Nov 1 - 8, 1999
Archive

• Add support for Matrox G400
• Add support for 3DLabs Permedia3
• Fix some texture corruption syndrome seen on M1541 and TNT2 Model 64 based system
• Fix M1541 system instability after resuming from suspend in Windows 98SE ACPI mode
• Improve system stability with some TNT2 cards
• Improve system stability with some Savage4 cards
  
  
• ALI AGP Driver (Win9X - v1.65E - 795 KB)
  
  
  

Product manager Joe Hsieh said he personally dealt with Intel-CPU motherboards and did not handle the K7M, but said: "The answer should be, we are still making K7 products for OEM customers... I think perhaps you should just ignore that [rumour]... nothing has changed at all."

It's too bad the board will not be available in the retail market because its probably the best Athlon motherboard there is.

• The Tech Zone's Intellimouse Explorer Review
• Tweak3D's Intellimouse Explorere Review
  
  
  

Direct Rambus is a set of technologies that includes high data transfer rate memory chips, an associated physical memory interface, and the signaling protocol and topology used to connect them together. It is the third generation of high-speed memory technology to be created by Rambus Inc. of Mountain View, California. Rambus does not manufacture Direct Rambus memory chips (DRDRAMs) or the application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) that interface to them but rather licenses the designs, patents, and technology to companies that do.

ATi has found a way to compete quite well with NVIDIA for performance oriented gamer's dollars over the next six months. With 3dfx missing in action with their new part until March, and S3's Savage2000 not contending in the highest bracket of performance as it seeks to redefine low cost/value, the window is open for ATi to score if they can ship on time.

• Motherboard Monitor (Win9X - v4.12 - 1.2 MB)
  
  
  

Not so long ago a new software player WinDVD ver. 1.2.85 came out. With its help we managed to get the CPU utilization of less than 45% when playing a DVD-disk on NVIDIA GeForce 256 based graphics card! It was unbelievable! And it was really much better than the results obtained on other graphics cards on NVIDIA chipsets. Moreover, the image quality didn't suffer at all! We consider these results to be a really important achievement, which makes the graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce 256 even more universal.

-Fan RPM Monitoring
-AGP Power Level Monitoring
-OverHeat Protection
-SmartCooling Technology
-Dynamic OverClocking Technology

• Wicked3D Drivers (Win9X - v2.61 - 7 MB)

DVI output
With it's DVI-Out (Digital Visual Interface) feature, the 3D Prophet DDR-DVI will enable users to have full access to all the new image enhancing technologies. In addition, all major monitor manufacturers support this new standard for digital display. 3D Prophet DDR-DVI guarantees high-resolution display on digital monitors, flat panel monitors and LCD projectors. 3D Prophet DDR-DVI displays up to 1600 x 1200 in 16 million colors with incredible sharpness and true 32-bit color. A hardware accelerator for DVD-Video playback, it also lets users playback DVD-Video on their PC or TV through the TV/Video Output (NTSC & PAL TV Output). 

Based on the GeForce core, the Quadro boasts a faster transform and lighting rate than it's older brother (17million vs 15 million triangles), along with a fill-rate of 540Mtexels/sec (vs 480mtex/sec for the GeForce). Furthermore, the Quadro will include hardware support for widely used professional features, such as anti-aliased vectors. Most Quadro solutions will probably feature 64MB of memory, competitive with current high end solutions.

From the looks of the specs, it seems as if the Quadro is a GeForce 256 running at a clock speed of 135mhz with the addition of accelerated anti-aliased vectors. Also, the drivers are most likely tuned for high-end applications which require extremely fast sustained transformation/lighting and triangle setup rates (as opposed to game optimizations which is more geared towards fill-rate and texture management).

New to the feature club is a semi-obscure tweak called In-Order Queue Depth, adjustable to 1 or 8. Basically what this does is when set to one, the processor's pipelining is deactivated, and all operations are handled one at a time. When set to 8, the processor can pipeline to it's heart content. So what's the point of a setting of 1? Well, you can achieve massive overclockability with a setting of 1. Yet another useful tweak that will aid you in your quest for a state of CPU overclocking nirvana.

Well, according to Derek, the Quadro will actually outperform an equivalently spec'ed GeForce 256 board at any given 3D game, which makes sense based on the higher clock speed of the graphics core. The workstation-specific enhancements for Quadro won't make a difference in most general 3D apps or games, and whether they'll be implemented as a side-benefit depends on how much volume is shipped.

• Neon 250 Driver (Win9X - v3.2.1.2 - 6.2 MB)
  
  
  

When a qubit is able to have a value of 1 and 0, then this one qubit can be used in two separate calculations simultaneously. Two qubits will be able to do four calculations at once, three qubits to do eight and four qubits sixteen calculations at the same time. Thus when the number of qubits increases so does the entire microprocessor’s processing power, exponentially. A quantum computer will therefor be much faster than any conventional computer; to give an example: a 64-qubit microprocessor will be able to do 1.84x10¹⁹ (18.4 million million million) calculations per second; that’s 41 billion times faster than your 32-bit P3/450.

