3TC or T&L (Transformation & Lightning)? At our GDC (Game Developers Conference) 3dfx meeting yesterday, Gary Tarolli told us that with NVIDIA's 4X super-sampling, you only get the 2X FSAA that 3dfx is capable of doing, and NVIDIA will need to go up to 16X to catch up with 3dfx's planned 4X FSAA standard. We'll talk more about our 3dfx Voodoo 5 meeting in our GDC reports. For now, let's take a closer look at the frame rate gains with the 5.08 Detonator drivers. Is it the T&L? Is it S3TC? (more....) And the winner is..... T&L. The runs with the "low power" Celeron and the comparsion with TNT2 shows that a better T&L capability seems to be responsible for the increase with the new drivers. 11.03 Webwide Graphic cards: Misc: |
Friday 10.03.2000 |
| 10.03 3dfx about NVIDIA´s FSAA Reverend the Pulpit´s got a statement of 3dfx´s PR Manager Brian Burke on NVIDIA´s FSAA, that´s "hidden" in the inofiziellen v5.08 referencedrivers. The tongue is getting more rough these days from 3dfx´s side..... There is really nothing new in the drivers from nVidia. They claim to offer some form of polygonal anti-aliasing. Any video card can support this type of emulated anti-aliasing through driver tricks that simply stretch the rendering resolution in one or both horizontal and/or vertical dimensions. The technique nVidia seems to be using has been offered to gamers before and was used in the past to fool benchmarking programs into thinking AA was supported. It was rejected by Ziff-Davis as a valid technique for doing AA and nVidia even requested that reviewers benchmarking their products turn this option off due to the overwhelming loss in framerate. We define full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) to be an anti-aliasing solution that is (a) 100% compatible with all applications and APIs, and (b) performed in hardware. nVidia's approach is neither 100% compatible with all applications and APIs nor is it performed in hardware, instead using age-old software tricks to emulate true anti-aliasing. You can find the whole statement here. 10.03 NVIDIA & X-Box NVIDIA made a pressrelease for Microsoft´s upcoming gameconsole X-Box. NVIDIA will deliver the 3D graphic chip (based on third generation like NV 25 (not NV11 or NV15)... seems to be a specialized chip I think) SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 10, 2000--NVIDIA(TM) Corp. (Nasdaq:NVDA - news) today announced that Microsoft® Corp. has selected NVIDIA to design and manufacture the 3D graphics and multimedia sub-system for Microsoft's highly anticipated X-Box game console. Microsoft officially announced X-Box today to an anxious audience at the Game Developer's Conference, being held this week in San Jose, Calif. The design win represents an important strategic step for NVIDIA. For the past three years, NVIDIA has dominated the performance 3D segment of the desktop PC market with its RIVA TNT(TM), TNT2(TM) and GeForce 256(TM) graphics processors. These graphics processors have become the development platform of choice for PC game development companies worldwide, and have won over 450 awards to date. NVIDIA has established many technical milestones in its 7-year history, and is now ready to have its team of seasoned experts help Microsoft advance the quality of the console games experience. NVIDIA will design a custom Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Multimedia and Communications Processor (MCP) chipset for the X-Box. ``The digital revolution is driving massive change in consumer electronics. At the epicenter of this revolution will be next-generation game consoles like X-Box -- it is incredibly powerful, networked to the Internet, and will deliver breathtaking games. ``And as 3D is a key component of X-Box, NVIDIA will be launched onto the world stage as we work with Microsoft to transform the living room experience,'' said Jen Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. ``Microsoft has the vast resources, experience in supporting developers, and great technology and tools to build this industry changing platform The full pressrelease can be found here. 10.03 X-Box News Microsoft´s Bill Gates announced the game console X-Box that will be brought into market at end 2001. The official X-Box website shows first technical specs:
Gmespot offers an exclusive MPEG and Quicktime video with a X-Box techdemo for download: X-Box Videos 10.03 LithTech 2.0 Screenshots EvilAvatar has new GDC screenshots of the new Lithtech 2.0 3D-Engine: Lithtech 2.0 Screenshots 10.03 Voodoo5 Screenshots There are new screenshots of 3dfx´s upcoming Voodoo 4/5 cards with VSA 100 chip technology: Avault
- Star Wars Episode1 Racer, NBA 2000 |
Thursday 09.03.2000 |
| 09.03 Bettle Crazy Cup Infogrames released a demo to the "crazy" game Beetle Buggin. The demo offers 3 self running demos and 2 demo tracks. In special the idea of a beetle long-jump shows the creativity of the developers (2. image from left). The graphics is neat with nice textures.
