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

03.04 New ATi Windows 2000 drivers

ATi released new Windows 2000 drivers for some cards:

ATI RAGE 128/128 PRO, ALL-IN-WONDER 128 and ALL-IN-WONDER 128 PRO: Download (12.1MB)

BETA Multimedia Center for Windows2000: Download (6.41MB)

03.04 NVIDIA Tech Demo

NVIDIA lets you view a new techdemo on its developer websites. After the Q3A bump model viewer they made a version for Quake2 models. Download: Q2 Bump Model Viewer

03.04 Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed Demo

EA Sports released the demoversion for Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. The demo allows to race on one track with one car. But EA is EA and so we find something very strange here: The Demo is limited for 15 days!! I really can´t understand this because the demo is very very limited itself (no tuning, no setup and only one track). So decide if you really want to download the 30MB sized demo file. As with the final retail version there are problems with GeForce cards. You should use (inofficial) v3.77 NVIDIA reference drivers (see files/download) or drivers based on this release. Earlier versions crash (on GeForce only) when the game loads the track.


Click to enlarge

The screenshots were made on a GeForce at 800x600-32 with max. details.

Download (30,1): Fileplanet - Fileleech

31.03 ASUS Live 4.0 Beta 4

ASUS offers a new Beta 4 of their video capturesoftware ASUS Live:

ASUS Live 4.0 Beta 4 (28/Mar/2000)
1. Add ASUS codec to enable running UYVY format capture and compressing.

Download: ASUS Live 4.0 Beta 4

31.03 New ATi drivers

ATi released new w9x drivers for cards based on Rage 128 (Pro):

This driver supports Rage 128 and Rage 128 PRO products including:

Rage FURY
Rage Fury PRO
Rage MAGNUM
XPERT 2000
XPERT 128
XPERT 99
All-In-Wonder 128 PRO
All-In-Wonder 128

Download

31.03 S3 about to sell graphics devision

S3 announced that they think about selling thier graphics devision (Pressrelease):

S3 in Discussions Regarding Graphics Business

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — March 29, 2000 — S3 Incorporated® (Nasdaq: SIII) announced today that it is in discussions with and has received term sheets from several companies relating to the separation of S3’s graphics business from the remainder of its businesses. The company stated today that it is assessing all opportunities and is committed to choosing a path that will take into account the interests of its stockholders, customers and employees.

The company had no further comments with respect to these matters. There can be no assurance that any transaction will result from the discussions.

Now there´s discussion about the guy who will buy it. Tech-Report made an article on that question and wants to give an answer.

31.03 Webwide

The Northwind GFD Rev. 2 (Athlon OC card) - The Techzone
Aureal SQ2500 Review - Gamewire
What to Get in a Video Card - Techextreme
MidiLand ADS-2000 Review - The Techzone
Gigabyte GA-GF2560 SDR - Hothardware

29.03 GeForce slows down under heat!???

ZDNet made an article (If you can't stand the heat... "Is it true" I asked the technical director of a PC builder, "that your machine will slow down to half its advertised speed after a few minutes?") which states that all GeForce cards slow down when they get hot:

From the report:

What happens then, it seems, is that they start using all the transistors on the graphics chip, and these all start switching furiously, and the temperature goes up. And even though the graphics cards are actually fitted with cooling fans - two of them per card, in some cases - to pump this heat away, they simply aren't efficient enough to cope with a full load of triangle calls.

The chip responds by slowing itself down. It is designed to do this, although this feature of the design isn't, perhaps, widely advertised.

Voodooextreme now posted a comment from William Ball (Creative). So it seems they´ve tested with an ASUS GeForce card with activated SmartDoctor. This software reads the temperature of the GeForce chip through a Winbond Hardwaremonitor Chip that is on the card and can slow it down automaticaly if it gets too hot (Dynamic Overclocking). So the statement that GeForce is designed to do that is absolutley wrong. This is only the case on ASUS cards with activated SmartDoctor software (Nothing will slow down if you don´t use Smartdoctor).

Here the comment of William Ball:

I saw your news item referring to the Kewney's World (ZDAnchordeskUK) March 22 article making an observation that GeForce chips are designed to slow down as they heat up. The fact is that GeForce chips do not do this. Kewney has made a simple mistake. He extrapolated from his experience with one card to all GeForce chips. One GeForce vendor has included a utility which monitors chip temperature and reduces the core clock if the temperature rises over a certain limit. I am certain that Kewney was testing one of those cards.

William Ball
Creative Labs, Senior Technical Marketing Specialist

Maybe they should ask before they make an article on this.... ;-)

29.03 AA in Direct 3D

The 5.13er Detonator drivers seem to be able to do AA in Direct 3D. 3D Colony offers some screenshots from Mad Onion´s 3D Mark 2000, made on a GeForce card.

