Donnerstag 20.04.2000

3dfx released new beta drivers for Voodoo3 2000 and 3000. The new drivers are version v1.04.07:

- Updated kit after server failed
- Contains new Driver installer
- Contains New edge tools - 1.5.7.77
- Force Commander fix
- Incorrect texture sizes reported from Glide fixed´

Download

20.04 Outrageous Ultra Review

PlanetGeForce reviewed the Outrageous Ultra from Absolute Multimedia. The GeForce DDR-RAM card runs at a memclock of 375MHz:

As hinted on earlier in this review the Outrageous Ultra GeForce DDR is an incredible overclocker, the principle difference between it and the Outrageous 3D. When we reviewed the Outrageous 3D our main complaint was how hard it was to push the card beyond it's specs. In fact even in the middle of Canadian winter, just in case you though it had to do with ambient temperature, we could not get the thing past 130/325 for the core and memory. Even at that low a speed, as overclocking goes that is, there were significant artifacts and even lockups.

The Outrageous Ultra GeForce DDR however is very well suited to pushing its limits as we were able to pull numbers of 149 MHz for the core and 375 MHz for the memory! (...more)

20.04 NVIDIA driverscomparsion

3D Rage made a NVIDIA driverscomparsion between the leaked v5.13 und v5.14 drivers:

If you've read anything about these drivers, then the nice 14% frame rate boost in 98 is no surprise. As of the time I'm writing this (April 19), I haven't seen any other benchmarks with the NT and 2K drivers, and those results really surprised me. Win2K actually suffered a slight loss while NT 4 posted huge gains, actually beating out 98 by 1 fps at the highest setting. (...more)

Wednessday 19.04.2000

ASUS released new VGA drivers and tools:

19.04 First Voodoo5 Benchmarks

First benchmark numbers of the new Voodoos:

HardOCP:
Let's take a look at the situation here.  3dfx is bringing a card to market that we had hoped to have seen almost a half a year ago.   This card is going to be very late to market.  While we have not put it in a direct comparison with the GeForce at this time, due to it being an Alpha, you can damn sure better believe that is what the entire hardware community is going to do soon.   The Voodoo 5 seems to have the strength to stand toe to toe with the GeForce at this time, and possibly give superior framerates.  Given the features that can be enabled on the Voodoo 5 out of the box, this card will very likely make a LOT of gamers happy.  I am sure we will see the drivers mature even further in the next couple of weeks to make our benchmarks here seem slow (hopefully).  

Beyond3D:
With the VSA-100, 3dfx is finally bringing to the market many of the long asked for features, such as 32-bit rendering, high-resolution texture support and more accurate Z-buffering. Also, additional features have been included such as texture compression, stencil buffering and as well as 3dfx's new T-buffer.

AGN3D:
It is very important to remember a few things about this card before looking at the results.  First and foremost, this is an alpha based board using early beta drivers.   Secondly, these results are more a measure of the performance hit associated with FSAA than a comparison between the Voodoo 5 and other manufacturers cards.  We will bring you more results as we get them, and a full review in good time as well, but this is just a taste, and not to be mistaken for an in-depth review.  With that in mind, off to the numbers:

There´s no direct comparsion with other cards yet so the numbers seem a bit useless. I´m wondering a bit about the low FSAA performance because in the past you could always hear "at no costs, because it´s done in Hardware".... So let´s wait for some comparsions.

Tuesday 18.04.2000

Core Magacine gathered some information on the NVIDIA X-Chip. This chip will fire the Microsoft gaming console X-Box that comes end 2001:

NVIDIA development team members recently went on record in Japan regarding the 'X-Chip,' the graphical heart of Microsoft's X-Box. According to company representatives, the finished chip will feature approximately 65 Million transistors; nearly 23 Million more than the Sony's Graphic Synthesizer. In terms of pixel fill rate, the X-Chip is capable of 4.8GB/second, whereas the Graphic Synthesizer is capable of 2.4GB/second. (...more)

18.04 Online Result Browser

Madonion.com made the Online-Resultbrowser for 3DMark2000 available. Now you can compare your own results in a large database:

MadOnion.com is pleased to announce that our Online ResultBrowser(ORB) is now up and ready for your 3DMark2000 benchmark submissions. The ORB allows you to quickly compare your "3D marks" to the results achieved by other users worldwide. You can make these comparisons based on CPU and/or 3D Adapter. Additionally, you can get a test-by-test analysis of your computer's strength and weaknesses, as well as quantify its gaming abilities.

To access the ORB, simply load 3DMark2000 and, after running a full set of benchmark tests, select "Submit Saved Results" from the MadOnion.com pull-down menu. You will be connected to MadOnion.com's Online Services page where you can select your browsing options. To access these services, you will require a cookie-enabled web-browser.

The results supplied by the ORB reflect averages calculated from our performance database of approximately 500,000 submissions. Because these averages are affected by the number of scores submitted, encouraging others to submit results will improve the statistical accuracy of these reports.

At MadOnion.com, web development is an ongoing process. We strive to offer you the content and services that will help you make informed upgrade decisions, and keep you up-to-date with the latest advances in PC technologies.

You only have to click on the button "Online Result Browser" after running a benchmark. You can compare 3D and CPU performance and can also view a overview table of your results.

18.04 News on Creative GeForce 2

The Daily Telefrag got some news about Creative´s upcoming NV15 card:

The board is supposed to be announced right after the announce of NVIDIA (the 26-th of April) and will most probably appear in the stores in the beginning of June. The expected price – 500 USD. They also are promising a board with a TV outset. The 64 megabyte board will first hit the OEM dealers and the box version will be out in the stores by the end of August. The processor will have to be under 200 MHz, the memory – 166 MHz (DDR memory).

Nothing new at all. But the price seems to be a bit high... There are some rumors that TV-out will come on a daughter board - A thing I speak about for years....

18.04 Viper II driverscomparsion

Rizenet made a driverscomparsion with 5 different drivers on a S3/Diamond Viper 2:

Because of the bad glitches contained in 9.00.23, the only driver with both speed and image quality is 9.10.24. This driver not only is faster than the others in D3D, it has the "4 textures in one pass" feature enabled, and the 9.10.32 OpenGL ICD can also be used with it for newer OpenGL support. In fact, I'm running it now. I did test to make sure D3D was usuable (9.10.21, it's closest compiled build available, crashed nearly every D3D game I tried). My game of test, TrickStyle, booted and ran fine. Therefore, Rizenet now recommends 9.10.24 for everyone with a Savage2000-based card and who is looking for speed. Enjoy! (...more)

18.04 Webwide

Monday 17.04.2000

nV News made a couple of benchmarks with a GeForce DDR in the game Soldier Of Fortune to see how HW T&L performs in this game: SOF Benchmarks

17.04 cards to come

This month is hot! There are new 3D cards to come:

• About easter holidays we expect to see the first benchmarks of 3dfx´s new Voodoos. I´m very impatient to see how they´ll perform. Besides of HW T&L the specs are still impressive.
• about 25.04: ATi Rage6c alias RADEON (?). The chip will habe Der Chip will do Hardware T&L and might be at NV15 performance level
• about 26.04: NVIDIA NV11 and NV15 alias GeForce2 (?). NVIDIA wants to beat 3dfx once and for all. A very high fillrate expected. Different cardversions possible. NV11 for low-budget.

Sunday 16.04.2000

A new update of Christopher Hill´s GeForce FAQ:

9.9 - 15/4/2000

Added command line switch tip to 'I get problems in Messiah, especially when enabling T&L. How can I fix them?' question.

Renamed 'OpenGL programs run very slowly or crash in Windows 2000. How can I fix it?' question.
Updated all the drivers questions (Win9x, Win2K, WinNT) with 3.84 and 5.14 driver links (leaked).
Updated 'What Windows 9x drivers should I use?' question with information that the 5.14 drivers fix flashing textures problems with The Sims.

16.04 New Wicked GL

Wicked 3D released a new version of thier Wicked 3D drivers:

This version contains accelerated MiniGL support for 3Dfx Voodoo2, 3Dfx Voodoo3, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee.

New in This Version
* Fixed HiRes version of WickedGL with Quake3 bug
* Fixed gamma when exiting game in Win2K

Download

16.04 Creative Labs NV15

The russian website iXBT got information on Creative´s upcoming NV15 card on a pressconference in Moscow:

• 32MB DDR card will be introduced simultaneously with NVIDIA announcement.
• The samples will be available in the first or second week of May.
• The cards will be shipped in volume in the beginning of June.
• 32MB DDR card will be priced at $349 at launch
  the retail card box design is the same as GeForce and GeForce Pro (or Annihilator) but with a word GeForce2 on it.
• The card will be bundled with several games and software titles - Evolva (enhanced version with EMBM), Rage Rally, Whole Experience, Colorific, software DVD player (probably WinDVD.
• There will be no TV-out on the card, but this feature will be provided by a specially developed daughter card.
• 64MB DDR card will initially be available only for OEMs. 64MB DDR retail version is scheduled to the end of summer. 128MB version won't be produced.
• Chip will run at "about 200MHz".
• The card will be equipped with Infineon DDR memory chips. We can suppose that memory will be clocked at 166MHz (333MHz DDR) since Creative's manager mentioned that "there were no DDR memory chips at the market faster than 166MHz at an acceptable price".
• Reference design of NV15 based card for NVIDIA was developed by Creative (since the company is the main NVIDIA's partner - it buys about 17% of all NVIDIA's graphics chips).

iXBT also reports of performance increases in Q3A with GeForce on Athlon systems by using the new leaked v5.14 drivers. More at iXBT.

