Donnerstag 02.12.1999 |
| 02.12 - 3DMark 2000 Impressions Here a couple of screenshots of the 3DMark 2000 Beta in demo mode:
You should download the two videos below to get an impression how these great images look in motion. You need the Windows Media Player to play the videos. I zipped the files because the data-rate is too high for streaming:
The animations run very smooth in real. Some hangs are caused by the videoformat. The loading times are sometimes pretty long because I have to use a slow harddisk to help me out after my HD crash yesterday. But a new one is one the way... :-) You can compare your own 3DMark 2000 results on the web with a hughe database. You also get tips and hints on what you should upgrade to let your machine perform better. More about that at MadOnion.com. |
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Wednessday 01.12.1999 |
| 01.12 - HD Probs I wanted to post some new 3DMark2000 Beta impressions here but now I first have to do some fix on my system because my Barracuda doesīnt want to work any more :-( 01.12 - New SB Live! drivers A bit off-topic but somehow important. Creative releases some new drivers for the SB Live!:
Get the drivers here. This Coppermine issue made me crazy.... hope it will work now so I can use my SB Live again. 01.12 - GeForce Reviews RIVA 3D - ASUS
V6600 Deluxe 01.12 - New Erazor III drivers ELSA released new drivers for Erazor III, Erazor III Pro and Erazor III LT:
Download the drivers here: ELSA Erazor III driver (v4.11.01.0104-0023) |
Tuesday 30.11.1999 |
| 30.11 - ASUS V6800 Details ASUS presented some first details about the GeForce DDR-RAM card AGP-V6800 (Deluxe).
- Drakan (full version) - Rollcage (full version) - 12 game Demos The card will be available early january 2000. The models are AGP-V6800 299.- US $ (basic VGA) or 349.- US $(Deluxe model). 3D glasses are optional by the VR-100 VR upgrade kit. 30.11 - New Creative Beta drivers Creative released new beta drivers for the following cards: Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT, 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 3D Blaster RIVA TNT2 Ultra Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT2 Value (32Mb) 3D Blaster GeForce You can download the drivers here: Creative NVIDIA Beta drivers 30.11 - More about W2K and OGL A W2K Beta Tester has send a mail to Blueīs News about W2K and OpenGL support: ...I would like to set the record straight. I am a beta tester for Win2K. Not only will Win2K not ship with OpenGL drivers it will not ship with Direct3D drivers. The OS supports both DirectX and OpenGL, however, video card manufacturers have/were not able to kick out stable drivers in time to make it to RC3, (the cut-off was actually RC2). MS is pushing stability so they will not be replacing the current drivers that support only standard 2D desktop graphics. I am using Win2K beta drivers for my TNT2 Ultra and many games run fantastically on Win2K with it. I am using NT4 glide and opengl drivers for my voodoo2 board and I am able to play Ultima9 acceptably, (it runs under Win2K better than under win98). You can be sure that when Win2K is on the shelves most of the card manufacturers will have Win2K drivers with D3D and OpenGL support available. When will the unfounded rumors cease? BTW, the Fahrenheit project was for DirectX 3D technologies and has nothing to do with Windows 2000 or any Microsoft OS per se. So it seems itīs only because of the Standard Display drivers... I hope new RCīs donīt use as much memory as RC1..... It used 65MB right after startup. 30.11 - T&L Benchmarks Fastgraphics made some benchmarks with TNT2 and GeForce cards with Winbech 2000, that supports hardware T&L in DirectX. 3D Winbench 2000 clearly shows what we can expect from T&L in the near future. DirectX games which take advantage of on-chip T&L hardware can gain much as 300% in extreme situations. Most games will obviously not show that kind of numbers, but I think that 30% to 50% extra performance will not be a problem, provided that the game is hard on geometry and lighting. |
Monday 29.11.1999 |
| 29.11 - v3.62 drivers for whom? Iīve fired a mail to NVIDIA with the question about the new v3.62 drivers: Q: are the new v3.62 drives only for AMD Athlon systems or is it recommended to use these drivers also on intel chipsets? A: Nope only AMD systems.... Short but clear... I only wonder why I cant read such things on the driver pages of the card manufaturers!? 29.11 - Windows 2000 without OpenGL? The Register (once again) postet an article where they reoprt about the possibility that Windows 2000 will come without OpenGL support: Fahrenheit, the joint Microsoft-SGI project "to define the future of graphics" has crashed in ruins, with Microsoft to all intents and purposes pulling its support for OpenGL and throwing its weight behind Direct3D. The Register has obtained correspondence from the Win2k beta tests which makes this abundantly clear, and last week SGI itself drew a final line under its involvement with Fahrenheit. 29.11 - Falcon4 mit T&L 3DSL made news that Hardware T&L Support will be included in the upcoming F15 add-on for Falcon 4: This just in: "I just thought I'd mention that you can add two more games to your list that will support T&L: The F-15 add-on to Falcon 4, and Falcon 4 with the patch that will be released at the same time as the add-on. MPS is updating the graphics engine to fully support DX7, which means T&L. Both should be available Q1 or Q2 next year." - Rob "Narphous" Hughes 29.11 - V-Sync GameProWorld made an article about V-Sync: V-sync, plainly put, is the relation between the refresh rate of your 3D video accelerator and the refresh rate of your monitor. Refresh rate simply means how many times your computer redraws the image you see on your screen every second. When you first plug in your brand spankin' new computer and fire it up, Windows usually will auto-detect (plug-and-play) your monitor and set the default refresh rate for your individual monitor-usually around 75Hz, or 75 frames per second. In essence, the monitor is set at 75Hz, thus limiting your refresh rate to 75 frames per second, because they are in direct relation with each other. The article can be found here. 29.11 - GeForce Reviews Mike of NV News updated his GeForce Review site. There are over 150 entries inside yet: GeForce Review Site 29.11 - Translation Uh... Iīm still sitting on the translation. I had no time to finish it yesterday....... :-( |
Saturday 27.11.1999 |
| 27.11 - GeForce Shootout GeForce Shootout at RIVA Station:
Iīve tested the ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe, the ELSA Erazor X and the Guillemot 3D Prophet. The Review is only in GERMAN LANGUAGE yet. Iīm working on the translation and hope I can post it tomorrow. So stay tuned. But you can take a look on the benches and images if you want.... GeForce Shootout (German language) 27.11 - GeForce review at Tomīs Hardware Tomīs Hardware reviewed the Creative and Leadtek GeForce card: My decision is pretty solid here. If you want a 'no-bullshit'-GeForce based board without any special features besides kick butt 3D performance, go pick up the Creative board at the cheapest price available. You can probably pick it up easier and at $20 less than the Leadtek. However, if you aren't decided between both boards, grab the Leadtek if you can find it. For a slightly higher price you can pick up the added software bundle and have video out that you might find useful in the future. Being able to pump video through your TV to show off DVD movies or MPEG clips can be useful and with flat panels coming around the corner, you might regret not getting a card with the DVI connection. Read the whole stuff here. 27.11 - Overclocking Journey And John "Moto" Chow of The Techzone went out to learn overclocking. A journey into overclocking: Not unlike any other day, I was trolling through the tangled web of techno-babble on the web searching for that one “golden nugget” that would put me over the edge and give me that extra 10mhz of processor speed (like I’ll ever NOTICE the advantage of 10mhz) or the 5 frames per second to play my favorite 3D games (Again… Like I’ll ever SEE the difference 5 FPS provides). But, today WAS different… Read more about it here. 27.11 - Creative Annihilator Review RIVA3D reviewed the Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator: "The Creative Annihilator uses the standard NVIDIA reference design, which is also used by Guillemot, Leadtek and Elsa, so performance wise, the Annihilator gives benchmark scores very similar to any of the other companies GeForce offerings. However, we can also look at the performance of the Unified drivers running on the Annihilator, which definitely will give you an idea of how potentially valuable this feature can be." More about that here: Creative Annihilator Review |
Friday 26.11.1999 |
| 26.11 - New ErazorX drivers ELSA released new Win 9x drivers v4.12.01.104-0020 for the GeForce card ErazorX: ELSA ErazorX drivers |
Thursday 25.11.1999 |
| 25.11 - News about 3DMark 99MAX and GeForce After the strange results of GeForce and DirectX 6.1/7.0 in 3DMark99 Max, MadOnion.com (former Futuremark) gave me a small comment about that: The weird result disparity between DX6.1 /DX7 you encountered on the GeForce test, is simply because 3DMark99 has no DX7 optimization routines and expected results are being skewed. The lack of DX7 optimization makes very little difference to perceived visuals, but throws the figures out of whack. Remember that neither DX7 or the GeForce existed when 3DMark99 was released. Then again, in a few days that will be taken care of... So it seems that 3DMark99 Max is not good to test the GeForce D3D performance because GeForce drivers are optimized for DirectX 7. A bit strange: you canīt see this problem in 'normal' games..... but letīs wait for 3DMark 2000. 25.11 - 3D Blaster GeForce Pro Creative Asia now has a own website for the DDR-RAM GeForce card 3D Blaster GeForce Pro: 3DBlaster GeForce Pro 25.11 - 3D Prophet drivers Guillemot has released a new driver for the GeForce card 3D Prophet. The drivers are based on NVIDIA Reference drivers v3.62:
Download: 3D Prophet drivers v3.62 NVIDIA speaks only about AMD Athlon optimizations in these drivers. It seems that these optimizations are only compatibility issues because AGP seems to run in AGP 1X mode only. 25.11 - NVIDIA Linux ICD GA-Source reports that NVIDIA will release a full Linux OpenGL ICD driver for NVIDIA chipsets end of the year. |
