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

19.03 Tom´s Hardware found

Kyle (HardOCP) found the office of Toms Hardware......

19.03 Inside GeForce

Reactor Critical made an article about the technical background of NVIDIA´s GeForce chip:

Too many questions rose lately about the GeForce geometry pipeline performance. Let's investigate what highest performance the GeForce may reach in different situations, and let's figure out the reasons for such behavior of the chip. Another purpose of the article was to find the aspects one should draw his attention to when examining other 3D-accelerators with hardware T&L in future. (...more)

19.03 ASUS NT drivers

ASUS offers new Windows NT4 drivers v3.68 Beta for the TNT/TNT2 cards V3400/V3800: ASUS TNT Windows NT drivers

18.03 GeForce and DVD

PC Rave tested several DVD Players with NVIDIA´s GeForce. The GeForce chip supports Motion Compensation in hardware (Only areas in the image that are changed will be drawn).

It has been over five months and the GeForce 256 has been pratically reviewed to death with comparisons, 5-way shootouts, benchmarks, analysis, and commentary. Nearly every topic has been covered. But in an effort to educate and inform you the reader, I have decided to cover software DVD for the GeForce 256

You can find the whole stuff here.

18.03 NVIDIA at GDC

Computer Games Online made a report about the GDC (Game Developers Conference) where NVIDIA showed some first details about NV15: (ThanX to the girls at PlanetGeForce)

NVIDIA had plenty to say and show about their spring product, code-named NV-15. We can't say when it will be available, except to confirm that it will be in their second fiscal quarter and "sooner rather than later." They've obviously had chips back from the fabrication plant for some time already, given that the X-Box demo unit used one. Details of the new chip are under embargo for the time being, but the move to a .18 micron manufacturing process apparently paid off big. NVIDIA was pleasantly surprised to find that the first chips they got back from the lab run quite a bit faster than anticipated. They tell of even clocking one as high as 250MHz! Naturally, it was an exception to the rule and they can't possibly ship parts in quantity at that speed, but a target shipping speed of 180MHz or more isn't at all out of the question. The NV-15 chips draw far less power and run cooler than their NV-10 counterparts as well.

Those who are expecting the NV-15 to be what the TNT2 was to the TNT (the same thing, only faster) may be in for a surprise. Yes, the feature set of the NV-15 looks a lot like the current NV-10 (GeForce), but the company does have a few surprises in store. The speed and features of the chip will be shown off in a manner very similar to the GeForce—most cards will come with demo disks full of small applications showing what the card can do. (...more)

18.03 Server change

RIVA Station went to another Server. There shouldn´t have been any problems yet.... Please tell if something doesn´t work!

17.03 v3.81 Windows 2000 drivers

Voodooextreme got hands on new Windows 2000 NVIDIA drivers version v2.81. nV News speaks of improvements in performance and stability.

nVidia's Developer's site has been updated with new Windows 2000 drivers for their GeForce board. Whoa, I think we popped these bad boys up before they really got around (thanks to my anon. friend for getting these to me). No word in the readme on what's new with these drivers, but they are now up to version 3.81. Actually, these aren't just for the GeForce, as mentioned in the readme, they are basically for every nVidia product from the TNT up to the GeForce and Quadro.

Download: NVIDIA W2K v3.81

17.03 V5 Falcon 4 AA Shots

SimHQ shows new Voodoo 4/5 screenshots of Falcon 4. They are with and Anti Aliasing:

There's been some buzz about a demonstration done at GDC this past week. 3dfx was showing off the antialiasing capability of its new line of cards, and using Falcon 4.0 as an example. SimHQ.com is pleased to present the first published screenshots of this technology in action in F4, courtesy of 3dfx. Below are four JPG screenshots, two at 0% image compression and two at 10% image compression, showing the same basic scene in F4 with antialiasing on and off. Pay particular attention to the mountains in the background and the detail in the weapons when comparing the two...it's easy to see that there are a lot less "jaggies" in the shots where antialiasing is activated. We've been told that it's hard to do it justice in still shots, but it looks pretty good so far.

