Aachen, August 1999 – Because of the large demand, ELSA has augmented its 3D REVELATOR to support graphics boards equipped with RIVA TNT, TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra. This allows ELSA to now offer even more users the opportunity to experience realistic 3D images on their PCs.

ELSA has expanded the technical possibilities of the 3D glasses so that 3D REVELATOR will work in harmony with the graphics boards of other manufacturers. This allows those who have not yet used an ELSA graphics board to experience the revolutionary 3D adventure.

The 3D glasses, which became one of the top products of 1999 soon after they went on the market, also support other graphics boards equipped with RIVA TNT, TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra.. For a list of the graphics boards that are supported, please see the product site— 3D REVELATOR —for more detailed information.

As always, the ideal solution for every user is to operate ELSA 3D glasses in conjunction with an ELSA graphics board. The optimal coordination of all ELSA components to one another guarantees, along with the best game performance, full utilization of all other graphics board features such as video applications, for example. Extremely flexible setting options, which include infinitely adjustable vertical refresh rates and nearly all possible resolutions, allow the user to perfectly adjust the entire system to the monitor being used or even to the individual game.

ELSA 3D REVELATOR are stereo glasses which, for the first time, lend a realistic spatial representation to almost any Direct3D game. The expanded version with new stereo drivers and new packaging is now available in stores.

ELSA customers can expect to see more highlights throughout the rest of the year.

The driver can be found here

Features

In addition to the multitude of features offered by the Maxi Gamer Xentor 32,
the Falcon SE Xentor will also include:

• The fastest 3D chip clock to date – NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT2™ chipset
  running at a minimum of 195 MHz core chip speed.
• The fastest RAM ever used on a graphics card - 32 MB of 4.3-nanosecond
  video RAM running at a minimum of 235 MHz memory clock.
• True AGP 4X compatibility – no need to upgrade or modify your settings
  to take advantage of this innovative feature on upcoming motherboards.
• Advanced cooling – a custom fan on the core chip and individual heatsinks
  for every memory chip pair.
• Smart power management - the cooling fan runs directly off the power
  supply to allow more processing power for the graphics engine.

NVidia.Nv4 = "NVIDIA RIVA TNT"
NVidia.Nv5 = "NVIDIA RIVA TNT2"
NVidia.Nv0A = "NVIDIA RIVA TNT2-0A"
NVidia.NvVanta = "NVIDIA Vanta"
NVidia.NvUltra = "NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Ultra"
NVidia.Nv5M64 = "NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64"

The drivers of only very few cards could convince us completely. Things like OS-independent monitor refresh rate adjustments, tweaking features, core and memory clock adjustments, storable color and gamma profiles and more should be easily accessible in a good driver interface today. There's also a bid difference in terms of features between the cards. Part 1 only lists the features, in the next parts we'll test them as well.

You can find the review here.

Flash it in DOS! (Not in window mode). Use a bootdisk or press F8 while windows starts and choose command prompt only in the menu. Don´t bother about the long file names that appear with a ~

Last week 3Dfx announced a new technology for their future card Voodoo4. 3Dfx promises full new effects in games like Depth Of Field, Motion Blur and Full-Scene AntiAliasing....
Now Wolfgang (ThanX for that) sends an e-mail that the finish programmer Jari Jokivuori made a small Demo with the 'nice' name T-Bluffer, that shows these effects on all OpenGl capable graphic cards - if the fillrate is high enough. I made a quick test on a TNT2 Ultra and it runs without probs (see image above).... but I don´t want to give away a comment on that.....

Embedded DRAM based Glaze3D? 1200 and 2400 to offer gigatexel fillrates

NOORMARKKU, Finland - August 2, 1999 - Bitboys Oy announced today Glaze3D? 1200 and Glaze3D? 2400, two 2D/3D-graphics accelerator architectures with embedded framebuffer memory. The Glaze3D? products are the first available next-generation graphics accelerator architectures utilizing embedded DRAM, overcoming the bottleneck caused by external memory bandwidth. The Glaze3D? products will take gameplay to the next level with unseen image quality and clarity with full support for digital video and next generation operating systems. Both products are expected to be available commercially in Q1/2000.

Embedded DRAM breakthrough

The Glaze3D? products are based on Bitboys? Glaze3D? graphics accelerator chip, manufactured in Infineon Technologies? 0.20 micron embedded DRAM process technology. "By combining our 1.5 million gate rendering core and the best available embedded DRAM technology we have been able to introduce this next-generation graphics product well ahead of others," said Mika Tuomi, general manager of Bitboys Oy. "Never before has it been possible to integrate the full framebuffer memory and the most advanced rendering core on a reasonably sized silicon chip," Tuomi continues. The Glaze3D™ die size is just 150 square millimeters, including the embedded DRAM.

Embedded DRAM is a technology where an ASIC chip is manufactured in an enhanced DRAM manufacturing process. The rendering engine is integrated on the same silicon die as the memory. The advantage is that the memory bus can be almost as wide as the chip designer requires, when with external memory the bus is practically limited to 128-bits.

The Glaze3D™ chip has 72 Mbits of embedded framebuffer memory with a 512-bit memory interface. The quad-pixel pipelined rendering core is clocked at 150 MHz and generates 1200 million texels per second, four times as much as the current 3D-graphics accelerator chips. "The currently available external memory technology barely allows a 128-bit, 200 MHz external memory interface – with embedded DRAM the memory bus is internal and we can have as wide bus as we need," said Tuomi. Glaze3D™ also includes an external memory interface, allowing a 137 MB total video memory. "This configuration gives the user a full memory bandwidth of 12 gigabytes per second. Compared to the 3 gigabytes per second attainable with external SDRAM, we can clearly see where the graphics accelerators are heading. Embedded DRAM is the future and with Glaze3D™ 1200 and 2400 we are the first to provide users with products based on this amazing technology. Others fill follow eventually, but their huge 10-15 million transistor rendering cores are way too large and inefficient to be combined with embedded DRAM."