Wednessday 24.11.1999 |
| 24.11 - Breakthrough in chip technology The University of California, Berekley, announced that theyīve developed a new technology that allows 10x smaller chip structures than available today. They speak of a 18 nanometer long gate - this is about 100 Atoms. The most interresting thing here is that the technology is free for all: Hu said the secret to the success of the electronics industry has been built around making transistors ever smaller for the last three decades. But, Hu said, the laws of physics eventually will limit what can be done unless a new transistor design, such as the UC Berkeley prototype, is adopted. The prototype was successfully fabricated last July and shows good performance characteristics, Hu said. No patent has been taken on the device. "We made the decision not to patent," Hu said. "We want the widest possible usage. We hope this becomes a mainstream transistor structure in the future." Yes.... thereīs alive aside exchange rates....! The whole pressrelease can be found here. 24.11 - 3dfx Interview Gamerīs Depot made an interview with ī3dfx new CEO Alex Luepp: Q: Do you think the "hefty" cost of your high-end 3D accelerators will affect sales to your target market, the younger generation of online gamers? A: I think it's certainly something we need to watch and look at. On the other hand, when the Voodoo2 was released consumers spent around $600 on cards and there was no issue. I think it's going to be a question of acceptance and performance. We have to make sure and be attractive to the market. The market will determine what the price level is and we have to be ready to react to that. The whole interview can be found here. 24.11 - High End GeForce Tests The website Texel tested a Creative GeForce card on Win NT application benchmarks and compared the results with a 3DLabs GVX1: Surprise - the GeForce uses all the CPU! Nothing left over for anything else. With this slightly modified ProCDRS-02 test the Geforce score was 23.5 and the GVX1 score was 22.84. But it almost looks like the GPU annihilated the CPU!! The CPU usage for the GeForce was about 100% for each subtest and for the GVX1 less than 10%. There are also some results of a Quadro beta card included. 24.11 - ASUS V6600 Review Gamespot made a review of the ASUS V6600 GeForce card: Finally, one cool feature for all those performance snobs is the monitoring software that ships with the card. The software lets you check to see whether the onboard fan is turning, how fast it's turning, the temperature of the GeForce 256 chip, and its voltage draw. Toss in Asus' clock-rate-tweaking software, and you have a potent combination if you like to tweak your card's clock rate. (Yes, there's a safe-mode recovery utility to go back to the defaults if you get into trouble). The core clock can be cranked all the way up to 142MHz and the memory to 195MHz. I pumped it up to 135/195 for several hours without any hiccups, but your mileage may vary - expect a card that can run at 120/166, and anything above that is gravy. As with the Leadtek card that we tested yesterday, there doesn't seem to be a huge impact on actual game performance by pumping up the clock rate. The whole stuff can be found here. Note: Thereīs a 'small' misstake in this review. Hardware Monitoring is not available on V6600. This card is based on the NVIDIA reference design and doesīnt own a chip for HW Monitor. Only the V6600 Deluxe is equipped with a chip for Monitoring :-) |
Tuesday 23.11.1999 |
| 23.11 - News about Savage 2000 Savage2k.com got new informatiions about the HW T&L capabilities of the Savage2000. There were reports in the past days that the chip will come without Hardware T&L support. Now it seems that this feature will be included in the drivers later: There has been some confusion with regards to the Transformation and Lighting engine on the Viper II board and S3 would like to provide clarification. The Transformation and Lighting engine on S3's Viper II works however it was not completely enabled in the first driver rev that shipped to retail last Friday (Nov 19th). S3 focused on performance, stability and optimizing feature sets for today's games. Transformation and lighting capabilities will be available in soon to be released drivers We anticipate driver availability in Open GL around the first part of December. Comment: With the last generation of graphic
cards we allready had the problem that the card manufatureres were not able to deliver
thier product with optimized drivers. There were only beta or not fully function drivers
available. TNT2 and Voodoo3 cards got their full performance and functionality after
numerous driver upgrades (Video I/O, OpenGL.....). We now have the same situation with
GeForce cards. But S3 reaches a whole new dimension. 23.11 - In-Game Screenshots Here are some screenshot from two new games: The long awaited Unreal Tournament and Rally Championship:
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Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand |
