September 19 - 25, 1998
Archive

Riding on the latest platform (the 400-MHz Intel Pentium II and Microsoft's DirectX 6 API), these two cards are leaps-and-bounds faster and better in 3-D image quality than the previous generation of 2-D/3-D cards. (3DfX Voodoo2-based cards are still exceptional performers with excellent image quality, but they require separate 2-D accelerators. The new ATI Rage128, S3 Savage 3D, and 3DfX Banshee chips also promise greatly improved 3-D graphics. Look for reviews based on many of these chips in our Fall Comdex issue.)

 

AMD, for its part, will be releasing a 400-MHz version of the K6-2 in the fourth quarter, and the company may even be able to eke out small volumes of its next-generation K6-3 chip--which comes with integrated "secondary" cache memory for the first time--before the end of the year, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

 

Check out the General Reviews Index for my updated September 1998 PC100 SDRAM Comparison with new results from the Memory Man's newest Samsung (SEC) SDRAM.   The results are quite an improvement from the original SDRAM I reviewed from the Memory Man.  I hope you enjoy the updated review, and I should have the Marvel G200 Review up tomorrow or Saturday at latest.  Btw...thanks for the wonderful suggestions on a good radar detector, time to put the internet to use with some good old fashioned online ordering ;)

 

Among other processors, AMD's K6-2 3-D 333-MHz chip will drop to $95, the 350-MHz will drop to $130; the new 380-MHz will be introduced at $170; and the 400-MHz chip will be introduced at $248, a source said. The 380-MHz is expected to require a special mother board sporting a 95-MHz bus speed, the source said.

 

Within the next few days we're going to have another official driver release. This release will consist of the latest core drivers from 3Dfx (the ones which are currently on the 3Dfx site) as well as a few other goodies which will be a surprise. We're officially releasing them so that our customers can contact us for technical support if they need assistance.

At around the same time (but possibly delayed; it's dependent on 3Dfx), 3Dfx will be releasing a new version of their OEM drivers. This is the long-awaited version with DirectX6 optimization and H3D support as well as taking care of various other issues. They'll release it to us first, and then to the public in two weeks. We should be offering it to our customers as a beta immediately after 3Dfx releases it to Creative.

-- Dylan

 

Sorry for missing the update this morning, I overslept and had to leave the house in a run.  The official word from Diamond on the V550 Flash BIOS issue is that the Viper V550 does have a flash BIOS, so rest assured that when a new BIOS upgrade is available the V550 will be able to take advantage of it...

 

• AGN3D Hardware Show (Real Player Required - Time 6PM EST)

Some pretty reliable sources sent word regarding the latest info on Quantum3D's upcoming Banshee board. As Alex mentioned a few weeks ago, Quantum3D is opting to stick to a reference design in order to be competitive in the same market as Diamond, Creative etc. Quantum3D is notorious for bringing to market extremely high end video cards, as was the case for the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 based video cards. Unfortunately, those boards also brought with them a hefty price tag.

The card, called the Quantum3D Raven, will come with 16MB of SDRAM, TV-out and will be bundled with NFL Blitz, San Francisco Rush and Gex. It's no surprise that Quantum3D opted for the former 2 titles, since the Obsidian Voodoo Graphics boards powered the original arcade versions. The card will retail for $149. No word on availability.

 

I really wanted to give the Mystique G200 a 9 out of 10, but my conscience wouldn't let me do it. The card itself deserves it, since the G200 has all the performance you would want in a 2D/3D accelerator and it comes at a very competitive price. Direct 3D scores are in the upper echelon of accelerators and image quality is also top notch. Matrox is a very well respected company and their drivers are very solid and support is also very good. So what's wrong? No OpenGL ICD. In this day and age, I feel that a company that does not include full OpenGL functionality in their shipping drivers is simply not giving gamers their money's worth. With so many 3D shooter either using the Quake 2 engine or using their own OpenGL implementation (Unreal, Duke Nukem Forever) there's a large portion of games that the G200 cannot currently play.

 

• STB Velocity 4400 PCI BIOS (version 1.02 - 341 KB)

• Graphics Blaster TNT Driver (Win9X - 1.5 MB)
• Graphics Blaster TNT BIOS (417 KB)

The company also plans to roll out a geometry-setup co-processor, perhaps by next year. The device will be designed to churn out more polygons than general-purpose CPUs, which many observers say create a bottleneck in the graphics subsystem. Most graphics engines are capable of processing triangles much faster.