The screenshots were made with a GeForce in 800x600-32 with max. quality settings. Download 49,2MB: Fileleech - Fileplanet 09.03 GeForce Tweak Guide Tweak 3D offers a new Tweak-Guide for NVIDIA´s GeForce:
More about that here: GeForce Tweak Guide. 09.03 VSA 100 Screenshots Voodooextreme offers 4 screenshots that were taken with 3dfx´s VSA 100 Chip, which will be used on Voodoo4 and Voodoo5. The screenshots demonstrate the use of FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing): FSAA Screenshots |
||||||||
Wednessday 08.03.2000 |
| 08.03 FSAA The new inofficial v5.08 reference drivers do now support FSAA (Full-Scene Antialiasing) in OpenGL. This feature is massively advertised by 3dfx for their upcoming Voodoo 4/5 cards which can do that in hardware. Here are some screenshots made in 640x480-16:
Imagesize 100%
Imagesize 300% The differnces are not very strong so you have to take a closer look. The performance drops from 96FPS to 55FPS. The Quality of the GeForce FSAA does not reach the quality of the FSAA that Voodoo5 does! I was able to see Voodoo5 in action at this years CeBIT. But the image-quality is not as unsharp as the FSAA of the V5. More information about FSAA can be found here. 08.03 X-Box News Maximum PC reports that Microsoft has choosen NVIDIA to deliver the 3D graphics for the upcoming MS gaming console X-Box that will come end 2001. Gigapixel seems to be out of the race. The news caused a huge increase in the NVIDIA stock ratings... (No... no financial bullshit here...!) 08.03 5.08 drivers News about the new NVIDIA 5.08 drivers. Besides of the support of S3TC textures in OpenGL there´s also support of FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing) included - one of the key features of 3dfx´s upcoming Voodoo4/5. But the performance with FSAA is not very good at all with GeForce. There are also reports of quality issues with these drivers. But you shouldn´t forget that these drivers are no official release and may be still far away of beeing "final".... FSAA: To use this you have to open the registry (hkey_local_machine/system/currentcontrolset/services/class/display/XXXX/nvidia/opengl) and set the key EnableFSAA from 0 to 1. To deactivate set it to 0 again. (XXXX is the number of the actual drivers... depends on your windows history... maybe you have to search a bit) S3TC: You can enable the use of compressed
textures in Q3A by a console command: r_ext_compress_textures
1 Exclusive S3 Levels: To use the special S3 levels you have to download a special EXE file from the S3/Diamond Underground webseite. Then you have to start the game with this file. In addition you have to download the special maps itself: exclusive S3 Maps. I´ve tested it with 1.15c (official first final Point Release) ant it worked. More reports about 5.08: 08.03 ATi Charisma: First Look Gamers Depot made an article about ATi´s new Charisma technology that will be supported by ATi´s coming Rage6C chip. The ship may be shown on WinHEC in April and will come onto the market in fall this year. For around the last 6 months or so, nVIDIA has been the prominent 3D chipmaker by releasing to world the first consumer-level graphics chip that had it’s own hardware transformation and lighting engine. The biggest significance to this was especially noticeable on lower speed grade CPUs, but not as apparent on CPUs say 550Mhz and above. In the mean time ATI has kind of fallen by the way side, only kicking out a Rage Fury Maxx which is built on last-years technology. It was basically just two Rage 128 Pro chips slapped together on a single card, which gave decent speed, but still lost ground to the GeForce DDR-based cards, and didn’t offer anything new in terms of features. (...more) 08.03 ATi Charisma ATi made a pressrelease for the new ATI Charisma Engine(TM) and Pixel Tapestry(TM) architectures that will be shown for developers at GDC: TORONTO, March 7 /CNW-PRN/ - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSE: ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT) will unveil to the world's leading game developers the details of two important technologies that will revolutionize the 3D graphics power of PCs and deliver life-like virtual characters in real time. The new technologies, to be introduced in upcoming products, will establish