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Starsiege


This demo lets you play for a longer time. You can play four training and 2 campaign missions. A manual is included in the readme-file and you have two bitmaps that show you the keyboard layout. The 800x600 OpenGL screenshots were made with a STB Velocity 4400 and Detonator drivers v1.09. Homepage - Download (52MB): 3DFiles Download page


Storm


This demo has a "small' file size but the opitc is very impressive. The steering is a bit tricky at the beginning but if you flew a bit around.... check the keyboard setting on the 3Dfiles download page! The 3D engine supports 32Bit Rendering. The 800x600x32Bit screenshots were made with a STB Velocity 4400 and Detonator v1.09 drivers. Homepage - Download (11MB): 3DFiles Download page

There are a lot demos coming out these days. Some more are a new Descent3 Demo and a demo of Hell-Copter.

Monolith is working on their new 3D Engine called LithTech2. Maonolith´s programmer Mike Dussault made some comment about this new engine:

Skeletal animation is working great so far. Each model can now have multiple textures assigned to it as well. M.A. is pimping out models with shared animation sets.

Support for 32-bit textures and screen surfaces has been in for a while. I'm very happy with the way it's structured.. all the color conversion code was strewn out before but now it is cenralized, clean, and simple. It's definitely better to be using 32-bit textures and a 16-bit screen than 16-bit textures and a 32-bit screen

The TNT2 owns me. It's very interesting to be working in this paradigm where the card isn't the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is much more on the processor and data structure side. The biggest overall change in Lithtech2 will be to support the kind of rich environment that we can now render in the networking, tools, and physics.

Source: Voodooextreme

Epic´s Mark Rein made a statement about the current Unreal 2.24 Patch status:

Actually I did say that the patch would be out "later this week" referring to the end of last week. When I made that statement it certainly looked like a slam dunk it would be out around the weekend. The whole team was planning two days off from Unreal Tournament to work exclusively on testing the patch thoroughly. But as the weekend rolled around it still had some problems that needed to be resolved and retested. So, I apologize for that. You'd think I would have learned my lesson by now in terms of letting people know our expectations. I think I'll just slink back into my cave in shame with my tail between my legs and shut up now.

Once again, sorry folks for making yet another release-related statement that turned out to be erroneous. We're trying to give you as much feedback as possible and sometimes we step on ourselves when we do that.

Source: Voodooextreme

The game Expendable (see screenshots) has many light effects and explosions. Most of these effects are made with alpha blending. At 16Bit color depth the card goes out of colors very soon and the card needs to dither the colors. Expendable can render in 32Bit (Thas is absolutely playable at 800x600) so I wanted to show the differences between 16Bit and 32Bit rendering with NVIDIA TNT (Desktop should run at 32Bit colors):

TNT 16Bit (200% Zoom)	TNT 32Bit (200% Zoom)
TNT 16Bit (200% Zoom)	TNT 32Bit (200% Zoom)
TNT 16Bit (100% Zoom) same image than above	TNT 32Bit (100% Zoom) same image than above

There´s a lot confusion and diskussion about the quality of 3Dfx Voodoo3 compared to TNT and others currently in the web. 3Dfx speaks of a 22Bit solution and explains its existance in technical statements. RIVA 3D made a couple of Voodoo3 and TNT2 screenshots and posted them on a website: Voodoo 3/TNT Kingpin Screenshot Comparison

ELSA released new Win9X drivers for the Erazor II with NVIDIA TNT. The new drivers are version v4.11.01.0301-0023. The new drivers include support for the 3D shutter glasses ELSA Revelator and have a new version of ELSA Winman and 3D settings: ELSA Erazor II drivers

HC-Hung from ASUS informed me that we´ll see new drivers for the AGP-V3400 TNT this week. The reason for the delay are the large amount of new features that are included in the new drivers.

The new drivers V2.16 have new features such as:

Independent color/gamma setting for game/video/desktop
indepdent refresh rate setting for game and GDI desktop
new Live3400 which can do true 704x480 30 frame/sec
totally done by software based on PII-400.
support to Asus VR100 stereo glass.

The new drivers will be available for download very soon

Expendable


Expendable from Rage Software offers features like 32Bit colors, trilinear filtering, Bump Mapping and supports videocards with stencil Buffer. The donwload size is a bit large. The Demo contains one playable demo level. To get it to work correctly you have to set the value Video_Attempt [1] to 0 (null) in the file Config.txt. To see shadows like on the screenshots you have to set shadows in video options to projected. The 32Bit screenshots were made on a STB Velocity 4400 with Detonator v1.09 drivers (Stencil + Tripple Buffering (-> You should enable VSYNC on TNT for triple!)). Homepage - Download (75MB): 3DFiles Download page

ASUS offers an external TV-Tuner box for its graphics cards V2740, V3000 and V3400. RIVA Station took a look on the ASUS TV-Box:

Review: ASUS TV-Box

There are new NVIDIA Detonator reference drivers v1.15 available from the Microsoft WHQL (Windows High Quality Lab) site. You can download them here:
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/services/whql/drivers/win98/disply/A56678.exe

These drivers can not be downloaded from NVIDIA, so use them on your own risk!

New drivers are available for Super Socket 7 mainboards based on VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset. There is a new AGP-driver v3.3 a new IRQ Routing driver, a new PCI-Bridge patch and a new USB-Filter driver. You can get the patches on the VIA-driverspage. (ThanX to Guido for the news)

iD´s Brian Hook made some comments to that question in Voodooextreme´s 'ask Grandmaster B.' section:

For me, I want enough of both and I'm not willing to sacrifice one to a gross degree. If your hardware has poor image quality but does 300fps, shouldn't you think about spending a bit more bandwidth on image quality?

To me, if hardware can run at 30-60Hz @ 640x480, I'm happy. After that, I want better image quality. Some others would rather see hardware that runs at 200fps...these people are, uh, wrong.

VRally


You can see at first sight that Vrally comes from Playstation- The resolution is limited to 640x480 and the whole game is more action than simulation. But it´s OK if you only want to fire a few laps. The Screenshots were made with a STB Velocity 4400 and Detonator v1.09 drivers (16Bit) Homepage - Download (20MB): 3DFiles Download page

The german magacine c´t reports of a NVIDIA announcement on the WinHEC conference. It spaeks of a dramatic increase of 3D power that will come this year. It speaks of geometry acceleration by hardware. Follow this link for the Altavista translation. The original german article can be found here.

RIVA Station moves - on the high speed server of the company K&K Kommunikations- systeme. The access-problems of the past should have an end now. There may occur some problems caused by overlapping in the next few days (also with e-mail).
I want to thank my old provider Webspace-Service for his patience with this rescouce hungry website.