November 15 - 21, 1998
Archive

• PowerStrip (Win9X - 2.30 Beta - 774 KB)

 

• ELSA Erazor II Driver (Win9x - v4.10.01.0200-0012 - 1.79 MB)

 

Sound Blaster PCI64 and PCI128 updates:

• Allows simultaneous recording and playback (full-duplex) in DirectSound. Recording and playback sample rates are now independent.
• Fixes DOS box wavetable synthesis (MIDI) problems.
• Adds fixes to turn on Microphone Bias at all times. The Microphone Bias option is thus removed from the software.
• Allows dynamic primary buffer sizes for Quake II games.
• Improves startup quality in DirectSound buffers.

• Sound Blaster PCI64 Driver (Win9X - Revision 2 - 792 KB)
• Sound Blaster PCI128 Driver (Win9X - Revision 1 - 765 KB)

Ensoniq AudioPCI updates:

• Adds stability fixes.
• Supports large MIDI wavesets.
• Solves system functionality problem when recording from Line in source.
• Fixes shut-down problem (when mixer settings could not be saved)

• Ensoniq AudioPCI Driver (WinNT4 - 408 KB)

Graphics Blaster TNT updates:

• Upgrades the Win9x driver to version 1.05
• Solves problem of "Windows hanging during bootup", which happens on selected socket 7 ALI chip motherboards.

• Graphics Blaster TNT Driver (Win9X - Revision 1 - 1.4 MB)

Graphics Blaster Banshee updates:

• This update also fixes mouse cursor pointing problems.

• Graphics Blaster Banshee Driver (Win9X - Revision 1 - 1.9 MB)

Sound Blaster Live! Stuff:

• Playcenter Upgrade (Win9X/NT4 - 1.50 - 2.5 MB)

 

We'll take a look at some of the brand-new boards that will take us to the next level in 3D accelerators. An interesting trend in 3D graphics is emerging: the use of low-cost, 16MB of RAM. Now we're seeing graphics cards with 16MB of local video memory for well under $200 - some even approaching $100 - due to the wonders of commodity pricing. Cheaper RAM also means there are some cards with more than 16MB of RAM. In fact, one board in our roundup supports a whopping 32MB of RAM, and more 32MB boards are on the way.

When Intel learned of the project, it convinced HP to extend its IA-64 partnership, which originally covered co-development work only on Merced, to include the new chip. That's how Merced, once considered a potentially crushing blow to the RISC community, has evolved into a mere steppingstone toward the goals Intel and HP originally intended for it when they announced their historic partnership in 1994.

Merced's focus will be on backward compatibility with Intel's X86 architecture. The follow-on chip--which Intel has code-named McKinley--is the one that will go head-to-head with high-end 64-bit RISC architectures.

That's bad news for HP as well as the myriad other systems makers lining up behind IA-64. Merced is not due to ship until mid-2000, and McKinley isn't due until late 2001, putting Intel about three years away from delivering a 64-bit architecture that can comfortably surpass the performance of RISC systems. HP executives won't comment on their involvement in McKinley's development.'

 

• July 1999: .25 micron 500MHz K7 debuts in very limited quantities and marketed solely to high-end servers. Pitched as a Xeon competitor, the .25 micron K7 will be very expensive. Speculative prices fall somewhere around $800+ depending upon L2 cache options.
• October 1999: .18 die shrink occurs, allowing much higher margin rates for the K7, driving prices down and making the K7 a mainstream Katmai competitor.

  The K7's specifications break down as follows:

• Nine-issue superscalar architecture
• Superscalar pipelined FPU
• 128KB of L1 cache
• Programmable backside L2 cache up to 8MB
• 200MHz Alpha EV6 compatible system bus

 

Thirty and more frames per second, all beautiful sharp and colorful at resolutions of 800*600 and even 1024*768? Yes, the new wave of 3D video cards have really released the multimedia potential of the home PC. But before you rush to the local shop to spend you hard earned money, we would point out some important facts. After all, choosing a video card is not just about frames per second...

The main goal of this article is to make sure that you, the reader, know what's going on behind all those benchmarks you see on the web, so you can interpret them yourself.  We would also like to point out some forgotten or lesser known facts.   This first part is going to refresh your memory about AGP and give you some tips and tricks to help you optimize the AGP performance of your system. We will also try to solve some common AGP problems. The second part will give you a complete overview of the market today and a review of upcoming products, but first things first...

Officials here showed the K7 running several productivity applications, but the real horsepower of the processor was demonstrated while playing back a DVD movie. The system ran software decompression without any assistance from added hardware. Many systems today can run software-DVD while relying on the graphics card to handle some of the MPEG-2 decode process. AMD officials said the K7 won't need any hardware assist, even for such a CPU-intensive task.

Well, the Enlight 7101 is about the smallest ATX case (excluding micro-ATX) you can get and packs quite a bit into that small space. It would be nice if there were more hard drive bays or some more fans. Nevertheless, those are just minor details. The Enlight 7101 is a great case for the size with a trick motherboard tray that makes working on your system a breeze.