ATI as a major force in the performance gaming and workstation market segments. ``ATI's Charisma Engine and Pixel Tapestry Architecture will shatter the barriers to realistic gaming on the PC platform,'' said Philip Eisler, Senior Director of Component Marketing, ATI. ``3D characters will come to life on the screen.'' The Charisma Engine(TM) is the world's fastest geometry processing unit and is also the first to incorporate advanced game character acceleration for 3D skinning and key-frame character animation. These effects are critical for enabling game characters to reveal life-like facial expressions and to achieve fluid movement and motion. The Pixel Tapestry(TM) Architecture features the world's first GigaTexel rendering engine, and includes support for deep multitexturing and new 3D effects with eye-popping photorealistic impact. It easily deals with complex elements such as metals, liquids and wood and their complex interaction with lighting and shadows. ``The technologies that ATI delivers in their upcoming chips will raise the bar for PC graphics,'' said Alex Garden, CEO of Relic Entertainment. ``Leading-edge features to enhance character animations and to create realistic environments will have a significant impact upon the graphics in our next-generation games.'' |
Tuesday 07.03.2000 |
| 07.03 Detonator 5.08 Benchmarks Good and bad news with the new inofficial Detonator v5.08 drivers. The bad news first: the S3 S3TC Quake 3 maps do not work with these OGL S3TC-capable drivers. The good: The drivers are way faster (kick ass) than the older detonators in Quake3! Benchmarks made on an ASUS AGP-V6800 Deluxe with an Intel Pentium III 700/100:
wooha... more than 10% faster (The 49,9% value seems was wrong.. (I´d doublechecked it... rebooted 2 times and made 3runs per resolution on a fresh w98 inst... but.. hmmm)) with max. Details at 1024x768-32!!! But AGP-Sidebanding with GeForce cards does still not work by default. For a test with TNT2 I used an ASUS AGP-V3800 Ultra Deluxe:
The increase on TNT2 cards is not as dramatic as with GeForce, but it´s also there at all! Update: To use the special S3 Quake3 Arena maps with S3TC you need a special EXE file bsides of the maps: DMMQ3.EXE. The levels work without any additional settings with the 5.08 drivers if you start the game with this EXE instead of the normal file. You can download the EXE and levels here: S3 Q3A Levels 07.03 News from 3dfx 3dfx gave out a pressrelease for the GDC (Game Developers Conference). They want to introduce their upcoming Rampage Chip technology to choosen visitors: Immersion 2000 - 'The New Generation' Registered 3dfx developers will be able to have the first look at specifications for 3dfx's next-generation processor, codename ``Rampage,'' under NDA, on Thursday, March 9, from 4:00 - 7:00 P.M., at The Bankers Club Event Center in San Jose, 8 South First Street, San Jose, CA 95113. 3dfx will continue developer education on Rampage and a number of other topics including the next generation of texture shading, API's and special effects, throughout GDC, at the 3dfx booth, number 616. Developers interested in participating in Immersion 2000 should send an email to immersion2000@3dfx.com. 'Rampage Through the Year' - 2000 GDC Opening Night Party 3dfx is also co-hosting ``Rampage Through the Year,'' the 2000 GDC Opening Night Party with AMD. This event is open to all GDC attendees and will be held on Thursday, March 9 from 7:00 P.M. until 1:00 A.M., at The Bankers Club Event Center in San Jose, 8 South First Street, San Jose, CA 95113. VSA-100 Demonstrations at 2000 GDC 3dfx will be showcasing dual VSA-100 processor boards running on the PC and Mac in booth 616 at the San Jose Convention Center, from Friday, March 10, through Sunday, March 12. The company will demo the VSA-100 boards and the industry's hottest games utilizing 3dfx's new full-scene anti-aliasing capability which dramatically improves the overall image quality of all games. Interested media should contact Brian Burke at 972-234-8750, ext. 2113, or bburke@3dfx.com to set up an appointment. 07.03 Detonator v5.08!! Reactor Critical offers the new OpenGL S3TC-capable Detonator drivers v5.08 for Download (wherever they may come from....). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand |
