December 6 - 12, 1998
Archive

• Dr. Hardware System Info/Benchmark(Win9X - version 2.5 - 1.1 MB)

 

With the imminent release of the Vortex2, however, Aureal is upping the ante to a whole new level with A3D 2.0. A3D 2.0, quite frankly, obliterates EAX in every conceivable way. It's just noticeably more immersive. A lot more immersive.

Creative Labs, of course, immediately announced EAX 2.0 with comparable features. It's hard to tell how EAX 2.0 will stand up until we actually see (hear?) it in action. Their announcement may have been a preliminary "shot across the bow" to Aureal.

 

After hooking up 2 amplifiers to the MX300 and setting up four speakers, I was ready to rumble... Unreal 2.19 in the CD drive... double click the icon... and tada the A3D-four-speaker logo popped up to inform that all was set up correctly... So I went down to the advanced settings where I enabled 3D support in the sound section.. Incredible... no other than that. Unreal on a A3D 2.0 system with four speakers is absolutely incredible. The four speakers are driven separately, and all sound effects and environment noises are panned over four speakers and really come from the direction they're supposed to come. Same thing on the Creative SoundBlaster Live!.. Unreal 2.19 supports EAX extensions which make rooms in Unreal echo like they should. Very impressive sound reproduction here, with well locatable sounds..

 

• Quantum3D Raven Driver (Win95 - version 2.0)
• Quantum3D Raven Driver (Win98 - version 2.0)
• Quantum3D Raven Driver (WinNT4 - version 2.0)

• Canopus Pure3D II Driver (Win9X - version 1402 - 2.7 MB)

 

• nVidia Riva 128/128ZX Driver (Win9X - version 2.83)

 

The Voodoo series of graphics accelerators has seen leaps and bounds in performance generation after generation, but the architecture for each card has been roughly the same.  Possibly one of the biggest hindrances the Voodoo 3 will have in the future will be the lack of 32-bit rendering capabilities.  As video games start coming out that utilize 32-bit color, the 16-bit palette that has been a trademark of 3Dfx may come back to haunt them.  In present time, 32-bit palette's have not been implemented well enough to fully take advantage of the colors provided.  However, as technology, in software as well as hardware, progresses, this will change drastically.

The possible demise of the PowerVR may lie in its Tile Based Rendering.  Games that utilize this will certainly make the graphics at the heart of the PVR a very pleasing sight.  Although, running games that do not use said rendering may bring the chipset to its knees.  The performance hit incurred, however, is unknown by Cool Info at this time, and this argument may be superficial at best.

 

I’ve been running my BH6 with a Celeron300A overclocked to 464Mhz for almost a month now, and it has been running for 48hours straight a couple of times without rebooting. And I can honestly say that I haven’t had ONE single hardware related crash (sure Windows98 has hung once or twice, but this was because I’m running lots of BETA software).

 

Times have definitely changed. Sound is now rising to the same level of importance video. Sound cards might never truly reach the so-called importance of video cards, which is logical considering that our massive dependence on visual information. Nevertheless, A3D 2.0, and other positional audio APIs prove that sound technology is fully capable of enhancing the gaming experience.  The MX300 is priced very affordably at just under $100.  Diamond really hit the competition hard with their initial line of Monster Sounds, and their newest sound product, the MX300 is definitely another heavy hitter.

 

• Based on latest reference drivers
• Resolution Override in D3D
• Improved Re2Flex interface
• Improved eyeSCREAM stereo support
• Performance Optimization and Bug Fixes

• Wicked3D Vengeance Driver (Win9x - version 1.50 - 3.73 MB)

 

The Rage 128 will have to overcome the current problems and it could be a very serious competitor to NVIDIA's RIVA TNT. However, right now there's no reason for NVIDIA to become nervous. Rage 128 is not really faster than TNT, considering the results from the 'crusher' demo and the Direct3D performance. The additional features of Rage 128, the 32 MB memory support and particularly the impressive performance in 32-bit color mode could be a good reason for preferring Rage 128 over TNT, once the problems have been sorted out. Then ATI should also have an answer to TNT-2 though.

A3D 2.0 is an absolutely mind blowing achievement. While playing Half-Life with A3D 2.0 enabled on the MX300, we were instantly transported to an audio realm we'd only heard rumors of previously. As the first title that supports A3D 2.0's high-end featureset, Half-Life is a perfect example of the true potential for 3D positional audio as it relates to gaming. Folks, you haven't lived until you've run through the Half-Life level entitled "Surface Tension" where you're under near constant assault by highly intelligent Marines, with M1 tank rounds flying to the left, right, and even ABOVE your head. A3D 2.0 is the only API currently in existence that allows for true 3D audio positioning not only to your left, right, or behind, but also from above or below you.

 

• Diamond Monster Fusion Review
• ATI Rage Fury Review

 

As you can see, the ATI Rage 128GL is an excellent performer in OpenGL testing. The numbers prove to be equal to that of even the TNT, an impressive undertaking for ATI’s first real 3D graphics processor. Since the drivers are still in beta, further improvements may even improve the numbers. Because of limitations with the 16-bit output of the card, the output was very dithered. This did not happen when I set the desktop to a 32-bit depth though, showing off excellent quality output that was equal to that of the TNT card. I was told by ATI that they are aware of the 16-bit dithering problem and will have a fix for it with future drivers.

 

Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. December 8, 1998- When does 1 = 370? With the ABIT Slotket card. In order to provide the most flexibility and options for the end user, ABIT has developed the Slot 1 to Socket 370 Slotket adapter card. The Slotket card is an adapter for use with Slot 1 motherboards that will allow the use of a Socket 370 CPU.

Our engineer team has worked long and hard to figure a simple solution for the end-user confronted with different architectures and CPUs. The Slotket uses the same high quality engineering that you would expect from the makers of some of the most famous motherboards in the world. With this winning combination from ABIT you can purchase among Slot 1 Pentium CPU's, Slot 1 Celeron CPU's and PPGA Celeron CPU's. Now you can buy an ABIT motherboard with confidence knowing that you can definitely use the widest variety of CPU's on the market!

The Super7 platform, along with AMD's K6-2 chip, have been known for their good overclocking abilities. While not as overclockable as Intel's Celeron, the K6-2's limits can be pushed a bit to and fro. Well, sorry to say, Diamond's C200 is no overclockers board. I was able to get one of our new K6-2 350 chips to boot and run correctly at 366, 375, and 380, but wasn't able to fully hit the 400 mark, which seems to be what people would like to overclock this chip to when they buy it. For some unknown reason, the board gave me random windows errors when running the Windows startup process, and completely halted the system. Also, if you plan to overclock it, make note that the C200 doesn't support bus speeds up and over 100 MHz, like the very popular 112 MHz. So to overclock, you must crank down the bus speed and crank up the multipliers, but there are ways to overclock it, just not very good. If you're looking for an overclocker's Super7 solution, check out the FIC 2013.

 

What money? Savage 3d boards are dirt cheap, and you defenitely get good performance for your dollar. However, you should note that several companies have already released Savage 3d cards with SGRAM onboard, which greatly increases performance, although they will put you back a few bucks more. Hercules has also announced 2 new SGRAM boards, the Terminator BEAST SGRAM (which will undoubtebly replace the SDRAM board for probably the same cost), and the new Hydra board, which includes TV Out and is aimed at higher-end users (and will be priced accordingly), so you might want to hold your money for a couple weeks.

 

Intel claims in the literature to date for a 0.18-micron process, the process was designed for operating voltages of 1.3 to 1.5 volts. And instead of using copper, the company is sticking wiht aluminum wiring, for now.

 

3Dfx has released a beta version of its OpenGL ICD to its registered developers.  A public beta should be available by late January 1999.  Look for an announcement on VoodooExtreme indicating that a public beta is available for download from the 3Dfx site. The company has not yet set a date for the final production version

Steve Schick
3Dfx Interactive, Inc.

 

What will happen here is that the L2 cache will move up the speed/cost/size hierarchy and leave a space there on the motherboard for another cache—the L3.  Or perhaps a better way to think of it is that the cache we normally know as L2 is staying there on the motherboard, but it’s getting renamed "L3" because they’re adding another cache on the chip and calling it the "L2". So now there will be three caches between the CPU and RAM. One wonders if they’ll add some smarts to the L2 cache and have it use an algorithm like LRU, or will they just leave it direct-mapped. For more information on AMD’s plans for Super 7, check out this link.

• Matrox Unified Driver (WinNT4 - version 3.68 - 1.58 MB)

 

Out of all of the features the Rage 128 will become famous for, probably the most well-known will be its support for 32-bit rendering.   If the TNT and G200 can also render at a 32-bit color depth, why on earth would the most popular feature of the Rage 128 be its 32-bit rendering support?  Unlike the TNT and G200, the Rage 128 can render at 32-bit (aka True Color) color depths without the 20 - 50% performance decrease all other chipsets come with.  In fact, the Rage 128 can render at 32bpp (versus 16bpp) in many cases, without any performance penalty at all.    In the tests AnandTech ran, the largest performance gap between 16bpp and 32bpp rendering was no greater than 3 fps.

 

• Matrox G200 OpenGL ICD (Win9X/NT4 - Beta 1 - 1 MB)

 

Yes, with the currently available crop of chips, you can usually get away with moderate overclocking.  What you are trading off is reliability and chip life.  There are certain semiconductor failure modes that are speed sensitive.  We design chips with these in mind for a certain (rather long) lifetime.  Overclocking reduces this, but many people don't care as they will have traded in their machines long ago.  We care, because we honor the warranty on that chip, no matter who has it now, so overclocked chips cost us extra money in support.

Also, faster chips can be sold for higher prices, right?  When we test manufacturing batches, we sort them by maximum reliable speed.  If a 333 MHz chip was capable of running reliably at 350 or 400, don't you think we would be selling it at that speed, with it's correspondingly higher price?   Whatever you may think of Intel, we aren't stupid. The speed-sensitive error causing that lower speed rating may or may not be significant to your application, but how do you know?  We don't label the chip with the type of error, only the maximum reliable speed.

Anyway, the newer chips coming out soon have more effective speed control methods built into them, so overclocking will soon become a dead subject. Why do we go to such great lengths to prevent hobbyists from experimenting with their personal property?    Ah, if that were all it was...

 

ATi has long been a supporter of DVD, and has included the two most critical features for its support (hardware motion compensation and iDCT) on its cards for more than a year now. The Rage128GL also includes these critical features, and thereby offers true fullscreen, full color depth DVD playback without the need for an MPEG-2 decoder card.

Thanks to the motion compensation ability combined with other hardware specific DVD routines, the Rage Fury is able to produce near-perfect DVD playback while only utilizing 15 - 20% of an Intel P2-350's total output capability. Compared to the upcoming Voodoo3's 60% utilization score for the same procedure (60% is actually a good score) the Rage Fury shows that true DVD playback in a window while downloading a file and working on a document is not only possible, but a reality.

 

• Aureal A3D Driver (Win9X - version 2.04 - 223 KB)
• Aureal Vortex 2 Driver (Win9X - version 4.06.2015 - 21.7 MB)

 

A removable drive bay allows you to take your existing 3.5-inch Hard Drive(s), internal ZIP Drive, or Tape Drive and mount it into a cartridge that inserts into a cartridge frame which you mount in your computers 5.25-inch drive bay.  The manufacture Kingwin does have some new models that include support for ZIP, LS-120 and Tape drives. The Mobile Rack MR-27 is a hard drive only removable bay.  However, if you are creative it wouldn't be hard with the  MR-27 to mount an internal IDE tape drive or Iomega IDE ZIP drive.  All that would be necessary, is to cut a hole into the plastic face of the cartridge.

 

• The .18 micron chip has 2.1 million gates.
• The .18 micron chip is up and running in S3's labs.
• S3 will officially announce what the .18 micron product will be in the first half of 1999.
• The .18 micron chip will go into full production during Q2 1999.

 

I was wondering if you have any info on the Rage 128 that you can share.  I was a little disturbed at its performance from the French magazine comparison that Wicked posted.  While the drop in performance was fairly  consistent for both the TnT and R128 from 640x480, the drop going from 16-32bpp in QII was alarming!  How can the R128 get *faster* in 32bpp? My initial reaction was one of shock (though I understand QII uses 16-bit textures), but it strikes me that the Rage128 is somehow 'cheating' by using only 16bpp rendering in OGL.

 

• Stronger forces for WingMan Force and Formula Force
• Support of external third-party rudder pedals for WingMan Force, Interceptor, and Extreme Digital
• Loss of forces in some games (Motorhead, Redline Racer) fixed
• Added stability to the driver
• Rudder support with checkbox, and according bar display
• Forces on hat movement for WingMan Force
• New forces for WingMan Force and Formula Force
• Fixed Overall Force slider; reducing the slider now linearly decreases the force
• Added device detection on launch, if no devices were found.

• Logitech Wingman Force Driver (Win9X - version 3.11)

• Matrox G200 Driver (Win9X - 4.50 Beta 3 - 1.5 MB)

 

• Aureal A3D Driver (Win9X - version 2.02 - 194 KB)

 

Toshiba and Fujitsu officials said work on 1 Gbit will begin immediately at Toshiba's Advanced Microelectronics Center in Yokohama, Japan. The two companies will assign 100 researchers and spend approximately $250 million on joint development until 2002. The goal is to develop a 1-Gbit DRAM with a chip size of 250 mm2 or smaller, officials said.

 

• Avault Rage Fury Review
• 3DGaming's Rage Fury Review

 

Anand Tech has done a review of the #9 Revolution IV Video Accerlator and Digital Flat Panel package solution.  As I'm sure you have read by now, the Revolution IV is not to great for playing games, but for professional graphics, its amazing:

There is a huge gap between the performance of the old Millennium II and the newer accelerators, however the G200's strong performance in 32-bit true color gives the Revolution IV a good run for the money.   If you're not going to be using your system for image editing or things of that sort, then you're probably better off with the G200 so long as the price is below that of the Revolution IV, in which case, it comes down to whether or not you're going to be using your system for games.  The performance hit going from 16-bit to 32-bit color is insignificant with the Revolution IV, and even more insignificant is the performance decrease from 1024 x 768 to 1600 x 1024, a unique SuperWide resolution supported by the Revolution IV...why would a card support such an odd resolution?   Well...

AGNHardware has done a review of Creative Lab's PC-DVD Encore 5X kit.  This is Creative Lab's 3rd generation DVD kit and boy do I wish I got one of these for Christmas :)  Here is a bit from the review:

I know you have heard the screeching cry of those aging 8X CD-ROM drives, begging to be replaced as they try to load yet another game. Every time you put a new game in them you sit back and wait for an eternity as it loads everything into your computers memory. You can always upgrade to one of those new high-speed CD-ROM drives, buy why? With DVD-ROM drives having dropped down in price, you can play both your DVD and CD media at high-speed. Creative’s PC-DVD Encore 5X kit offers up an excellent mix of price and performance that makes it a very good choice to replace that aging CD-ROM.

 

Avault has done a review of ATI's new power card, the Fury, based on ATI's new power chip, the RAGE 128.  Looks like ATI is back in the 3D business, with Avault giving the Fury 4.5 stars out of 5.   Check out this bit from the review:

You will often get frame rates from the Rage Fury better than Voodoo2 or Riva TNT in resolutions of 800 x 600 and up, and even more dramatic differences when you step up to 32-bit color. With Quake II performance of 58.5 fps at 800 x 600 x 32, why would you ever play at lesser settings? In another year, we expect essentially all games to use 24 or 32-bit engines. The Rage 128 is ready for 32-bit color now, delivering great frame rates and beautiful color.

 

Even though using 32-bpp rendering can cause a considerable loss of frame-rate, why not just included it as an option that people can have? Most gamers wouldn't mind playing at 40 fps with a higher rendering quality it seems.
Including features that add no real value (marginal picture improvement in today's game for significant performance loss) is a waste of time and money. As 32bpp rendering becomes more important in games and can be accomplished without sacrificing performance, I'm sure you'll see us support it.  Plus in today's games, the marginal visual quality improvement of 32bpp is only noticeable in static screen shots or while standing still - that's not the way I play my games!

With Voodoo3 supporting AGP 2X, why not include support for AGP texturing?   It seems as though having the system memory for textures could really help performance.
That's a common misperception.  With Voodoo 3, textures are still stored in system memory until they are loaded on the card.  They are still loaded across the AGP bus at incredibly fast rates compared to PCI.  Voodoo 3 just has textures loaded to the card rather than the card pulling textures from memory.  This give developers a much more flexible way to build a texture cache and manage their memory usage

 

Elsa has released a new driver for their Erazor II, what a cool name, don't you think? and one for the Victory II. Anyway, grab them below:

• Elsa Erazor II Driver (Win9X - version 0200-0016 - 1.57 MB)
• Elsa Victory II Driver (Win9X - version 0102-0003 - 2.44 MB)

Looks like PCFan has also pumped out a review of Hercules' Dynamite TNT card.  I remember Hercules, back when they used to make those great VGA cards (now considered as crap) but hey, they're classics.   Check out the review of their latest concoction, based on the Riva TNT chip.

The ABIT BH6 and the Intel Celeron 300A is one of the best combo around to get. This combo is selling for a disgusting price of around S$349 (US$212) and there is no reason why you should not get one today!

Overclocking has never been easier before. My first overclocking experience was way back to the time when I overclock my 486SX-25 to a whopping 33 MHz speed. Even though it's only an increase of 8 MHz by today standards, it's a whole world of difference at that time.

 

AMD who? A couple of years ago few people never hear of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices). At that time the Pentium Processor by Intel dominated the computer market. Most people didn't know of or remember the excellent 486 chips AMD produced. During the reign of Intel, AMD introduced a follow up to the 486 called the K5. This chip performed well below the standards set by Intel. For a few years, AMD lingered around with it's K5. Things would soon change...

 

To describe the potential of the MJPEG CODEC we can imagine we're storing a ten minute video of, say, a concert at 704x480x30FPS. Uncompressed, this would take up a humongous 17.4 Gigabytes. That's around three times as much as a standard harddrive these days, and remember, this not more than ten minutes of recorded film. If we would instead use the MJPEG CODEC t compress the video we would end up with a more hadlable 1.7 Gigabytes, now this is still a great deal, but we have to remember that the video is captured at a better-than-TV resolution with a higher-than-tv framerate. If we would decide to use a resolution used in Video CD's or something comparable to a VHS video