Glaze3D™ 1200

Glaze3D™ 1200 is a PC 99, DirectX® 7.0, OpenGL® 1.2 and Microsoft® Windows® 2000 compatible product with no sacrifices in the feature list. The product delivers a fillrate of 1200 million texels per second and a geometry throughput of 15 million triangles per second. This translates to a real-world performance in, for example, id Software’s Quake III Arena of over 200 frames per second at true color in full monitor resolutions with all details and features enabled.

The advanced feature-list includes four simultaneous textures with trilinear filtering on a single pass, DXT texture compression, complete 4X AGP support, full-screen order-independent anti-aliasing, environment bump mapping, multiple scaled video overlays and digital flat panel support. Glaze3D™ 1200 is also ready for GDI+, the next generation Microsoft® Windows® user interface – the requirements include 4-tap anisotropic filtering, tear-free graphics rendering and windows manipulation and sRGB color matching support. Glaze3D™ 1200 supports a maximum display resolution of 2048x1536 pixels by combining the tremendous bandwidth of the embedded memory and the high-speed, high-volume external SDRAM memory. The fully unified memory architecture of Glaze3D allows the framebuffer, depth buffer and textures to be stored in either the embedded DRAM, in the external memory or in AGP memory.

Glaze3D™ 2400

Glaze3D™ 2400 provides even more performance and memory than the Glaze3D™ 1200. A fillrate of 2400 million texels allows 1.2 billion pixels to be rendered every second, the equivalent of filling a 1600x1200 screen over 600 times a second. Glaze3D™ 2400 includes two interconnected Glaze3D™ chips on the same PCI or AGP4X board. Where the 1200 version is targeted to PC entertainment and workstation markets, Glaze3D™ 2400 is clearly a product for the most demanding game player or graphics professional. It is also a perfect solution for visualization and for arcade systems. Glaze3D™ 2400 has a 18MB embedded framebuffer and a maximum of 256MB of external video memory. Utilizing a proprietary Bitboys-developed rasterization technology the two chips can distribute the geometry load without the inefficiencies of scan-line interleaving or screen splitting.

Advanced image quality

The accumulation buffer support in Glaze3D provides for advanced image quality enhancements like full-screen order-independent anti-aliasing, depth-of-field effect, motion blur, soft shadows and soft reflections. Bitboys Oy has improved the performance and image quality of the accumulation buffer to allow users to utilize these features in all applications and games at eye-pleasing refresh rates starting from 70 Hz.

Rendering architecture

Even with the advanced features, Glaze3D™ has a traditional rendering architecture - it has a full application-accessible frame- and depth-buffer. This is a requirement for full compatibility with existing 3D-graphics APIs.

The architecture contains a PCI and 4X AGP interface, geometry processing unit and four parallel pixel pipelines. Two texture caches, a total of 24 KB, feed 32 texture colors every cycle to the four pixel pipelines. Two consecutive multiply-accumulate blend stages for each active texture not only support all DirectX® 7.0 and OpenGL® 1.2 blending modes but also many other combinations, all in a single rendering pass.

Quad texturing

The rendered 3D-graphics image consists of pixels and for each pixel one or more surface texture colors are fetched from the memory and blended together to produce the final resulting color. The current 3D-graphics hardware limits game developers to just two textures per pixel on a single rendering pass. These are quickly consumed by the actual surface texture (for example a wooden surface) and another texture, which contains the lighting information. But game developers would also like to add layered, volumetric fog effects, dynamic lighting and bump mapping. No longer they have to fall back to use multiple rendering passes, Glaze3D™ is able to fetch four texture pixels from the memory on a single rendering pass for each pixel. This allows unseen performance and image quality with a major step towards photo realistic image quality.

Future roadmap

Glaze3D™ is a scalable architecture and Bitboys Oy intends to introduce a monster configuration, the Glaze3D™ 4800 later next year. This combines four Glaze3D™ chips together with an external programmable floating point CPU, capable of advanced geometry processing at real-world sustained rates exceeding 10 million primitives per second. With a 36MB embedded framebuffer and a maximum of 512MB of external video memory, this monster will satisfy even the most demanding user. Because it uses mass-market chips, the product will be very cost effective.

• fixed marks fading properly in fog volumes
• show weapon in fov >90, adjusting position down as needed
• update scoreboard info while at intermission
• print "waiting to play" for tourney spectators
• fixed tied rank with 0 score and spectators
• return to roaming spectator when a followed client quits or spectates
• release windows cursor when running windowed and the console is down
• log all client transitions, item pickups, and kills
• changed joystick axis to act just like arrow keys so they can be bound in the controls menu for strafing. Yes, this does remove slow walking from joystick movement, but it makes everything a lot cleaner.
• fix up PantherXL trackball support
• tournament queuing of spectators to enter the game
• track wins and losses as long as you stay on a tourney server
• spectators are now in fly mode instead of noclip, and use teleporters
• pass serverTime instead of msec for command timing, prevents
• timescale cheating
• fixed rcon

An update does´nt work at all! I also heard that they (finaly!) included a cheat protection. A new model is also available. Use it by typing "model sarge" in console.

Download: Bluesnews - CDROM.COM (35MB)

Benchmarks: The names of the demos have changed:

Type: TIMEDEMO 1
then DEMO Q3DEMO1
or DEMO Q3DEMO2

Tomshardware also wrote some words about that.

3 days gibbing and fragging and only few sleeep.... but it was great! You can find some impressions of the party here:GXP LAN-Party Episode II

... but now I first need a shower! <g>

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