Falcon4 V4/5 Screenshots

17.03 V5 Preview Teil 4

Gamefan has set up the fourth part of the Voodoo 4/5 Previews: Voodoo 4/5 Preview

17.03 New GeForce cards with 64MB

Besides of the Dell 64MB GeForce cards there will also be 64MB DDR cards uses in Hewlett Packard system. This was announced by NVIDIA and HP in a pressrelease. Absolute Multimedia will also sell a 64MB GeForce version. Planetgeforce reports the following:

Absolute Multimedia is now launching new products including a GeForce DDR 64MB, a new revised 32MB DDR graphic board solution with "Gaming Fan" allowing better overclockability, better picture quality and a new unique MP3 solution.

On CeBIt ASUS showed a 64MB version of the V6600 Deluxe. (There are also rumors of a 64MB DDR version)

17.03 New S3 drivers

New w9x drivers are available for the S3/Diamond Viper II with Savage 2000 Chip:

-Driver Version: 4.12.01.9002-9.10.30
-ICT Core Version: 1.07
-ICT Switch Version: 1.00.11-0602

Download: Viper II drivers

There are also new w9x drivers for the Stealth III/Extreme (v82011):

- Resolves Asheron's Call texturing issues.
- Addresses reported intermittent lockups in Unreal Tournament.
- Resolves issue of disappearing descenders in IE 5 (letters g, q, y, etc.)

Download:
Stealth III drivers
Stealth III Extreme drivers

16.03 OpenGL Demos

Voodooextreme made a link to a few new great demos:

- BumpWater is a simple demo that shows water in a pool. The surface of the water dynamically changes. The underwater and the reflected environments are distorted quite realistically. I made this demo to investigate potentiality of hardware-accelerated Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping.

- TLWater is a simple demo that shows water in a pool. The surface of the water dynamically changes. The underwater and the reflected environments are distorted quite realistically. The aim of this demo is to investigate potentiality of hardware-accelerated transform and lighting.

- RigidBody simulates rigid bodies with realistic motion and graphics. The motion of the rigid bodies is calculated by solving Newton's equation of motion and Euler's equation of rotation in discrete time.

- Stained Glass shows stained glass effect that is implemented using Automatic Texture-Coordinate Generation. Projected shadows are also demonstrated.

You can download the demos here.

16.03 GeForce DDR Review

Gamecenter reviewed 4 GeForce DDR cards (ELSA Erazor X², Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro, Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR).

We took a long, hard look at four DDR-equipped gaming graphics cards: Guillemot's Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, Creative Labs' 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro, ELSA's Erazor X², and Leadtek's WinFast GeForce 256 DDR. All are fitted with Nvidia's GeForce 256 processor and 32MB of blazingly fast DDR memory. Some of the cards have more features than their competitors, and the ELSA card squeezed (barely) past the others in our benchmark test, but they all prove that the new memory technology is more than just another acronym. (...more)

16.03 Voodoo 4/5 Preview

Gamefan has set up the third part of their Voodoo 4/5 preview. This time they take a look on the T-Buffer technology: Voodoo 4/5 Preview

16.03 NVIDIA Q&A

PCRave made an interview with NVIDIA´s PR-Manager Derek Perez on GDC. The main topic was the X-Chip for the X-Box.... but also a response on Brian Burke´s (3dfx) attack on the leaked v5.08 NVIDIA drivers:

Joe: What's the OFFICIAL statement from NVIDIA about the leaked 5.08 drivers that were leaked from mother Russia? What do you think about Brian Burke's comments (from 3dfx) about the sub-standard full screen anti-aliasing support in the drivers?

Derek: Well, seeing that those are leaked drivers - they are not NVIDIA certified and we tell people to use these at their own risk.

As for Brian Burke, he should really focus on 3dfx and the VSA - 100 (does that stand for Very Slow Architecture - 100 MHz?) and leave NVIDIA alone - but of course I think he has what we call GPU envy.

...

Joe: You said earlier that the NV25 will be exclusive to the X-Box. Since the X-Box will use an NV25 chipset, will we not see NV25 on PCs? Will the PC have it earlier than the X-Box next year Spring 2001 or just skip it and go to the next version up - for example NV30?

Derek: No, there is no NV25 - we are calling [it] the X-Box GPU and rest assured, we are not ignoring the desktop market - we are still laser focused on delivering the world's best 3d graphics for the desktop PC

Read the whole interview here.

15.03 Magic-sphere comparsion

3D Workshop takes a deep look into a magic sphere and compares Voodoo 4/5 with NV15 in a column.