Friday 14.04.2000

New inofficial NVIDIA drivers available: v3.84 and v5.14 for Win9x/NT and Windows 2000. These drivers are not released by NVIDIA - use them on your own risk! (Download)

14.04 Benchmark Analysis

John Scott, technical developer at Raven Software (SOF - Soldier Of Fortune), mad an analysis of SOF Benchmarks made with many graphic cards in an artcile at The Trenches:

Personally, I think video card manufacturers need to divert some of their attention from developing obscenely high fill rates to optimising the transform path of their drivers. This is clearly where Soldier of Fortune would benefit the most, and as poly counts increase, where many other games would too. Hardware T&L is the way to go.

The difference between the 3dfx reference driver and the WickedGL mini driver clearly indicate how much can be gained on all cards.

The Geforce romps home as the clear winner, its hardware transforms give it a considerable lead on the nearest competitor. It is the card of the moment.

So drivers seem to be the magic thing here. But you must not forget that SOF is OpenGL game based on a improved but rather old Q2 Engine.

14.04 Voodoo 4/ Box-Shots

Puissance PC shows first packshots of  Voodoo 4 4500 and V5 5000 and 6000. The spanish (?) website Info Guía Juegos got some information about the release dates of the new Voodoos. 3dfx´s Alf Covey:

It is true, the 5500 will ship towards the end of this month and the estimated pricing is $299. These are also available pre-order through the online 3dfx store. I don't have any information on when other models will ship but we are planning review units.

14.04 S3 Texturecompression in the new Detonators

nV News took a look on the S3 Texturecompression features in the inofficial NVIDIA Detonator drivers:

It's been a little over a month since we posted our first look at NVIDIA's progress with the Detonator drivers. For those of us who follow NVIDIA closely, it's no secret that they're readying the next release of the Detonator drivers to coincide with the roll out of the NV15. Rumor has it that the official announcement of the NV15 will take place sometime towards the end of April. (...more)

(More features of these drivers are antialiasing - you may also take a look on the RIVA Station Detonator driverscomparsion)

14.04 EMBM in Rollcage II

Matrox released a patch for Rollcage II that enables Hardware-EMBM (Environmental Bump Mapping) in this game:

This patch adds EMBM support to Rollcage Stage II. Download (836KB)

More EMBM patches for Matrox G400 series cards can be found here.

Thursday 13.04.2000

Systemlogic took a look on 3dfx´s upcoming Voodoo 4/5. They explain the technical details and features of the cards but still no benchmarks....

All in all, I enjoyed my visit and my little chats with both Brian Burke and PT Barnum, they are really nice people. Also, I gotten to see what might possibly be one of the more feature-packed cards that we will see for some time. With high fillrates and spectacular hardware FSAA, combined with T-Buffer effects, we will probably not see such as revolutionary card for a while. Some things we might not have covered in this article is the Voodoo4 and the Voodoo5 5000 PCI, this was because we weren't shown those cards but if we ever do, you will see another one of these monster previews! Mass production of the Voodoo5 will lead to the release date of early May, and if we are lucky, you might see a review or two here are SystemLogic before then. (...more)

13.04 WickedGL

R-Age tool a look on the newest Wicked GL driver for 3dfx cards:

To date, 3dfx only has one release of Windows 2000 drivers for its Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 cards. This driver release offered Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 users to play games such as Quake3 in Windows 2000, but because of lower frame rates, compared to Win98, many users went back to Win98. This is where Wicked GL comes in. Up to this point Wicked3d.com had only a Wicked GL for Windows 98. In this setting, when using Wicked GL Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 users saw increased frame rates at higher resolutions, but with the very mature 3dfx drivers there was a decrease in the lower resolutions.   (...more)

The WickedGL driver offers a much better performance in Q3A than the standard 3dfx driver - Now also in w2k.

13.04 GeForce FAQ Update

Chirstopher Hill made an update of his great GeForce FAQ.

Added 'I get problems in Messiah, especially when enabling T&L. How can I fix them?'
Added 'DVD playback seems slow with my ALI chipset based motherboard. How can I fix it?'

News archives - more March News

Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!