************************************** * borstiīs * * Ŋ||\ //\ * * \ | \/STATION * ************************************** * RIVA Station - L O G B O O K * ************************************** - What is this? Here I post things Iīm currently I mentioned during testing or I talk about thinks that do not fit on the news page or still needs confirmation. ****** - Samstag 28.August 1999 What will you see here soon? Iīll be on IFA at 31.08 when NVIDIA announces the NV10. So you wonīt see any news about NV10 on that day... but wait! I allready have a prototype board of the ELSA Erazor III Pro here. So I can post some results of this new card soon! Some reviews are on the way: The Creative Labs 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra and the Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 by Guillemot. An AMD Athlon system is on the way. It should arrive monday. So I can take a deeper look into Athlon systems. But most important: Iīll go in holidays for two weeks on 11.09.... HOLIDAYS! Yeah! ****** ****** - Freitag 13.August 1999 Athlon, Athlon everywhere. All are happy that theyīll see some movements in the market. The Users can be happy. But you should not forget one thing: AMD wantīs the same thing than Intel: Making a lot of money! So you shouldīnt be surprised if the symphatic underdoc becomes a wild monster that sues everybody. Why canīt we see any Athlon tests at RIVA Station? Thatīs simple: I donīt get answers from AMD to my e-mails... maybe they are frightened No, serious. If they donīt want to talk with me - right. I donīt run after anyboy. Matrox is also such a candidate. The revenge of the Belgians. I felt the revenge after my small comments about belgian chicken. A truck driver blocked the whole Autobahn during a traffic jam. This is a compulsion! But Borsti had his camera: http://cauchy.informatik.fh-kl.de/~borsti/lkw1.jpg http://cauchy.informatik.fh-kl.de/~borsti/lkw2.jpg http://cauchy.informatik.fh-kl.de/~borsti/lkw3.jpg http://cauchy.informatik.fh-kl.de/~borsti/lkw4.jpg I was almost as angry like during the eclipse and the comtech stuff ****** ****** - Tuesday 27.Juli 1999 oooops! Forgot to update the english logbook. Iīll update it in future as the german version... so I wonīt forget it anymore. A cheat for Kingpin. Enter this script into Autoexec.cfg to enable a snyper-zoom. //ZOOOOOM set sensitivity "5.5" //zoom select bind del "set zfov 25; echo ZOOM SET TO 25" bind end "set zfov 30; echo ZOOM SET TO 30" bind pgdn "set zfov 40; echo ZOOM SET TO 40" bind ins "set zsens 2; echo ZOOM SENS SET TO 2" bind home "set zsens 2.5; echo ZOOM SENS SET TO 2.5" bind pgup "set zsens 3; echo ZOOM SENS SET TO 3" set zfov 30 set zsens 2.5 //zoom alias +zoom "fov $zfov; sensitivity $zsens" alias -zoom "fov 90; sensitivity 5.5" bind mouse2 "+zoom" //ENDE ZOOOOOM Some more Kingpin stuff: developer 1 (enables console) SET CL_ALLOW_DOWNLOADS 1 (Allows the load of skins ans maps from server) But donīt use zoom for camping... use it to frag campers ;-) Kingpin is one big camping yard . ****** ****** - Wedenesday 30.Juni 1999 I finaly made it. Iīve finished the large graphics card review. It was a lot of work to test so many cards with so many drivers in so many systems with so many benchmarks (oh yeah - so many). When you were finished with one card new drivers were released for it. So you had to run all tests anew. This means for K6-2 that I have to change the mainboard in my second system (The IDE one with 64MB RAM). This is done pretty fast and thanks to a boot manager I can manage multiple Windows 98 installations on one harddisk. I hope I can get some other interresting cards soon. But the first thing is to translate the review to english language. I always try to give the english version the same 'smell' the german version has. But thatīs not so easy and it takes time! So please, stay tuned! ****** ****** - Thursday June 10. 1999 Benchmarks can take a lot of time if you test many cards on multiple system configuration and every card with multiple drivers. But Iīm going forward. Currently I test the following cards: 3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 ASUS V3800 TVR (TNT2) ASUS V3800 TVR Deluxe (TNT2 ULTRA) Diamond Viper V770 ULTRA (TNT2 ULTRA) ELSA Erazor III Video (TNT2) ELSA Winner II (S3 Savage4 Pro) Guillemot Xentor (TNT2) Diamond Stealth III S540 (S3 Savage4 Pro) The review will take a few days. I also have to finish the translation of the Revelator Review. Direct X6.1 and Windows 98 Second Edition. I had a very surprising situation with that new windows version and Drakan Demo. Win98 SE2 allready comes with DirectX 6.1. An error occurs if you try to install DX6.1 with the normal core files. Normaly harmless. The problem is: Drakan Demo tries to install DX6.1 and the installer deletes all files immediately after the error occurs - without any message. So you try to find the files you installed a few seconds before but canīt find them anymore! I was very sour first because I thought it was a new try of censorship for germany but after a while I found out that you have to delete the DX6.1 folder in the Drakan Setup files to solve the problem. ****** ****** - Sunday June 6. 1999 I have problems with v1.88 drivers on my small 64MB system with 16MB cards. A Xentor TNT2 with 16MB and all TNT cards I have crash in 3DMARK99MAX when system memory is used by AGP (16MB rendering tests or 1024x768-32....) Numerous Win98 reinstallations and a mainboardchange didīnt fix it! 32MB cards or older drivers work without problems.... (32MB rendering tests canīt be made with 64MB Systemmemory) Can anybody see anything simmilar? Seems to be a bug for me...!?! ****** ****** - Friday Juni 4. 1999 Linux is coming! 3D acceleration for NVIDIA cards is now available for Linux. So I think Iīll have to take a closer look on this O.S. in future - nice evolution! Waiting for the new NVIDIA drivers for Win9x. Iīm preparing a review with a couple of TNT2 cards compared with Voodoo3 and Savage4 so Iīm really hot for these new drivers. NVIDIA told me that the drivers v1.81 should not be used for a comparsion because they are 'simply bad' - I like them but maybe weīll see some more performance !?! Letīs wait and see. Currently TNT2 is faster in the benchmarks than Voodoo3 - If you donīt use Glide or a MiniGL (Direct 3D/OpenGL). Very interesting: 3DMARk99MAX shows that TNT2 is using both texture units even if Multitexturing is not used: 3DMark99 Max (www.3dmark.com) run: Voodoo3 3000 TNT2 ULTRA Fillrate: 150 249 Fillrate MT: 282 237 I was surprised that the performance of TNT2 is lower when MT is used. Letīs wait and see if thatīs a driver issue or a 'feature' of TNT2. Maybe MT is not working correctly and weīll see much more performance soon when MT is fixed? Possibly but I donīt really think so. Tools-page. I got numerous mails where people stated that I should update the tools page because itīs out of date. Iīll make an update soon! If you know tools everybody should know about (not only gfx - i.e. PS/2 Rate) send me a mail! ****** ****** - Wednessday June 2. 1999 Yesterday a Voodoo3 3000 AGP arrived at RIVA Station. The surprise came 5 minutes later when I ran the card in my PII system. The card got so hot that some display corruption occured in Incoming. These problems were gone after I fixed a SS7 cooling fan on the card. The card gets really really hot. 3Dfx should install a fan on the card. Letīs see what 3Dfx states about that. I surely ran some first benches but I donīt release the values (yet) :-) ****** ****** - Wednessday June 2. 1999 Roman told me to start such a logbook on my page to write about things that do not fit on the newspage. Well here it is: the RIVA Station logbook ******