A review of the card will follow soon!

DDR RAM stands for Double Data Rate RAM (as opposed to SDR RAM, which stands for Single Data Rate). DDR RAM doubles the data transfer rate per clock. It can go faster because it performs two instructions per RAM clock instead of a single instruction for SDR.

Pressrelease

'3D Blaster Annihilator'
http://www.soundblaster.com/corporate/news/geforce256.html
http://www.creaf.com/corporate/news/geforce256.html
http://www.creative-asia.com/press/1999/p991004a.html

'3D Blaster Annihilator Pro'
http://www.soundblaster.com/corporate/news/3db-annihilator.html
http://www.creaf.com/corporate/news/3db-annihilator.html
http://www.creative-asia.com/press/1999/p991004b.html

Guillemot ppresented its new GeForce card 3D Prophet to the press. They also showd the Maxi Gamer Cougar / Cougar Video Edition and the soundcard Fortissimo:

Preview: Guillemot 3D Prophet + more

click to enlarge

You can see that the performance of v3.34 is slightly slower than 2.08. But this can also depend on different default tweak settings of both driver versions!

Driver v3.34 and VSYNC

RIVA 3D got some information on how to enable the VSYNC menu for D3D in the v3.34 drivers:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak
D_DWORD CoolBits
Value 3 (1=Direct3D vsync option, 2=overclock option, 3=both, 0=none)

You have to create the whole key. The driver v3.34 does not create a key called 'NVIDIA Corporation'! If you find this in your registry then it´s from an older driver version! To make this process more easy I made a small Reg-File: REG-FILE. Just double-click it in your windows explorer and the key is made automaticaly. The Tweak menus now also have an overclocking possibility!

Another interessting point in the new drivers can be found in the inf-file:

NVIDIA&DEV_00A0.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA Crush"
NVIDIA&DEV_0100.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA GeForce 256"
NVIDIA&DEV_0103.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA Quadro"

TNT Users, Try This!

Tweaks:

• Play in 16-bit color, which is significantly faster than 32-bit color.
• Turn the detail options down in the Preferences/Video menu.
• Use the "-" key to reduce the HUD size.
• In Preferences/Game, turn off the display of your weapon.
• If you have enabled Advanced Options / Audio / Use3DHardware audio support, TURN IT OFF for now! Big driver performance problems.

Experimental improvement for the brave:

• Try NVidia's Beta Detonator 3.34 drivers (thanks to Anandtech's site for the link).
• Try putting this new D3DDRV.DLL into your \TournamentDemo\System directory. Please back up your existing one first!

These two downloads are beta and haven't been rigorously tested yet, but in our gameplay sessions here, they're a huge improvement on low-RAM machines with the TNT, TNT2, and GeForce256.  

Please let us know how these work for you, by emailing utbugs@epicgames.com

BTW: Epic always writes TNT.... what about TNT2?

• We received some more confirmations of Unreal working better on TNT's with the Creative Labs unified drivers using Glide than Direct3D.  If you have a Creative Labs TNT card and have having performance problems, try that. Especially if you have under 128 megs of RAM.
  
• Jack and I have been tracking down the performance problems with the TNT on 64-meg (and lower) machines.  To our great surprise, it appears that the TNT is keeping duplicate system memory copies of all our textures--we saw system memory grow and shrink in almost exact proportion to our "supposed" video memory texture allocations.  Thus the game uses an extra 12-26 megabytes of system memory--a very inefficient allocation of resources. This is a big surprise, because the NVidia guys has always told us this isn't the case.
  
  Problem in my code?  I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong.  I'll follow up with our henchmen at NVidia and Microsoft and see if we can track this down...

Had to be removed (04.10)

Michael Tirtasana released version 1.5 of his OpenGL/Direct 3D Benchmark Tirtanium. Here´s what´s new:

- released Tirtanium 1.5 for DirectX 7.0.
- use the new DirectX 7 interface to support hardware T&L.
- improved D3D spotlight effects.
- this version is little bit slower than older version because of DX7 and more imporoved spotlight effects with specular lights.
- requires DirectX 7
- new Linux version
- not tested with T&L hardware

Besides of the whole Benchmark you can also download an update for previous versions.

Oliver Thylmann from BeNews gives some information and facts about the new version 4.5 of the Operation System BeOS on RIVA Station:

Introduction: BeOS 4.5

The earthquake delay our schedule of NV10/GeForce design about one week. New ASUS's GeForce board is called V6600. It will be with three models:

- V6600/32M or V6600/64M
- V6600-Deluxe/32M
- V6600GL/32M or V6600GL/64M or V6600GL/128M

• File Planet - UT Demo Full Version (228) - 53 Mb
• File Planet - UT Demo Linux Server (228) - 49.6 Mb
• File Planet - UT Demo Patch From 3dfx Version (228) - 9.4 Mb
• AVault
• 3Dfiles
• 3DAGA
• Unreal Universe (full version)
• Unreal Universe (patch)

Planetriva shows a couple of TNT2 Screenshots from this demo.

Although it is still impossible to quantify the damage with precision, some analysts are cautiously estimating that the net effect on the PC supply chain is a disruption of a few weeks.

The article goes on to explain that the TSMC fab facility, which manufactures chips for NVIDIA and 3dfx, is currently operating at 70% capacity.

• CNet´s Game Center
• iBXT-Hardware
• 3D Hardware

With normal TNT2s, the path is 128bits wide. With the TNT2 M64 of the Cougar, the path is 64bits wide, half the size. This does not mean that the TNT2 M64 is half the speed of a normal TNT2. Most of the time memory bandwidth is not totally being used up and there are other components, such as the card's processor speed, that effect performance. In real world performance, it means that when you're running at high resolutions (800x600 and above) and/or in 32bit color, the TNT2 M64's memory bus width becomes a bottleneck and it lags behind the normal TNT2. On the positive side, when you're running games in 640x480 without all the quality settings at their highest, the Cougar with its TNT2 M64 is almost as fast and, in some cases, just as fast as a full on TNT2 but for a lot less money....mehr

The best feature in the new demo is the OpenGL and Direct3D support, allowing the masses of people without 3dfx cards to play. For people with TNT and TNT2 cards, the difference of Unreal Tournament's OpenGL and D3D performance will blow you away! With not only better image quality, there's a huge rendering speed improvement and much more stable code, Better image quality, faster performace and stable gameplay will soon put to rest the myth that the Unreal engine is designed only with glide in mind. To run the D3D, you'll need DirectX 7.0, you can grab it from the official website. For best results, stick with the D3D, as it's much faster than OpenGL at this point in time.

Screenshots + more here.

• Landscape Demo
  Features: Character Animation, Terrain, rippling water using bump mapping (Matrox G400 only), multitexturing, scrolling sky, polytope collision detection.
• Particle Demo
  Generate various kinds of particle effects by pressing keys and view them from any angle.
• Multimonitor/Bump Mapping Demo  (For Matrox G400 only)
  This will show two different spinning bump mapped objects on two monitors.
• Indoor Bump Mapping Demo (For Matrox G400 only)
  This was a tech demo shown by Matrox earlier this year at E3.
• Curved Surfaces
  Shows a realtime tesselated and bending bezier patch.
• DirectShow Demo
  Plays a movie on a texture which is used by a spinning object.
• Triangle Picking
  Demonstrates picking individual triangles on an object, using the ray->triangle collision routines.
• Object Picking
  Demonstrates precise triangle picking of entire objects from an assortment of shapes.
• Polytope Collision
  Demonstrates collision with a set of convex volumes.
• Projected Shadows
  Shows how to project a shadow from any object onto a ground plane given any light source.
• Stencil Buffered Shadows (3D card must support stencil buffering)
  Shows how to use stencil buffering to produce 3D shadows for any shapes.
• Spotlights
  Demonstrates color moving spotlights.
• Rotating Mirrors (requires zbuffering)
  Shows how to create rotating mirrors from any flat object with any number of triangles.

I´ve returned after very fantastic holidays and 'enjoy' the good old german fall weather (rain, rain, rain).... but I could´nt see this sunny weather anymore :-)
Tomorrow everything will go on as before!

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