November 9 - 14, 1998
Archive

The PCI 128 is pretty much your standard PCI audio board, with support for DirectSound and DirectSound 3D as well as full multi-stream playback support under Windows9x (very nice if you for some reason want to play .mp3's while going at it in multiplayer Quake, provided of course that you have the CPU to power both).

If you're thinking to yourself right now that the SoundBlaster PCI 128 bears a striking resemblance to some of the PCI products that were offered this year by an audio card vendor named Ensoniq, you'd be right. Creative acquired Ensoniq earlier this year for both financial as well as technical reasons. Ensoniq had been one of the first audio card vendors to offer a full line of PCI-based products at a time when Creative was still stuck in the low-bandwidth world of ISA only.

 

Digital brought us the first 64bit processor around 1992, the 21064. Sun Microsystems followed, and IBM came soon thereafter. The largest CPU manufacturer in the world (Intel); however, is waiting until early 2000 to introduce its first 64bit processor, Merced. This 64bit processor is not only new to Intel, but new to the world. Based on Intel's "EPIC" architecture (actually very similar to VLIW = Very Long Instruction Word = a technique which originated in the early 1980s) , Merced, is going to be the first true processor of its kind. What exactly is EPIC? How does it help? Find out...

 

A 400MHz Pentium II chip, which costs $375 today, will cost $200 by mid-1999, and today's $560 450MHz Pentium II will be priced at $300, sources said.

Katmai processors will debut in late February, sources said, and will be available for $530 at 450MHz and $765 at 500MHz. Systems based on Katmai processors are expected to start between $2,000 and $2,500.

Those prices, too, will drop in April when Intel drops Katmai prices to $445 and $675, respectively.

Major PC enhancements are coming by mid-1999, when Intel introduces a 533MHz Katmai, which will cost $745.

The faster chip will be coupled with a chip set called the 820, formerly code-named Camino, sources said. The 820 will enable 4X AGP 3-D graphics and will support Direct Rambus dynamic RAM, 1GB of RAM and Intel's first 133MHz bus, sources said.

In addition, Intel will use the 820 to begin moving PC users off the ISA bus. The chip set will make ISA slots and bus accessible only through the PCI bridge, sources said.

• 3D Blaster Banshee Driver and BIOS (WinNT4 - 1.4 MB)
• 3D Blaster Banshee OpenGL ICD (Win9X/NT4 - 648 KB
• Sound Blaster 16/32/AWE Driver (Win9X - Revision 16 - 311 KB)
• PC-DVD Encore Driver and Software (WinNT4 - Revision 1 - 4.6 MB)
• PC-DVD Encore Driver and Softeare (Win9X - Revision 1 - 4.1 MB)

 

• Actlabs Force RS review
• Microsoft Sidewinder Force Wheel Review

 

5.30b50y is a full Windows 95/98 driver set with an integrated OpenGL ICD component, DirectX 6 support and 3DNow! optimizations. Microsoft's DirectX 6 runtime is required for use with this driver

• ATI RAGE PRO TURBO Beta OpenGL ICD (Win9X - v 5.30b50y - 2.9 MB)

 

Advanced Motherboard Specifications
The T-100MMR motherboard offers 3-way AGP 2X support and supports processor speeds ranging from 266MHz to 500+ MHz. The T-100MMR is based on the Intel 440BX chipset and will support Intel® Celeron?, Pentium II? and Katmai? processors. System memory for the T-100MMR can be expanded up to 512MB. The graphics subsystem features the NVIDIA RIVA TNT? graphic processor and 8MB of SDRAM video memory along with STB’s high performance video drivers and software utilities.

 

• Canopus Total 3D 128V Driver (Win9X - version 2.00.05 - 5.96MB)

Aureal’s Vortex 2 is as impressive in its design as it is limited in its features. Because the Vortex 2 is hardwired, Aureal will not be able to do any reprogramming to the chip like Creative can do to the EMU DSP for the Live. With that said the Vortex 2 is fairly impressive, packing 3.3 million transistors into a tiny chip. This is over a million more than Creative’s EMU 10K1 that powers the Live.

 

Creative Lab today introduced EAX 2.0, a new version of its Environmental Audio Extensions (EAX) application programmer's interface (API) for game developers. EAX 2.0 allows developers to add new dimensions of realism through Microsoft(R) DirectSound property sets. The new tools in EAX 2.0 build on Creative's Environmental Audio Extensions 1.0 -- an API that is being used by top developers to add environmental effects to 3D games. With EAX 2.0, developers can add new features such as occlusion and obstruction for a new degree of realism that can be experienced with games supporting DirectSound 3D and Creative's Environmental Audio Extensions.

Environmental Audio goes beyond 3D positional audio -- sounds will appear to come from all corners of a room or space adding reverb, echo, and other effects consistent with the room acoustics, position of the player, source of the sound, and many other cues. The additional features in EAX 2.0 include occlusion and obstruction, making audio sources sound as if they are coming from another room or are in the same room being heard from behind an object. For example, with occlusion, the villain in a game can be heard in an adjacent room, or approaching from around a corner. Occlusion and obstruction in EAX 2.0 allows developers to add filters that muffle the sound according to the type of object that is in the way.

