NEWSPAGE DEUTSCH RIVASTATION - There´s something FISHY when you can read this!

02.01 - Athlon AGP2x on Athlon boards

On Athlon mainboards, v3.62 drivers only run in AGP1x mode by default. Here´s a registry entry to set it to 2x:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\System]
"EnableIrongate2x"=dword:00000001

There are reports that this works on some machines:

Here are REG Files that make the setting automatic after a double click:

Irongate Settings
v3.xx V-Sync/Overclock Settings

02.01 - New PCI List and Powerstrip

Entechtaiwan released new versions of its tools:

PowerStrip 2.6 (639kb) has been released as a unified build, with transparent support for the original retail release of Windows 95 to the latest RTM build of Windows 2000. Support has been added for the GeForce DDR and Savage 2000, as well as - belatedly - for Number Nine's proprietary T2R4. Fixes relate to, amongst other things, Rendition CRTC calculations, ATI Rage hardware configuration under Win2000, the TNT2 M64 clocks, and Intel overlay color correction. Also new in this release is a comprehensive diagnostic module and command-line support for configuring AGP transfers, along with automatic, temporary disabling of "secondary monitors" when you switch to DirectX or OpenGL settings (including the second of the G400's DH). Both the PowerStrip and the latest PCIList - now at Version 1.5 - include support for several new PCI class devices.

02.01 - Happy new year!

A happy new year to all! I hope your heads were not as wide as mine was yesterday... :-)

30.12 - Borsti´s Doomsday

It´s finaly finished. My first Quake3 Arena Map: Borsti´s Doomsday:

shot1_kl.jpg (12366 bytes)

The map is available in a DM and Tourney (1on1) Version. Download and more here.

Bug! Bug! There´s a texture bug on some machines. Q3 does´nt find a shader. It works without problems my main machine but it has this problem on another. So I´ll have to change this texture and recompile the maps (that takes 3h per map). Sorry! What the big players can do is no problem for me :-)

Fixed!! :-)

30.12 - Annihilator FAQ

nV News released a new version of the Creative Annihilator FAQ

30.12 - New ASUS files

ASUS released new bios and driver files:

66-362.exe
V6600/V6800 Series driver for Windows 95/98 (v3.62)

66sg204r.exe
V6600 BIOS Flash program (v2.10.02.04 for SGRAM)
For SGRAM chipset recovering from SDRAM version. Does not support SDRAM chipsets.

66sg204.exe
V6600 BIOS Flash program (v2.10.02.04 for SGRAM)

66sd104.exe
V6600 BIOS Flash program (v2.10.01.04 for SDRAM)

38p-213a.exe
V3800PRO BIOS Flash program (2.05.13a)

38-213a.exe
V3800 BIOS Flash program (2.05.13a)

30.12 - Guillemot 3D Prophet DDR Treiber

Guillemot released v3.62a drivers for 3D Prophet DDR-DVI: Guillemot drivers

30.12 - GeForce Reviews

Creative Labs Annihilator Pro - nV News
Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI - Game PC
Creative Labs Annihilator Pro - Glide Underground
Creative Labs Annihilator Pro - Computer Games Online

Hm.... time a bit competition on the market (Hello 3dfx??)

30.12 - ASUS V6800

ASUS announced the GeForce DDR RAM card V6800:

In order to provide all the best features to the enthusiast users, ASUS multimedia R&D engineers once again have a unique design for GeForce256DDR graphics card. The new AGP-V6800 Deluxe is born to differ from the generic GeForce256DDR cards from other vendors, and it is armed with all ASUS's secret weapons including

Secret weapon I: SmartDoctor Technologies
Secret weapon II: SmartVideo Applications
Secret weapon III: SmartVR Utilities

Secret weapon I: SmartDoctor Technologies
The innovative SmartDoctor technologies from ASUS include Fan RPM Monitoring, AGP Power Level Monitoring, SmartCooling technology, OverHeat Protection, and Dynamic OverClocking. These innovative designs in ASUS AGP-V6600/AGP-V6800 series can prevent any dangerous condition when enjoying the world's most powerful graphics card.

Secret weapon II: SmartVideo Applications
The ASUS AGP-V6800 Deluxe graphics card is bundled with a series of highly valuable SmartVideo applications including VideoSecurity, StereoTV, and ASUS Live.

Secret weapon III: SmartVR Utilities
ASUS once again is at the forefront with the stereoscopic technologies. At this time, ASUS features its AGP-V6800 Deluxe graphics card with the most complete SmartVR Utilities in the driver including D3D VR gaming, OpenGL VR gaming, stereoscopic photos viewing, and stereoscopic video viewing.
For D3D games, this unique utilities is the world first to provide the best compatibility with DirectX 7. By the way, it is the world first utilities which can provide most comprehensive support for stereoscopic gaming with OpenGL games including Unreal Tournament, Unreal, Quake III Arena, Quake II, Half-Life, Heretic II, ect. Thanks to ASUS's considerate design, the driver is also featured with functions of updating schemes for games and OSD(On Screen Display) control panel for both OpenGL games and D3D games.
Besides, ASUS also bundles VRViewer and StereoTV with AGP-V6800 Deluxe graphics card to let users to view stereo photos, stereo pictures, and stereo video.

ASUS Intelligent User Interface
ASUS AGP-V6800 Deluxe graphics card also provides most user-friendly and fancy driver-installation and user interface. It is featured with a lot of functions, including independent setting of display functions (including color-gamma, refresh-rate, output) for 3D games, desktop, and video, quick hot key for setting, quick short-cut, and so on.

Highly Valuable softwares and 3D Games Bundled
In the retail box, AGP-V6800 Deluxe graphics card bundles Ulead VideoStudio, ASUS DVD software player and highly valuable 3D games including, Drakan (full version), Rollcage(full version), and other 12 game titles.

Shipping date and Pricing
The ASUS AGP-V6800 is scheduled for late January 2000. The retail price will be about USD339.-. Price and release date may change as time goes by.

ThanX to AGN3D

29.12 - GeForce Sidebanding

3D Spotlight reports of rumors of a new tool which will allow to enable or disable AGP Sidebanding on NVIDIA cards:

While reading though the Creative Labs Annihilator newsgroup, I noticed a nice piece of information concerning sidebanding support for GeForce SDR and GeForce DDR boards. It looks like Creative Labs will be making a utility to enable and disable sidebanding support for these boards. William Ball of Creative hinted in a newsgroup post that they are making the utility. I know some people want to try out sidebanding on their GeForce cards. If you don't know, Nvidia disabled sidebanding for their GeForce boards in their drivers for some unknown reason. If the utility works for TNT and TNT2 users, some of them may be able to run on AGP speeds much higher now, but I don't know for sure if this utility will be GeForce specific or if it can also be used on TNT and TNT2 based boards.

29.12 - T&L Benchmarks

Mike of nV News made sone GeForce benchmarks with the demo of Test Drive 6. Test Drive 6 supports Hardware T&L with DirectX7. He achives 16FPS at 1024x768-32 with software T&L. A GEForce with hardware T&L achives 46FPS. The results can be found here.

28.12 - Multiscreen solutions for NT

I often get questions about multi screen solutions for Windows NT. ELSA offers some special packages for this:

ELSA multi-screen solutions have a long heritage. The principle is tried and tested, and offers the user a high degree of investment security. Simply by combining identical ELSA GLoria™ or ELSA Synergy™ graphics boards (including the addition of further boards to an existing system) extends the standard workstation to a powerful dual- or multi-screen solution.

ELSA multi-screen solutions

28.12 - LithTech2

GA-Source made 2 Screenshots, which were made with the new LithTech2 Engin. This eingine will support Hardware T&L: LithTech2 Screenshots.

28.12 - Desktop Pet

If you´re searching for a PC pet you should take a look to Desktop Pets. They offer a MS Office-style pet for your windows desktop (OpenGL): Desktop Pets

28.12 - 3DMark2000 Interview

Hardwareguru made an interview with MadOnions Markus Maki about 3DMark 2000:

7. -Optimization
Why are the values with Penitum-III Optimization higher than Hardware T&L when using a GeForce256 card ? Especially the 8 light test on a geforce runs significantly slower than on a TNT2..how that ?

A: Without specific configurations (CPU speeds, test results) it's very hard to answer this question. In the 8 light test, both AMD and Intel optimizations seem to be faster than hardware T&L when run with a fast (600+MHz) CPU. My only answer to this is that NVIDIA has some work to do in their lighting engine still.

The interview can be read here. (Nothing really new here)

28.12 - ELSA Windows 2000 beta drivers

ELSA offers new Windows 2000 RC3 Beta drivers for the Erazor III based on NVIDIA reference drivers v3.64.

BETA graphics display driver version '5.07.00.198' for Windows 2000 - RC3 (not supported) Download: ELSA Erazor III W2K drivers

27.12 - UT D3D Performance

Unrealitiy.org printed some hints of how to get better D3D performance in Unreal Tournament:

Still I am aware that UT's D3D performance isn't so great straight out of the box so I changed some stuff in the unrealtournament.ini file.
here is a copy of it:

[D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice]
Translucency=True
VolumetricLighting=True
ShinySurfaces=True
Coronas=True
HighDetailActors=True
UseMipmapping=True
UseTrilinear=False
UseMultitexture=True
UsePageFlipping=True
UsePalettes=True
UseFullscreen=True
UseGammaCorrection=True
DetailTextures=True
Use3dfx=False
UseTripleBuffering=True
UsePrecache=False
Use32BitTextures=False

Turning precaching off should reduce level load time and ram usage but, may cause some trashing in the game.
Yet if you would want more performance, the first things to turn off would be detailtextures and volumetric lighting.
Also if you are running the game in 32bit colours you could switch to 16bit for performance increase.

This should give you a fairly decent performance with any good D3D card and if you are low on ram you could always consider adding more.

27.12 - Q3 Level

My Q3 level is growing.... here´s one more screenshot:

Click to enlarge

I hope I can finish it in this century .-)

24.12 - Merry Christmas!

I wish you a warm and nice christmas night! Merry christmas! And Santa may bring a new graphics card to you... :-)

24.12 - New Creative Annihilator drivers

Creative released new Annihilator GeForce drivers:

This is a new driver release (v2.04) for 3D Blaster GeForce & 3D Blaster GeForce Pro (model CT6941 & CT6971) for Windows 95 & '98. This release includes :

- Virtual Desktop support

Download: Creative Annihilator GeForce drivers

24.12 - Does intel plan to make a graphic chip again?

CPU Review speculates about the possibility that intel wants to make its own graphic chips again: porduziern will.

There I was, innocently reading TechWeb, when I ran across their story about Intel licensing the whole 3DLabs patent portfolio (as an aside, I will have a Permidia 3 review RSN; 3DLabs was kind enough to send a card over for me to review).

Why would Intel want all of 3DLabs patents?

Simple.

Intel wants to integrate decent graphics capabilities into its chipsets; and I would not be surprised at all if they wanted to produce consumer level 3D graphics processors for AGP video cards as well.

More at CPU Review.

24.12 - GeForce Reviews

New GeForce Reviews in the WWW:

ASUS V6600 Pure - The Techzone
Guillemot 3D Prophet - CTNews3D
5 GeForce cards - GamePCs

23.12 - Revelator in OpenGL

Stereovision.net made an article of how to run the ELSA 3D Revelator with the new Beta OpenGL VR drivers in Q1/2/3:

I don't recommend running Quake2 and 3 in stereo mode since these games require sharp shooter precision which gets harder in stereo mode. It's just like in real life, when you take aim, you look with one eye while pointing the weapon at the target since it's the best way to get your target. Run Quake3 in stereo and prepared to get fragged, some training may help you but it's still harder than playing flat 2D. Halflife on the other hand improves a lot in stereo, while all other lame gamers play Gordon Freeman you ARE Gordon Freeman, you'll waste a little more ammo, but so what? After stepping into the third dimension you will never go back. Maybe for a short break, remember not to play more than one hour at a time in stereo.

More abvout that here.

23.12 - NVIDIA sues S3

The Register reports that NVIDIA sued S3. The reason or which patents are the reason for the clash is not known yet. SOme people think it´s because of the T&L engine of the Savage 2000.

Details at The Register. More specualtions with a small interview at AGN3D.

23.12 - OpenGL Screensaver

3DFiles has a new version of the OpenGL screensaver Planestate:

Planestate is a electropaint inspired 3d screensaver for Win9x and WinNT that shows a lot of planes moving around in strange and hypnotic motion patterns.

Download: 3DFiles Download Page