"The performance of the CPU is too poor to get good detail," Bellfield said. "[The movie] Jurassic Park, for example, had 20 million polygons per second. That's the kind of immersiveness that games want to reach."

That's why Sony is looking toward non-polygon-based 3-D graphics technologies for the next-generation PlayStation.

 

While the Boss Is Away Dept.: Just a year ago you might have thought the Merced (IA-64) would be taking over the world about now. The delay was announced, and we have to wait. Not wanting to miss a beat, Cyrix will aggressively go after the soft spot between the Pentium II and IA-64 with a chip code-named Jalapeno, which has a 600-MHz performance rating. According to reports, Cyrix wants to take advantage of some new CMOS processes it picked up from National Semiconductor. Here we go again. To complicate things more, EE Times reported that Cyrix may jump from the AMD 3DNow! extensions to an implementation of the Intel KNI (Katmai New Instructions). Watch this battle take center stage in the next 18 months. Also look for the sudden emergence of discussion over--get this--a Level-3 cache for these hyperhertz chips.

 

• STB V4400
• Diamond Viper V550

Mail order vendors are listing the price of the retail Creative Labs 3D Blaster 16Mb AGP in the $115 range; with the included $30 rebate (in the form of a mail in coupon), this puts the total cost at about $85. With further competition (only several resellers currently list the board in their inventory), we might even see the price drop further to $65 w/ rebate in the next week or two. Shipment is expected Sept 30th.

With the cost of TNT boards down in the range of $150 (oem) to $175 (retail), I had my doubts as to the ability of Banshee to compete in the retail marketplace. However, it would appear that 3Dfx is pricing their product more aggressively than previously expected. Instead of $150 range, they (or, at least, Creative Labs) would appear to be targetting the sub-$100 market. Eighty-five dollars for a board capable of running Quake2 in 1024x768x16bpp @ 30+fps is pretty damn impressive. It is certainly no TNT in performance, but then again, its no TNT in price either.

 

Well, Gary Jones has done it again!  This time he's enlarged the scope of his tests and added a new benchmark.  Later today I'll post "all" the latest from Gary including TnT results at 24 bit color, but until then here's a little preview... 

Overall, Diamond has another quality product on their hands, unfortunately it isn't enough to win a recommendation over Canopus for the price, or over Creative Labs because of the low cost ($169) of their Graphics Blaster TNT.    If the Viper V550 is all that is available, then it isn't a bad card, although there are competitors out there that can offer you a bit more.

 

There's not much to say that hasn't already been said about the Voodoo 2.  The Maxi Gamer 3D2 is no different from the rest of the pack as far as performance goes.  It does however have a big edge over the competition in cost.   At $129.99 for an 8MB Voodoo 2 based card it is far ahead of the competition at this point in the value category.  Even the 12MB version of the Maxi Gamer 3D2 is only $159.99.  Definitely a bargain.

 

For those of you not concerned with the video bells and whistles that the SPECTRA 2500 offers, Canopus will be releasing a new version without the TV out technology and with SGRAM instead of SDRAM for a yet undetermined price. The SGRAM should offer a little performance increase in 2D, especially at higher resolutions. The SPECTRA 3200 is currently only available in Japan. Here is a picture of the upcoming SPECTRA 3200 video card.

 

Guillemot today announces 2 Maxi Gamer 3D2's (12MB) for SLI mode for only $299.99. Gamers seeking to create the ultimate gaming machine can now attach two Maxi Gamer 3D2 cards together via the Scan Line Interleave (SLI*) port for up to 360 million texels per second and resolutions as high as 1024 x 768. At this low price, gamers can now double the raw performance of their graphics accelerator. The Maxi Gamer 3D2 uses the 3Dfx Interactive Voodoo2 technology to render ultra-realistic 3D arcade-quality images.

Alternatively, you can buy a single Maxi Gamer 3D2 (8 MB) for $129.99 and a Maxi Gamer 3D2 (12MB) for only $159.99 by calling 1-877-484-5536 or visiting the company's web site at http://www.guillemot.com.

 

By now, most of you are probably pretty familiar with Half-Life. A first-person shooter being developed by start-up Valve Software and using the Quake engine, the game has endured several major delays. But the end is definitely in sight, as we have just received the Half-Life Day One beta, a nearly finished version of the first fifth of the game going that will be included with some new 3D accelerator boards this holiday season. This preview recounts our impressions of playing the Day One beta, so be forewarned--spoilers lie ahead.