Peltiers are rated for the absolute maximum heat load they can move with no temperature differential. Above maximum, the cold plate temperature will actually be HOTTER THAN THE HEATSINK!!! Most Peltiers are rated close to 16 Volts, and move even less maximum heat in a 12 Volt PC.  The useful temperature drop of a Peltier must also be de-rated by a hotter running heatsink.

The worst fear of movie studios has been realized: DVD movie encryption has been broken.

A utility called DeCSS is currently floating around on the Net that will read a DVD movie disc and save the file on a hard disk, minus the encryption. All that’s required is a DVD-ROM drive -- since CD-ROM drives can’t read the 4.7GB DVD movie discs -- and a lot of disc space. The faster the CPU, the faster it will process the file. It takes around 10 minutes to process a .VOB file on a 500MHz Pentium III.

• WCPUID (Win9X - v 2.6d - 68 KB)
  
  
  

Also, for those of you who are having problems getting the wheel to function properly in games (especially Q3), you'll want to modify the value "MouseHookDllEnable" in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
Software\Logitech\MouseWare\CurrentVersion\Technical key of the Windows Registry. This value is 1 by default to prevent double scrolling (scrolling 2 lines instead of 1) in certain applications. When set to 0, wheel messages are sent to games properly rather than intercepted and discarded. Logitech engineers are aware of the bug and are working on a better fix. This fix works in both Win9x and NT 4.0, though in NT you will need to create the key and string manually.

• Logitech Mouseware (Win9X - v8.62 - 2.5 MB)
  
  
  

- DVI means Digital Visual Interface (DVI 1.0(tm)).
- DVI digital technology is the new open standard for digital display.
- DVI is backward compliant with IBM©P&D(tm) and Compaq© DFP(tm) older standards.
- DVI is supported by the main PC manufacturers (Intel, Compaq, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, P.Bell, NEC ...).
- DVI provides high quality digital output.
- DVI allows to plug digital flat panels, digital CRTs and LCD projectors to the "3D Prophet DDR-DVI".

At COMDEX '99, 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (Nasdaq: TDFX - news) will hold a press conference at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, November 15, to announce some of the features behind their next generation graphics technology, codenamed ``Napalm,'' to select members of the media.

Chief among these features will be a focus on fill-rate and the ability to achieve over one billion pixels per second. With fill-rate come benefits such as higher resolution, faster speeds, greater application complexity and the ability to display high quality 32bpp rendering at 60+ frames per second (FPS) at ultra high resolutions. All of these attributes equate to better image quality and highly realistic environments.

Pretty neat looking, don't you think?  That thing in the middle is a touch sensor pad.

I was definitely pleased with the performance of the drive. With the CDRW writing speed being the same as CDR writing speed, it starts to become meaningful to buy CDRW instead of just CDR media. In the past I have stuck with CDR media regarless of the drive just to get the extra speed in writing. Also, for those of you who have never used CDRW drives, it takes under 1 minute to re-format a used CDRW disc.

Based on measurements with pre-release drivers on a 550 MHz Pentium III Xeon(TM) single-processor machine, NVIDIA Quadro delivers outstanding 2D and 3D performance compared to other high-end boards that cost as much as ten times more. For example, Quadro delivers a Viewperf Advanced Visualizer score of 74, compared to the more expensive Intense3D Wildcat 4000 score of 57 and 3Dlabs GVX1 score of 27. On industry standard application benchmarks like Gbench99 for Pro Engineer, Quadro posts a score of 84, compared to 77 for Intense3D Wildcat, and 78 for 3Dlabs GVX1. This equates to more than 5-times the price/performance of the Intense3D Wildcat. On other industry standard benchmarks like Indy3D, Quadro scores 38 on the Animation test, which measures the GPU's capability to replay data sets in real time.

• Yamaha XG-Movie 5.1 Digital Surround Card FAQ
• Sound Blaster Live FAQ (w/ Live!Ware 3.0 info)
• Aureal A3D 3.0, Reverb and Assorted Futures FAQ
• An editorial on the present and future of DVD

They are all quite informative and very interesting.  For example, the Aureal FAQ says that new drivers should be out this week which will support EAX.  Hopefully Aureal can deliver.

The first, the 16MB edition, offered the same technology as last year's All-in-Wonder Pro with the only difference being the Rage128 graphics chip. The 32MB version scheduled for release for summer, implemented ATI's custom Rage Theater video encoding/decoding chip which promises consumer-electronic quality TV input and output. All was not well for ATI, and the All-in-Wonder 128 32MB saw delay after delay while both Matrox and 3dfx were able to release their own high-end "all-in-one" products the Matrox G400-TV and the Voodoo3 3500 TV.

• Powerstrip (Win9X/NT/2K - v2.55 Beta - 692 KB)
  
  
  

3Dlabs has been a longtime leader in the professional graphics field with it's Oxygen line of graphics cards. The new Oxygen VX1 is 3Dlabs' entry level professional graphics solution. With 32 MB of SDRAM and the new GLINT R3 graphics processor, the VX1 provides some powerful graphics performance at an affordable price. It may not be as good a performer in games as the Voodoo 3, TNT2, G400, or the new GeForce256, but it's not targeted towards gamers.