28.03 Detonator 5.13

Voodooextreme offers new inofficial NVIDIA referencedrivers in version v5.13. This driver should be more stable than the previous leaked v5.08 driver. v5.13 is available for win9x, NT and Windows 2000. It now offers an option in the drivermenus to enable FSAA for OpenGL. Download

These drivers also contain some interessting new names:

NVIDIA&DEV_0100.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce 256"
NVIDIA&DEV_0101.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce DDR"
NVIDIA&DEV_0103.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA Quadro"
NVIDIA&DEV_0150.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS"
NVIDIA&DEV_0151.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS"
NVIDIA&DEV_0152.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS"
NVIDIA&DEV_0153.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA Quadro2"

28.03 GeForce 2

You can find some pretty details in the v5.06 NVIDIA drivers for Windows NT that is available at Reactor Critical. There are some first details on NVIDIA´s GeForce-successor (GeForce 2?):

NVidia.Nv11 = "NVIDIA NV11"
NVidia.Nv11DDR = "NVIDIA NV11 DDR"
NVidia.Nv11GL = "NVIDIA NV11 GL"
NVidia.Nv15 = "NVIDIA NV15"
NVidia.Nv15DDR = "NVIDIA NV15 DDR"
NVidia.Nv15BR = "NVIDIA NV15 Bladerunner"
NVidia.Nv15GL = "NVIDIA NV15 GL"

So it seems that there´s a SD/SGRAM and DDR-RAM Version of NV11 and NV15 available. Bladerunner could be something like a special Ultra-Like version. Other rumor speak of a technology like the Matrox Dual-Head for NV-15. NV-15GL seems to be the succesor of NVIDIA Quadro.

28.03 3dfx buys Gigapixel

3dfx bought the chipmaker Gigapixel for 186Mio US$. Gigapixel was in competition with NVIDIA to deliver the 3d core for Microsofts upcomig game console X-Box. The reason why NVIDIA has been chosen seems to be tha fact that Gigapixel doesn´t have runninig silicon yet. Nevertheless the technology in the Giga-3D design is very powerfull. The chip is based on tile-based rendering and offers full Anti-Aliasiong without any performance loss:

Built upon the tiling architecture, we are able to efficiently detect which graphics primitives and pixels are visible and which are not. This is the heart of the visibility-culling subsystem, which effectively multiplies the raw hardware fill-rate by the depth complexity of the scene to achieve dramatically higher rendering performance for a given level of complexity in the pixel-processing pipeline. The tiling architecture allows very efficient implementation of full-scene anti-aliasing using multi-sampling. The inclusion of true multi-sample anti-aliasing with jittering produces much higher image quality than other solutions that simply render at higher resolution and filter down.

The Presseerklärung of 3dfx and Gigapixel:

3dfx will benefit in three significant ways from this transaction," said Leupp.

"First of all, we gain very broad and specialized intellectual property and design expertise relating to unique techniques for performing 3D rendering. When combined with our existing 3D technology, we believe we will have substantial performance, feature, and visual quality advantages for our future offerings."

"We view the GigaPixel technology as a disruptive capability in the 3D market," said Scott Sellers, founder and chief technology officer of 3dfx Interactive. "By reducing memory bandwidth requirements by up to a factor of 10, we can now perform true 32-bit full-scene anti-aliased rendering at previously unseen performance levels. This technology is not theoretical - it is real and exists in GigaPixel prototype silicon right now. Furthermore, we can now render in 3D at substantially reduced power requirements and cost points, thereby enabling a new class of 3D capable devices in the consumer electronics market."

"The second key benefit of this transaction is an expansion of our target markets," Leupp said. "With the GigaPixel technology and existing business relationships, we expect to be the leader in providing 3D cores and intellectual property to our partners leading the market with 3D capable consumer devices. These 3D capable consumer devices will usher in the era of three dimensional visual communications."
"The third key benefit of this transaction is access to a team of over 40 engineers skilled in 3D design and algorithm expertise," he said. "This will augment our existing engineering staff and allow us to produce highly innovative products on a rapid schedule. In many ways, this acquisition is about speed," Leupp continued. "We will increase the speed we bring products to market by being able to leverage the talented GigaPixel engineering team and their state of the art design methodology. We will also increase the speed at which we increase the performance levels of our products by utilizing the unique GigaPixel 3D technology. And we will increase the speed at which we provide solutions for new emerging consumer electronics markets to augment our existing PC 3D accelerator business."

You can read the whole pressrelease here.

28.03 3dfx and Intrinsic Alchemy

Intrinsic Alchemy announced that the game development system GDP (Game Development Platform) will support all current and upcoming cards from 3dfx. This tool allows developers to make platform independent games without problems. This means a developer can make a game for PC and Playstation2 at the same time. NVIDIA does also support this platform.

IIntrinsic Alchemy is a high-level game development platform that rises above the differences between hardware platforms and graphics APIs. By providing a uniform high-level, high-performance development and runtime environment, Intrinsic Alchemy allows developers to avoid the time-consuming work of providing platform portability, allowing them to concentrate on the creation of compelling game content.

"3dfx has recognized the need for developers to be able to utilize emerging hardware features in an API independent development environment in order to further 3D graphics on home computers," said Steve Gleitsmann, director of business development at Intrinsic Graphics. "By using Intrinsic Alchemy, a developer can ship identical game code running at peak performance on 3dfx hardware and Sony PlayStation 2."