 

I just returned from a visit with Diamond Multimedia and managed to learn that the Rio and the MX300 will both be on store shelves by the end of the month. The digital IO card for the MX300 should also be shipping in January of next year. The IO card will offer S/PDIF-IN/Out as will as Optical connections as well for the audiophiles out there. One thing that will be missing from the card is an additional jack for more speakers, something that the upcoming Creative daughter-card will be offering.

AMD said that Sharptooth with 256KB On-Chip Integrated L2 enable to exceed Pentium2 with half-speed 512KB L2. Attention of Many of PC Analyst is K7. They paid attention to K7 demonstration, because K7 have Great Architecture against Pentium2 and Katmai. Realization of K7 Architecture highly affects PC market. K7 worked at 500MHz and AMD showed us some benchmark tests and DVD playback. But AMD didn't open benchmark result. It is no surprise that K7 show great power because K7 has 3 IEU, 3AGU and 3 FPU/MMX/3DNow! Unit. This 9 Unit enable to issue instruction at the same time. This mean that K7's 9 Unit highly exceed Pentium2 with 5 Unit!Initially AMD will produce K7 at 0.25 Micron Process at over 500MHz and before long at 0.18 Micron Process at over 1GHz.

 

This is one kick bootie 2D/3D card and widely argued as one of the best, if not THE best card on the market. While I am going to keep my 2 12 Meg Monster cards in my computer for some time still, I will undoubtedly feel that now when I buy a game, I have two choices for 3D and will test them both to determine which card I prefer to run. If you want to know what to buy for future games that support D3D and OpenGL, you would be nuts not to consider purchasing a Diamond Viper V550. And don't forget, this is with FULL AGP 2x support, a feature completely lacking on Voodoo2.

The Terminator Beast has been through a lot since its release. Many have thought that Hercules released it a little too early like they did with the Hercules Stingray 128/3D, the first Voodoo Rush card on the market. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. At this point, I can say that the drivers have finally matured a good bit and are stable enough to actually use.

 

• Comdex Day 2 - 11/17
• Comdex Day 1 - 11/16

 

• nVidia TNT Reference Driver (Win9X - version 0.41 - 874 KB)

 

In a weird technology twist, Creative Labs is in the process of adapting its Graphics Blaster TNT drivers to provide real-time volumetric shadows for Epic MegaGame's Unreal.

By using the TNT's stencil buffer, Creative's adapted drivers take model geometry and lighting information and then uses this data to create a real-time volumetric shadow that reacts realistically to the light source shined on it. It also takes into account light direction, so shadows are rendered appropriately.

Currently, Unreal is the only game that will support this effect (via a patch), but game developers are more than welcome to talk with Creative Labs with regards to taking advantage of this new technology.

 

Nvidia was more forthcoming about the TNT Release 2, the next iteration of its flagship Riva TNT "enthusiast"-class graphics accelerator. Stocki said the Release 2 will likely be renamed. Scheduled to be launched in the spring of 1999, the chip will feature about twice the performance of the TNT, partly through the 0.25-micron process Nvidia's foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, will be bringing online. The Release 2 chip will include support for 4 to 32 megabytes of SDRAM or SGRAM used as a frame buffer, as well as a 4X AGP and digital flat panel interface.

KryoTech, Inc. today announced a 500MHz version of its Cool K6®-2 personal computer. The superfast machine, based on a 400MHz AMD-K6-2 processor thermally accelerated to 500MHz with KryoTech's cooling system, provides turbo-charged performance and superior thermal management for the most demanding PC applications.

"Power users are excited about the performance of the AMD-K6-2 processor combined with our cooling system," said Dennis Peck, Senior Vice President of Sales at KryoTech. "The Cool K6-2 is an outstanding platform for graphics professionals and extreme gamers."

 

The new high capacity Zip(R) 250 drives and disks are the answer for burgeoning file size demands that are being driven by the exponential growth in the size of computer applications, the emergence of audio and video files and the proliferation of Web downloads. The new Zip 250MB drive and disks offer consumers:

-- Compatibility with more than 100 million Zip 100MB disks shipped -- Higher Capacity - 175 times more capacity than a floppy Faster Performance - up to 56 times faster than a floppy (Based on the 250 SCSI external drive)

-- Ease of Use and Portability

 

As an extension of the Voodoo Banshee architecture, Voodoo 3 will share some of Banshee's shortcomings. Although Voodoo 3 will be able to take advantage of the high-speed data transfer offered by AGP 2X and sideband addressing, it will not support AGP texturing--the ability to access textures out of main system memory. Nor will the Voodoo 3 support true-color (24- or 32-bit) 3D rendering or true-color source textures, though it does include a 32-bit internal rendering pipeline. Instead, Voodoo 3 is forced to dither an image to 16-bit color, a process that can cause visual artifacts such as banding.