3dfx have been quite liberate with their specifications on the VSA-100 chip. It will have all the features the older Voodoo chips lacked, such as 32bpp rendering, AGP texturing, large texture support, and more. SLI is also maintained, but this time on chip level. The Voodoo5 6000 uses four of the VSA-100 chips, with 128MB memory, clocking in at 1.32 to 1.47 Gigapixels fillrate. It will also need an external power supply do accomodate the four chips and fans. Funny isn't it?

15.03 New AGP Wizard

3D Chipset offers a new version of the Creative Tools AGP Wizard. It allows to set AGP Options on Creative cards:

This utility :
* Allows you to set the AGP 1X/2X/4X bus data tranfer rate
* Allows you to enable/disable the side-band address mode and Fast-Writes option
* Supports the following AGP graphics card:

3D Blaster GeForce Pro
3D Blaster GeForce
3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 Ultra
3D Blaster RIVA TNT2
3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 Value
Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT
3D Blaster Savage4 AGP
Graphics Blaster Exxtreme (AGP)

Download

14.03 New X-Box Movies

IGN offers new impressive X-Box movies: IGN X-Box Demo Movies

14.03 Neues ASUS GeForce Bios

ASUS released a new Biosversion for the GeForce cards AGP-V6600 and AGP-V6800 (Pure and Deluxe versions). The new Bios enables AGP-Sidebanding as an Option!

Sideband Enabled!

Download:

ASUS AGP-V6600: ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/TREIBER/VGA/V6600/Firmware/
ASUS AGP-V6800: ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/TREIBER/VGA/V6800/Firmware/

The firmwareupdate runs in Win9x.

14.03 Serverumstellung

14.03 NV15 Info

The boys and girls of Björn3D report from a Creative pressconference where they got some first details about NV15:

32 Mb DDR memory
0.18 micron
Over 1 GigaTexel fillrate
4 dual-texture pipelines
TV-out via daughter-card (the idea is that you will only ahve to buy the TV-out board once and continue use it on future Creative products. This isn't finalized yet)

..oops... this will cause some phone calls ;-)

14.03 Voodoo5 Preview

Gamefan made a preview on 3dfx´s upcoming new Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 cards. Also included is an interview with 3dfx´s Brian Burke:

GameFan: The buzz on the Internet seems to be centered around Hardware T&L; releases from Nvidia, Matrox, and even ATI are offering support. Currently, no game offers full support, but does 3dfx see any benefit of Hardware T&L in its future technology projects?

BB: We do have a plan for geometry processing. We just think that the problem of FSAA needs to be solved before T&L. Adding more triangles just adds more "jaggies." The benefit of T&L is to allow you to add more triangles and finer details. We think that those details should look right, and not have artifacting that distracts from the playing experience. We know T&L is important, but we do not think that it will matter if the T&L is done by the graphics card or the CPU in the near term. When we have a geometry processor, it will be faster than the geometry available on CPUs.

You can read the whole stuff here.

14.03 NVIDIA on X-Box

Hardwareguru made an interview with NVIDIA´s Derek Perez on NVIDIA´s graphic chip X-Chip that will be used in Microsofts upcoming game console:

HARDWAREGURU: Microsoft announced a high performance graphics solution for the X-BOX, beating the current PS2 with the factor 5 in performance. Will that X-Chip be based on any technology we already see or heard of (NV25) and will we see a PC-X-Chip AddOn-Card in the market or will this be a X-BOX only thing ?

Derek Perez/NVIDIA: This is a GPU that will be for X-Box only and it will be the world’s first trillion operations per second (TOPS) processor and featuring a programmable per pixel shading architecture not found in any other product today. In addition to the per pixel shading technology, the GPU will include full support for programmable geometry, hardware accelerated transform and lighting, a variety of compressed texture formats and many other features. With the ability to process over 1 TOPS, the GPU will be several times faster than any current game console.

You can read the whole interview here.

13.03 XFree 4.0

The Version 4.0 of XFree86 is now available. Now OpenGL acceleration is available with GeForce cards:

~~4.0:~~: ~~Support (accelerated) for the Riva 128, 128ZX, TNT, TNT2 (Ultra, Vanta, M64), GeForce (DDR) and Quadro is provided by the XF86_SVGA server and the nv driver.~~

Download: XFree86 4.0 (Thanx to Bernd!)

13.03 Matrox G450 / G800 infos

3D Chipset reports of some first specs for the Matrox G450 and G800:

G450 (Condor I)

- G400 MAX core with integrated RGB, NTSC/PAL and DVI outputs
- 64bit DDR SDRAM
- Support for DDR FCDRAM
- 320 pin PBGA
- 0.18 micron 6 Metal Layer process
- Mass production : Mar. 2000
- 16MB frame buffer version : 2 x (2M x 32 DDR)
- 32MB frame buffer version : 4 x (4M x 16 DDR) or 4 x (2M x 32 DDR)

16MB version of G450 will use 166MHz memory clock (in case of FC DDR, 200MHz is feasible)and uses 64bit dual memory bus.

G800(Condor II)

- Pin compatible with G450
- Double fillrate of G450
- Support for 250MHz DDR FCRAM
- Support for Hardware T&L
- Support for DirectX 8.0 Shader and fully functional DX7
- New DX7, 8 IDC drivers
- Mass production : Sept. 2000

Matrox will show dual chip configured version of G800 in order to meet the higher transformation and fill performance too.

13.03 Virtual AGP

The Register has made a report on a technology called Virtual AGP. As the name shows you this enables AGP-like features on non-AGP mainboards. BTW: ATi also speaks of Virtual AGP on its new mainboard (ArtX - ATI-S1-370TL):

Virtual AGP is designed for older computer systems without any AGP slot. Specially targeted machines are the many i810 mainboards which do not provide any AGP slots. The i810 chipset just has integrated VGA, with practically no 3D features, as well as many PCI, slots which means that theres no AGP 3D gaming power available.

Besides this, for many i810 and i810e mainboards on market this will be a very useful feature, particularly for Socket 7 which does not have an AGP port. The solution for this problem is a patent from Nvidia called Virtual AGP. It provides high performance AGP style graphical options for Non AGP slot systems. It is based on unique NVIDIA texture management technology – Virtual AGP. Believe it or not, it provides AGP style texturing in standard PCI slot.

The benefits from this technology will mainly be AGP functionality on the PCI bus followed with better performance and higher resolutions. Products based on it will enable very large texture memory support on all systems.

Mehr dazu hier.

12.03 New Matrox demos

Demonews reports about two new tech-demos that demonstrate Environmental Bump Mapping on Matrox cards:

Matrox Funky Bumped Earth
with source): This sample is a funky twist on the standard DX SDK bumped spinning Earth sample. It now has multi-colored stars orbiting the Earth, which dynamically effect the envmap. You'll need a Matrox card for this demo to work.
Matrox Bumped Flame
(with source): This sample simulates a flame using EMBM, with bumped water and bumped heat distortion effect. A very cool/simple demo with NO procedural textures and very few polys! You'll need a Matrox card for this demo to work.

Besides of Matrox, ATi has announced sdupport of Environmental Bump Mapping with its upcoming new design (Charisma architecture)

12.03 5.08 Detonator Report

nV News made an article on 5.08 NVIDIA Detonator drivers:

We've completed an in-depth report on NVIDIA's 5.08 beta Detonator drivers. This report takes a look at texture compression and full scene anti-aliasing and includes lots of benchmarks and screenshots. Here's a snip:

Word on the street was that the leaked Detonators were still in the alpha stage of development, but curiosity got the better of me and I installed them for testing purposes only. Web sites began reporting that these drivers had support for S3's OpenGL texture compression algorithm S3TC.

You can read the whole article here.

12.03 X-Box 3D Details

The german site Heise reports about first details of the 3D chip that will be used in Microsofts game console X-Box. The chip will be delivered by NVIDIA. It seems to be based on a next generation chip (like NV 25). Heise speaks of a name X-Chip. Here are some specs:

Max. resolution: 1920 x 1080
Clockrate: 300MHz
Poly-performance: 300M Polygons/sec (GeForce: 15M!)
4 texures/clock
Pixel-Fillrate: 4.8 G/s (Anti-Aliased, 2 textures)
8:1 compressed textures

I wonder how they manage it to achive this fillrate with a shared memory technology..... But if this is true, the memory bus will be very interesting!