 

• AVENGER/RAMPAGE
• GRIM FANDANGO REVIEW
• HEAVY GEAR 2 DEMO
• TOMB 3 DEMO
• VOODOO BENCHMARKS
• and other rocking stuff....

 

International Business Machines will tomorrow unveil the largest hard drive available for personal computers, with roughly three times the capacity of typical storage disks now shipping in consumer PCs.

The new drive will offer a 25GB (gigabyte) drive aimed at home or PC hobbyists with an insatiable demand for storing data, according to the company. IBM will also offer a 22GB drive with faster response times aimed at the corporate market.

• 3DLab's Permedia 2 Driver (WinNT4 - version 2.12-0593 - 1.3 MB)

 

After spending many hours analysing the data, it became clear that the speeds achievable depend on the "actual" speed the CPU runs at. Further investigation found that the major differences were between two ranges: CPU's running 300MHz or less, and those running at more than 300MHz. For CPU's running above 300MHz their was no discernible pattern to link G200 speeds to CPU speed, so further splitting down of results was pointless. >{? As I had expected based on my own experience, The SGRAM equipped Millennium cards show that they can be overclocked more than their lesser SDRAM siblings. This proved true for those with systems running at more than 300MHz, but what I found surprising is the fact that on systems running at 300MHz or less, all cards seem to have the same sweetspot...

 

The uninteresting rectangular card brought much attention to itself when it became the most overclockable member of the TNT family with the use of Fujitsu SDRAM, unfortunately since then, it seems as if Creative has gone the path of their predecessors with the memory selection for their TNT boards and opted for the much more available and cheaper (in quality) Samsung SDRAM.  The SEC modules on the AGP version of the Graphics Blaster TNT wouldn't even make the jump to 115MHz reliably, up from the standard 100MHz clock frequency whereas the PCI TNT which Anand Tech received right after its release could be taken up to 130MHz reliably.  The unfortunate truth which is present in today's profit driven world, quality is quite often the sacrifice for cost.

 

If you're a PC enthusiast looking for the best 3-D acceleration available in an integrated 2-D/3-D card, check out our Editors' Choice for the enthusiast, the Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Riva TNT ($170 street) from Creative Labs. Its nVidia RIVA TNT chip lets it deliver top-tier 2-D and 3-D performance. Plus, Creative Labs adds stable, robust drivers and a host of useful utilities. In a field crowded with very similar accelerators, the full-featured and affordable Graphics Blaster showed the fewest problems in our labs.

Intel has apparently had it with overclockers. Word is that they will be sticking in an EEPROM I.C. in all their future P2/Celeron chips to stop them from being overclocked. This will also be included in the Katmai. This EEPROM I.C. will identify the chip for the motherboard, and give all needed information, including voltage, FSB speed, multiplier, serial number, etc. If the chip is run at any settings other than the ones stored in the EEPROM, it will simply cease the function until the normal settings are again restored.

Supposedly this is to stop the large market for remarked chips. Intel's high quality yields has led to a lot of remarking of chips and selling them at higher speeds.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm pissed. There are other ways of preventing remarking of the chip, such as giving a warning in the BIOS to specify what speed the chip is actually supposed to run at. This method puts a stop to all overclocking/tweaking of the chip. I'm not sure if there's any way to override this. I've talked to AOpen about it and they said they'd try to get some info and get back to me so I guess until then we're the dark.

 

• Metabyte Wicked3D Driver (Win9X - version 2.81 - 3.6 MB)

 

Brian Crese wrote in message <725v55$f0e$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...

* 0.25u, 125MHz chipset
* 10 million triangles/sec
* 500Mtexels/s fill rate
* 32Mb 125-150MHz SDRAM/SGRAM
* 16bpp and 32bpp rendering
* Improved Banshee 2D core
* Volume shipment 1Q 99
* $250-$300 retail

* 3Dfx expects to hit 1 billion texels/s in a
  separate $500+ product due by year's end;
  with these products, 3Dfx expects to remain
  at the forefront of the performance curve
  through 2000.

Further details to be posted 11/16.

 

CSim: Can you summarize for us the features of the Rage 128?

A: Two 128 bit wide graphic pipelines. ... single pass multi texturing Pixel cache (8KB) and Texture cache (8KB) ... more frame buffer B.W.

• 32 bit Z buffer.
• 8 bit Stencil buffer
• DX6.0 and Open GL support.
• Line and Edge antialiasing.
• VQ texture compression
• DVD MPEG-2 decode includes iDCT.
• Concurrent Command Control Engine ... uses AGP memory space to process
• display list from CPU so the RAge 128 is pulling the commands rather
• than the CPU pushing the commands thus avoiding stalls.
• 32 MB frame buffer support.
• 100MHz clock.

CSim: Which of these do you think is most significant for gamers?

A: Single pass multitexturing and everything else that gets the frame rates up

 

• Powerstrip Beta (Win9X/NT4 - version 2.30 - 760 KB)

 

• Terminator BEAST Driver (Win9X - version 0.96 - 1.91 MB)