In a Gamecenter interview, Scott Sellers, 3Dfx's founder and senior vice president of product development, claimed that even at 16-bit color, Voodoo 3 should be able to provide the equivalent of 22-bit color rendering without the performance hit encountered with competitors' 32-bit implementations. He also argued that AGP texturing at current AGP 2X speeds doesn't provide enough bandwidth, limiting rendering speed to Voodoo 1 levels of fill rate, and therefore isn't an attractive option for game developers.

• European 3dfx website
• AGNHardware Voodoo3 Preview
• Voodoo eXtreme's Voodoo3 shots
• Sharky Extreme's Voodoo3 Info

 

With its dual, 32-bit rendering pipelines, Voodoo3 can generate greater than 7 million triangles per second utilizing its 100-billion operations per second 3D architecture. Voodoo3 delivers more than twice the triangle performance of two Voodoo2 boards in the Scan Line Interleave (SLI) format -- currently the industry's fastest 3D graphics configuration. The Voodoo3 family utilizes the 3Dfx patented full-speed, single-cycle, single-pass multi- texturing, which enables critical features such as hardware accelerated bump- mapping and trilinear mip-mapping at 60 frames per second for today's most demanding entertainment titles.

Voodoo3 integrates the world's fastest 2D core from Voodoo Banshee, the Ziff-Davis Business Graphics Winbench® 99 leader, which includes a dedicated high speed 128-bit interface and an internal 256-bit datapath for optimized memory utilization. Additionally, Voodoo3 features the industry's most complete hardware acceleration of the Microsoft Windows Graphics Driver Interface (GDI).

The pin-compatible AGP 2X Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 are optimized for Intel's 440 LX/BX AGP chipset. In the first half of 1999, an AGP 4X version will be available for shipment with Intel's new AGP 4X chipsets to meet PC-OEM production requirements. The Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 support both SGRAM and SDRAM memory, as well as the Windows 95/98/2000, MAC OS, Unix, and Linux operating systems.

Voodoo3 supports ultra high-resolution display on PC monitors, LCD flat panels and high definition television sets (HDTV). With the world's fastest integrated RAMDAC at 350MHz, Voodoo3 achieves resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536 at a full 75Hz screen refresh rate, making it the only graphics chip able to support new proposed high-resolution display specifications from the VESA committee.

Voodoo3 also connects directly to 3Dfx's LCDfx chip to support high- resolution LCD flat panel displays. LCDfx features unique sub-pixel image scaling technology that provides significant image quality improvement over conventional two-tap scaling filters.

Additionally, Voodoo3 provides hardware DVD acceleration support to ensure 30 frames per second playback with no dropped frames. Coupled with the latest software MPEG2 codecs, Voodoo3 off-loads up to 40 percent of CPU overhead, enabling the CPU to do other tasks while playing DVD content.

Voodoo3 provides complete compatibility with the largest installed base of enhanced 3D entertainment titles available; more than 500 entertainment titles are expected to be available by the end of the year. Voodoo3 is optimized for Microsoft's Direct X6 application programming interface (API), as well as other standard API's including Glide® from 3Dfx and OpenGL from Silicon Graphics.

With 8.2 million transistors and manufactured in an advanced .25 micron CMOS process, Voodoo3 is designed for optimal performance on both Pentium II and future CPUs from Intel, as well as the AMD-K6®-2 processor featuring 3DNow!® technology.

The Voodoo3 products will be sampling in December and are scheduled to be in volume production the second quarter of 1999. Pricing for the Voodoo3 2000 is expected to start at $35 in quantities of 10,000 units, while pricing for the Voodoo3 3000 is expected to start at $45 in quantities of 10,000 units.

 

• wVis 4.0 (better fullscreen support, new effects, higher quality rendering!)
• Preliminary CDDB support. It rocks!
• Massively better HTTP streaming. Even allows you to psuedo-stream MOD and MIDI files!
• Much improved MOD/XM/IT playback.
• A lot of new IPC stuff (for plug-in authors)
• Bugfixes galore

• Winamp (Win9X/NT4 - version 2.05 - 518 KB)

The STB BlackMagic 3D is your average (North American market) Voodoo2. And in today’s 3D market, that is definitely more of a good thing than a bad thing. STB has brought to the table, solid, stable, good looking (black PCB), and speed that is expected from Voodoo2 – no less. Competitive pricing brings a SLI setup for $300 – what a single Voodoo2 cost a few months ago. However, there are other 12MB Voodoo2s on the market for even less.  These things are backed by a lifetime warranty!  Safe bet by STB, because in 2 years time, who would really care for getting their cards replaced?  Maybe they could be exchanged for some upgrade credit.

 

• Version 2.0.8:
  Added support for 5 custom configurations. These custom configurations allow the user to store / recall different card and clock settings. Users can save clock settings for use with specific games, overclocked and non-overclocked settings, different clock settings for different resolutions, etc. Currently, this option only supports card settings and clock settings, future versions will support additional options including Powerdesk and Advanced settings.

• Matrox Overclock (Win9X - version 2.0.8 - 168 KB)