 

• CPUIdle (version 5.0b - 286 KB)

I think that we might see the Rev 3 design picked up by at least one or two companies this Fall.

Also, it's no secret that we are developing future versions of Voodoo Banshee. Voodoo Banshee is meant to be a family of products.  As a part of that future family, you will see faster processors (higher clock). The dual TMU thing is really a question.

It's technically possible to add a second TMU, but we want to keep Voodoo
Banshee a single chip product.  The dual TMU approach is really what Voodoo2 is all about.

Steve Schick
3Dfx Interactive, Inc.

 

I'd throw some screenshots on here, but after compression and all that confusing mess it wouldn't even be worth it. But, I can tell you first hand, the visual difference is barely noticeable. I even thought I was in 16 bit some times when I was actually in 32 bit and vice versa.

Not much explaining is necessary here, at 125MHz, with a memory clock (MCLK) speed of 115MHz, the Riva TNT can really give you a nice performance increase, especially at 1024 x 768.  This performance trend would lead one to believe that being able to run a TNT at 125MHz with a memory clock speed of 130MHz would provide a performance increase great enough to make the TNT a strong enough competitor to 3Dfx's empire to tilt the favor of quite a few Voodoo2 supporters.   Just imagine the performance increase a true 0.25 micron TNT running at 125MHz with a 200MHz memory clock would yield...

 

• Intel i740 Driver (Win9X - version 3.0 - 305KB)
• Intel i740 Driver (WinNT - version 3.0 - 885KB)

Let's talk cooling first. This case has by far the most cooling options of any I've seen yet. A total of ten fan locations are standard with the case. There are plastic holders for three in the front under the 5.25" drive bays. In the back of the case, there is room for one fan that can be screwed directly to the case immediately behind the CPU. A plastic holder allows mounting of one more above the power supply.

Finally, there are plastic holders for two fans that mount directly to each side of the 5.25" drive bays which are perfect for cooling hard drives and/or CD-ROM drives. There are large slots in the side panels to allow air to flow freely to the drive bays. There is a filter integrated into the bezel (click here for a picture) that prevents dust from coming in through the front three fans - perfect if you're going to put it on the floor.

The fan located behind the CPU is obviously perfect for helping to cool that overclocked CPU. Another fan actually mounts on a slide out tray that mounts in place of another tray that could be used for hard drives. If you mount a fan there, it will blow down directly on your CPU. This is somewhat hard to explain so just look at this picture and the one above.

 

• Diamond Micronics C200 Super 7 Motherboard Press Released
• Diamond Sonic Impact S90 Press Release

The STB Velocity 4400 may have been rushed to the market a bit. But as of this writing the drivers are very stable, and the product works flawlessly. What makes the STB Velocity 4400 the board to get? Well I’d have to say the fact that it’s the first and only Riva TNT board you can get at this moment. As soon as other boards from other companies are released, the STB Velocity 4400 may get lost in the cloud of other TNT boards, that may offer better bundles, lower prices, better craftsmanship, more options etc. The Velocity 4400 is the vanilla nVidia Riva TNT board. It has all the goods that Riva TNT can offer, but nothing special. The Price for the the Velocity 4400 is $199 for 16 megabytes of SDRAM, for either the PCI or AGP2X version of the board.

I was consistently connected to my ISP at 50K with each modem, or 100K with the bonding. I even tried several times to make sure that I was seeing was correct. Armed with my newfound power, it was time to do a little surfing on the web to see if the modem would perform as advertised. A visit to AGN3D.com confirmed the speed when the homepage was fully displayed in 8 seconds. This is compared to the 45 seconds that it took with my Sporster running at 33.6. I visited quite a few other web sites from Zdnet to Gamecenter, and each of them loaded in as equally impressive a time. The Supra Sonic II had proven itself as the best solution for websurfers without cable or ASDL.

 

MILPITAS, Calif. - September 21, 1998 - Creative Technology Ltd. (NASDAQ: CREAF), the world's leading provider of multimedia products for the PC, today announced that it has added an extraordinary new 16MB 2D/3D graphics card to its award-winning 3D Blaster™ line of graphics accelerators. Available at a breakthrough price of US$129.99 (US$99.99 after US$30 manufacturers mail-in rebate for the US and Canada only), 3D Blaster Banshee combines the best of both worlds - exceptional 3D game play and outstanding 2D performance - all on a single card.

 

All of these new forms of RAM are great, the question is whether or not they are necessary. The performance difference between a 66mhz bus system running SDRAM and EDO RAM is ~1%, or very negligible. Does this mean that the difference between SDRAM and RDRAM, or DDR SDRAM will be the same. It depends (2) things, the operation, and the CPU. If the CPU running on this system is extremely fast (im talking like 6 x PII/400 speed) a main bottleneck may become the bandwidth, not the CPU. In this case, faster RAM will make a huge difference. The second aspect of computing which is greatly effected by ram is, you guessed it, AGP. AGP relies heavily on system RAM for storing/retrieving textures. Since many video cards are fast enough (in the operations they perform) to hit severe bandwidth centered limitations with low bandwidth memory (EDO DRAM (system, not the single cycle used in cards such as 3Dfx's Voodoo2), fast system memory will greatly increase AGP cards speed. (especially i740 based cards) There are already benchmarks which so stunning differences when running 66mhz and 100mhz based machines. Running a 100mhz based machine with DDR SDRAM, for example, may even give the i740 an edge over cards such as the RIVA 128.

 

While the P2 came in a bulky cartridge, the K6-3 will look virtually identical to the K6-2, even with its integrated L2 cache.  You're probably wondering about the L2 cache on your motherboard, well that will become the L3 cache.   Nifty, eh ;)   The size will be larger of course than the K6-2 with its integrated L2 cache, but I can tell you that is already smaller than what is on AMD's CPU road map.  Its doubtful we'll see Sharptooth in a micron below .25 in desktop PCs as the K7 should launch in the second half of 99.  Sorry I can't give you a better date than that, but AMD isn't even sure when it'll be out, so how should I know :)

 

For those of you who are looking for the fastest PC100 SDRAM out there, it is about time to halt your search.  Performance is not the issue when considering SDRAM, especially PC100 SDRAM.  Regardless of what some benchmark programs can produce, in real world situations, a single, well-made PC100 SDRAM DIMM will provide virtually identical performance to any other DIMM of its class. 

At the same time do not get fooled into the nanosecond hype that fell over the PC industry during the initial introduction of the elusive "10ns SDRAM DIMMs."  The nanosecond rating on a particular DIMM module does not directly relate to the performance you'll be receiving from your system overall, so don't be conned into buying a more expensive module just because it is rated at a lower speed.

  

A minor maintanence release, PowerStrip 2.26.6 is up, featuring improved programmable refresh rate support for the TNT and Savage3D, greater precision for the Banshee clocks, scheduled DPMS services for NT, and refined color correction/gamma controls for all supported chipsets.

• PowerStrip (Win9X/NT - version 2.26.6 - 728KB)

 

Switched fabrics are vastly different from buses. Rather than take a signal from a CPU into a bus through hard wires and into an I/O subsystem (the PCI bus implementation), signals come from the chip and into a high-speed switch. This switch acts as a controller and directs the signal to a subsystem, another chip or even another server. Performance is based on the speed of the switch.

 

• STB Velocity 4400 Bios (version 1.02 - 341KB)

STB's newest 2D/3D card, the Velocity V4400, relies on the promise and potential of the freshly pressed nVidia Riva TNT chip. By now the TNT's troubled development cycle has become common knowledge to most, and consumers are anxious to find out how the chip actually performs. After the initial Canopus Spectra 2500 TNT review I performed a week or two ago, I wondered if the stellar performance figures were a result of Canopus' sharp engineers or whether the TNT was actually just one helluva good part.

 

The M II PR 300 offers a good value for the money - however it is more appropriate for business systems than gaming systems. I should note that even at the default 3.5x66 setting the gaming performance was quite acceptable - Incoming and Turok "felt" fine, however Forsaken was noticeably less smooth.

The much improved performance with a 100Mhz bus shows a lot of promise for the M II and following processors from Cyrix / National Semiconductor. If the .22 micron fab starts manufacturing M II's I would not be surprised to see 300Mhz, 350Mhz and 400Mhz devices, whose performance should be outstanding. If they add 3DNow! and improve their FPU (as they are supposed to with Cayenne and Jalepeno) they could be a serious force in the performance / gaming arena.