Dan van Dan's Data heeft een roundup van 3 TNT2 kaarten. Hij bekijkt de Asus V3800, de Leadtek S320 2 en de Diamond Viper V770. Hier een snippet :

TNT-2s are differentiated by clock speed; there's apparently going to be a low-cost "Vanta" version with a default core graphics clock speed of 125MHz and a memory clock speed of 150MHz, an upcoming "Ultra" version clocked, by default, at 175 and 200MHz respectively, and a 150/175MHz midrange version too. Or something like that. At present, many of the stock TNT-2 card drivers clock the board, by default, at Vanta speed, although the chips are capable of the midrange speed, and maybe a bit more.

All of this is of special interest to users, because as with other recent graphics chipsets, the TNT's clock speeds can be altered easily with a simple tweaking utility. Of which more later.

En dus ook overclocking komt aan de beurt. Lees hier de complete review.

Op the tech zone staat een Voodoo 3 3000 review met overclocking resultaten.

The Voodoo 3 3000 is 3Dfx's top of the line video card. 3Dfx says, and rightfully so, that it's the first video card to exceed the power of SLI Voodoo 2. I have never came across a video card that was this fast. The frame rate it generates just blows the mind. Put this baby into a higher power PIII-580 like I did and you just build yourself the world's fastest system for playing Quake 2 and Unreal (at least until the V3 3500 comes out) There is very little difference between the Voodoo 3 3000 and the slower Voodoo 3 2000. The main difference beside the 3000 being faster is TV out. The 3000 has it, the 2000 don't. This may or may not be important to you. I don't care for the feature myself. The heatsink on the 3000 is also bigger. Despite what you see in the above photo, the Voodoo 3 3000 does NOT come with a fan. And if it did, it wouldn't come with one that big! That was the fan I put on the card for the overclocking test.

Klik voor de rest.

Op Thresh's FiringSquad staat een leuke guide over Cooling. De info is behoorlijk basic maar dat drukt de pret niet. Hier eventjes het introotje :

As technology progresses, we are seeing and increasing trend in the thermal output of systems. What this means is that the heat output generated by an average system is now greater than it ever was. This is due to a variety of reasons. First, as CPUs become more advanced, we are seeing millions of transistors per CPU, which is causing a drastic increase in the heat output of the CPU.

The CPU is not the only component that is heating up, though. Current generation video cards chipsets are HOT. This heat also contributes to the ambient heat inside a system's case. Hard drives are getting hotter and hotter as well. As the RPM speed increases for hard drives, we are seeing a correlation in the heat increase. 7,200 RPM and especially 10,000 RPM drives are big producers of heat. Even faster spinning CD-ROMs are outputting quite a bit of heat.

Dit is deel 1 van de guide. Er wordt gesproken over onder andere airflow, sinks en peltiers.

Storage Review heeft een review geupt van de Seagate Barracuda 18LP. Dit is al weer de 5de generatie uit de Barracuda serie en de schijf draait op 7200rpm. Hier een stuk over de performance in vergelijking met andere 7200rpm SCSI schijven:

The Barracuda 18LP's 3.6 gigs per platter begs comparison with the IBM Ultrastar 18ES. From performance testing already conducted here at StorageReview.com, however, it's clear that the comparison should be performed against today's premiere 7200rpm SCSI drive: the Western Digital Enterprise WDE18300. Windows 95 tests yield neck-and-neck performance. The Business Disk WinMark 99 places the Seagate in the lead over the WD by an unnoticeable 1%. The High-End Disk WinMark reverses the situation, the Barracuda trailing by a negligible 1%. Testing in Windows NT, however, reveals a larger difference in performance between the two units. Here the Seagate drive trails the Western Digital by 9% in the Business Disk WinMark and a fairly substantial 13% in High-End tests. ww

Review Zone heeft een artikel over audio compression bij elkaar gebakken. MP3, MP2, Mikrosoft Audio 4, Real Audio G2 en TwinVQ (VQF) komen aan de beurt. Zoals we van Review Zone gewend zijn is het weer goede info. De conclusie over Mikrosoft's audio formaat lijkt me wel interressant om hier ff te posten:

After all the music we went through, we will not say MS Audio is better than MP3 at the high end of the bitrate spectrum (160 kbps included) but is definitely better at the lower bitrates. It is a good compression scheme tragically compromised by a very annoying audible artefact. We can definitely look forward to improvements though. My only worry is that it will be platform limited at least in the sense that the software for producing compressed files will only be available on Windows.

Nou lijkt het me persoonlijk geen fijn idee als Mikrosoft ook een monopolie krijgt op internet audio, maar als je ziet dat 65% van de internetters inmiddels Internet Exploiter gebruikt dan heb ik weinig hoop voor de toekomst...

Bij FPS3D.com hebben ze een review van de Abit ZM6 gepost. Ga 'm hier checken en vergeet ook niet onze eigen review.

Gamehopper heeft een videokaarten roundup gepost. Hieronder een opsomming van de kaarten die zijn meegenomen:

- 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 16MB
- ATI Rage Fury 128 32MB Creative Labs Graphics Blaster TNT 16MB (nVidia Riva TNT 16MB)
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4 32MB (S3 Savage4 Pro 32MB)
- Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB (3dfx Voodoo 2 12MB)
- Leadtek Winfast 3D S320 II (nVidia Riva TNT2 16MB) [break]Gamehopper heeft een zooi handige benchmarks: Quake2 Crusher.dm2, Quake2 Massive.dm2 en zelfs Unreal. De laatste laat maar weer eens zien hoe hard de engine van Unreal zuigt, want de TNT2 is gewoon keihard tweemaal zo traag. Doet me herinneren aan deze opmerking bij Riva Station van een week geleden: heeft Unreal überhaupt multi-texturing support voor de TNT?[/break] I reported two days ago that NVIDIA has changes the multitexturing (MT) implementation in the OpenGL part of the v1.73 drivers. The result: Quake2 benchmarks with TNT2 do not show the real performance. The values are lower as they could be (although they are a lot faster as TNT with MT). The same problem exists with Kingpin and other games based on the Q2 Engine. So be carefull watching TNT2 scores of these games. They will change in future! (after a patch is available). The use of drivers based on v1.2X doesŽnt help. Tests show that these drivers canŽt use the high fill-rates of the TNT2. So we have to wait a bit until we can see the real Q2 performance of the TNT2! Interesting here: You canŽt see such things in Unreal v2.24... this letŽs me speculate if Unreal OpenGL is using MT at all... is this the answer to the performance problem?!?

Net Excite heeft een review van de Net-n-Dude Glacier 4500C koeler met Arctic Cap in elkaar getimmerd. Wa's da?

This is a CPU heatsink/fan combo that consists of a total of four fans. Three fans are mounted on the front of the CPU wile the Arctic Cap is mounted on the back of the CPU.

Dus om dit ff in normaal hollands samen te vatten gaat het hier gewoon om een dubbele met selderij belegde boterham met de Artic cap als backslice boterham .

Firingsquad heeft een review gepost van Mikrosoft's Midtown Madness. Als ik zo de screenshots zie dan kan ik niets anders zeggen dan dat de graphics extreem zuigend zijn...

Toch krijgt het spel een Editor's Choice, blijkbaar is de gameplay erg goed:

When we say alive, we MEAN alive. I've never played a game with so much ambient stuff going on in the background. This game just wouldn't be the same without the seemingly hundreds of other cars and pedestrians in the background, going about their daily business while you're tearing off around the city being destructive! I'm not a big racing game fan - I'll probably be one of the last people to strap a steering wheel on to my computer but I still found Midtown Madness to be an incredibly fun game.

PC.IGN heeft een artikel gepost met drie korte reviews van Star Wars: Episode 1 - Racer, The Gungan Frontier en The Phantom Menace.

We started our play today with Star Wars: Episode I - Racer. While there's no doubt that the PC title looks a lot better in race than what we had seen previously on the N64, the actual gameplay hasn't changed all that much. The game offers very little challenge in the first few levels, but we've just now started hitting a few tracks that are pretty difficult. Speaking of pretty difficult, the control setup for this game is one of the worst I've ever seen in my life. Activating just about any change in the default control scheme causes the game to instantly become unnavigatible. You'll find getting into and out of this game more challenge than actually playing it.

Van de 3 spellen vinden ze The Phantom Menace het minst, maar echt positief zijn ze niet. Check 't zelf bij PC.IGN.

John Carmack heeft z'n laatste .plan update een berg info gepost over Quake3 Arena en multi processing. Ja, Q3 heeft support voor dual processors:

I finally got around to implementing dual processor acceleration today. I still have a couple issues to resolve and some more rearranging to do, but it is giving 20%+ speedup right now in a worst-case situation for it.

When completed, I expect the average speedup to be in the 40% to 80% range, depending on what is going on and the video configuration. Scenes with lots of dynamic lighting and lots of sounds and other client processing going will show the largest speedups. It helps the slow scenes more than the fast scenes, which is basically what you want.

I am going to shake this out with the Windows (NT) code first, but it should definately make its way to the linux port eventually.

I know SMP is a que for all the BeOS folks to ask about ports, so I'm going to head that off: Be has all the code for Q3 (and Q2, for that matter), and a version of Q3test should be available by the time they ship a release OS with OpenGL hardware acceleration. [...]True, only a tiny fraction of our players (probably less than 1%) will be able to take advantage of this, but I consider SMP usage to be an important technology to nurture over the coming years.

The top of the benchmark chart should be an SMP system (assuming the NT drivers have all the optimizations of the '98 drivers), and it will also be possible to build a reletively cheap SMP system (say, dual 400's) that outperforms the best single processor system.

Verder zegt-ie dat er mogelijk een SGI Irix port komt, wat leuk is als je toevallig nog een Silicon op zolder hebt staan. Voor de gewone SGI-loze sterveling is het belangrijker om te weten dat er waarschijnlijk volgende week een Q3Test update komt waarin een zooi bugs gefixt worden.

Diegene die een Savage 4 kaart hebben kunnen hier de win9x en hier de Win NT drivers downen.

CGO heeft een preview geplaats van Dark Reign 2.

Hier een stukkie text:

In the tradition of Command & Conquer, Dark Reign 2 will emphasize soldiers over vehicles. "We want to go back to the idea of infantry and make these guys powerful and fun to play with," Candler says. "It seems like in most strategy games the idea of infantry is not well thought out and infantry is just easy to run over." In addition to formidable weaponry, Pandemic is including spell abilities to make infantry more powerful. One of the Tribe units is the Voodoun, a witch doctor of sorts who can heal units, blind enemies, and amass the spirits of dead enemies to summon something big and mean called a Baron Samedi. "It will stomp across the terrain and destroy anything in its path," says Borrud.

Kijk hier voor de rest.

...en nu we het toch over Unreal hebben: Planet Unreal weet te vertellen dat er een beta versie van de Unreal 225 patch is uitgelekt:

A 225A patch for internal beta testing has been leaked. It is network compatible with 224. It is not ready for general release. It is 33 megs because it has not yet been delta compressed. The final 225 patch will be out soon and will fix server stability and cpu usage problems in 224. Again, 225A has not been released by Epic and is not supported by Epic. You are advised against using this patch as it is not ready for public consumption.

Ik zag bij Planet Unreal trouwens ook nog dit errug koele Unreal Tournament screenshot op de frontpage staan (uit de UT preview van Evil Avatar).

Billy van Voodoo Extreme heeft een mailtje gedropt bij Tim Sweeney, met een paar vragen over Unreal patch 225:

1) How's 225 coming along?

Sweeney: Good, we're optimizing the server code, and fixing minor bugs people reported.

2) What kind of net performance increase, if any, will we see, in 225, - or our we as far in Unreal as we'll see? Can expect the net performance increase to be substantial with Unreal Tournament?

Sweeney: Unreal server performance is still improving, though bandwidth usage won't improve significantly for Unreal 1. (Unreal Tournament's new weapons are designed with more client-side simulation, so the bandwidth is better now).

3) Any guestimate as to when we _might_ see 225? Sweeney: No!

Dus dat kan nog wel ff duren (zijn we inmiddels gewend ).

Jon (die is daar nieuw geloof ik) van Sharky Extreme heeft een review van Requiem: Avenging Angel in elkaar gedraaid. Er hangt een super wazig & dik verhaal achter dat spel. Samengevat: elkaar afknallen. Laat ik het maar simpel houden en een stukkie pasten over de graphics:

Graphically, Requiem is more famine than feast. Textures were done by someone who, it seems, did not much care for their job. While colors and themes do vary between levels, you always get the feeling that you're in the same dull and unpleasant location. Enemies move smoothly and quickly, if not realistically. One place where the engine really falls apart is in environmental interaction. Almost nothing in the world is destructible. You can shoot out windows, but that is about it. Computers, desks, chairs, fire extinguishers, and most everything else can take a rocket in the kiester without a scratch. Bullet holes don't show on anything. The only sign of you firing are spent shells on the ground, which disappear after you fire a few more shots. Another annoying "feature" is evident when you walk up stairs. It feels like the whole world is shaking in a massive earthquake. It's a real nausea inducing experience. The fact that enemies end up dying half way through walls, often with only their feet sticking out like the Wicked Witch of the West, [or is it South or North or what?] is evidence of bad collision detection. Levels are all highly claustrophobic and enclosed because the engine can't handle anything more. Overall, the engine seems on par with that of Quake 1.

Mijn leven heeft sinds twee dagen een nieuw opperdoel, namelijk het downsizen & uploaden van screenshots . Laat ik dat hier ook maar doen:

Oja, Jon geeft het spel een 5 en da's nie goed. Lees hier waarom.

Laat ik de nieuws pagina maar weer eens opblijen met een paar schermschoten:

Deus Ex (GA-Source)

Anachronox (AVault)

Soldier of Fortune (3DNews.net)

Oni (GA-Source)

FAKK (3DNews.net)

Planet of Apes (Sharky Extreme)

En ik zie bij 3DNews.net ook nog een link naar een Quake3 screensaver.

Ik zag op de news page van Sharky Extreme dat Soyo een nieuw BX moederbord heeft aangekondigd. Hier is de soep (en die is lekker):

Soyo today announced that its 100MHZ Slot 1 based Intel BX chipset motherboard will have a new addition. The SY-6BA+3 motherboard will feature new components and software-driven features designed to maximize the performance of Intel's new Pentium III CPU as well as the management of systems built with the SOYO motherboard. The ATX footprint motherboard will also be bundled with Symantec's Norton AntiVirus to protect board components and software from virus attacks, as well as Symantec's Norton Ghost disk cloning software, and Virtual Drive CD-ROM emulation application. SOYO's SY-6BA+3 motherboard has been reengineered with a new clock generator that allows the CPU Frontside System Bus (FSB) and PCI bus clock to be configured 29 different ways -- from 66MHz-155MHz -- in order to fine-tune the system bus speed for performance-oriented applications such as 3D modeling, animation or gaming. The new design also protects overclocked systems from crashes, particularly when using PCI bus add-in cards, because the redesigned SY-6BA+3 automatically sets the PCI bus clock to a safe level when the CPU FSB is set. When users overclock the CPU FSB, the PCI bus clock will be automatically clocked to a safe level. Other enhancements geared to overclocking include adjustable CPU Core voltage. Users can set CPU Core voltage directly through the BIOS directly without jumpers.

Dan is dit denk ik de extreem wrede oc plank uit deze nieuws posting. Specs zijn errug goed!

Sharky Extreme heeft z'n Celeon Overclockers Guide van een update voorzien. De nieuwe 466 en 433MHz Celerons komen nu ook aan bod, verder is het gewoon weer de gebruikelijke oc info (koeling, voltage tweaking enz.).

Matrox Users heeft een ultr hi-res screenshot van Quake3 op een G400Max. Hier heb je de info:

I mentioned light heartedly 2048x1536 screenshots of Quake3 yesterday and I've received quite a few emails about this. There are only one or two high end 21" monitors available that support this resolution, one of which is the ViewSonic P817 which I currently have on loan from ViewSonic UK. Yes this is a ridiculously high resolution and no I'm not saying Quake3 is playable at this resolution but people have asked for a screenshot so here's one for you. Beware, this thing is huge, it's a 615K JPEG. Quake 3 test demo, 32-bit colour, 32-bit textures, trilinear filtering captured on a Millennium G400 MAX, 32 MB SGRAM. That doesn't mean that all games are unplayable at this resolution though, you'll have to wait for the review for more on that.

Screenshot vind je hier. Eerder vandaag postte Sharky Extreme al hi-res shots van Q3, zie dit nieuwsbericht.

Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy van Tweak3D heeft een review gepost van Electronic Arts' Sports Car GT.

As I mentioned above, the features in Sports Car GT rival Gran Turismo on the Playstation. The developer, Image Space, worked very hard to polish this game, and it shows.

Although many of them are similar, there are over 50 cars available in the game. There are several Porches, BMW M3s, McLaren F1 GTRs, Saleen Mustangs, and many others. If you play the "Career" mode, you start with a small budget which you must use to buy your first car. After a few races you'll have money to add headers, turbo chargers, and tires, etc. to ensure that your car smokes the competition. The upgrading features are much like Gran Turismo. Everything you buy will add to your horsepower and torque, decrease weight, or increase grip. Your car will be customized to your liking and budget. After you've won a season (a series of several races), you'll have money to buy a higher class car. For example, my first car was a Porsche 911. After winning a season I bought a Saleen Mustang that had plenty of horsepower and weighed a lot less.

...en een paar screenshots:

GA Sports heeft een preview geplaatst van de Act Labs RS Shifter, een versnellingspook die je op je Act Labs Force RS stuur kunt plakken (zie pic):

The shifter comes with three different plates to make it perfect for any type of racing title. These plates rest over the main one and are changed seamlessly. I'm talking in a matter of seconds here. No screws, no duct tape, no nothing. There is the classic high/low plate, a 7-gear/1 Reverse, and a 6-gear/1 Reverse and plates that leave nothing to be desired. 7-gears would be for a game like Need for Speed 3 where the Diablo would be fully supported. The 6-Gear plate would be for old-school Rally and Cart titles and a sequential gearbox for the modern-day Rally/Touring/Cart cars. Of course, anything lower can be used as well.

Gamespy heeft als onderdeel van z'n E3 show coverage een drietal previews gepost:

- Anachronox
- Half-Life: Opposing Force
- Team Fortress 2

Die laatste lijkt me wel interessant om ff wat uit te copy/pasten:

One of the main focuses of Team Fortress 2 is social interaction. As much as the Valve guys (including the Team Fortress Software guys, who've been assimilated) like deathmatch, they believe that having a more meaningful interaction with your peers than just blowing them away is a lot more fun. This has factored heavily into the design and execution of TF2. A very important part of good social interaction, of course, is finding the right people. With this fact in mind, Valve has built an icq-like friend-finder into Team Fortress 2. This software allows to find out if your friends are running servers or, much like Gamespy's shared server lists, find the server that gives the best average ping to everyone in a group. Other features for social interaction within the game include two-person weapons which fire faster and more accurately with another player feeding ammo into them, and grenades with realistic shrapnel. How's that a social aspect? Imagine seeing a grenade lobbed at your medic, who's about to heal your commanding officer, and throwing yourself between the explosion and the medic in order to sacrifice for the greater good. Pretty damn cool.

Ook weer wat info over de voice communication in TF2, dat gaat best kewl worden om te multiplayeren denk ik.

Gamasutra heeft een artikel gepost over de ontwikkeling van Trespasser en waar het fout liep. Ooit ambitieus begonnen maar toen erg zwaar geflopt. Hier heb je een stuk:

The original plan for Trespasser certainly seemed like a good one. It was very ambitious, but the team had made tradeoffs for implementation and execution time from the very beginning, such as not attempting to do multiple or moving light sources or Quake-style shadow generation in order to accommodate arbitrary numbers of moving objects and long, wide-open views. Unfortunately, there is a difference between having a plan and successfully executing it, and the product that we eventually shipped was as disappointing to us as it was to the great majority of game players and game critics.

Chris van Voodoo Extreme heeft een review van X-Wing Alliance geschreven. Hier krijg je wat info:

Visuals are the big thing in the media today, and everyone knows it. Computer games strive to look as realistic as possible, and movies (like, for example, The Phantom Menace) endeavor to create utterly believable settings and characters that don't actually exist outside the workstation they were rendered on. So, how do the graphics stand up in Alliance? They're very good, by any standard - by far the best in LucasArts's flagship series. However, unlike its newborn film cousin, Alliance doesn't offer anything that hasn't been seen before. It doesn't have the graphical glitz of its earlier competitors, Wing Commander: Prophecy or Descent: Freespace. What Alliance lacks in flash, though, it more than makes up for in refinement.

Sharky heeft 2 super high-res shots (2084 x 1536) van Quake 3 Arena, draaiend op een G400MAX.

Here's a litte treat for you... we've got some VERY high-res shots of the Quake III: Arena Test running on a G400MAX. As we said these are high-res and NOT for the faint hearted. At 2048x1536, the game was no way near playable but nonetheless, these shots give you an indication of the direction that 'image quality' is taking.

Ga ze hier bekijken!

Yep, ze zijn nog niet dood: Beyond3D heeft een interview met een ventje van Rendition. Hier heb je een paar stukken:

4. What's the story on RRedline (V3k) ? It seems as though one minute it is coming, the next it isn't, and finally things are up in the air. Will RRedline ever be released?

Not to the general public. Not the v3k anyway. We may use the RRedline name, but our third generation chip is being skipped over. This is a major disappointment, because it would have kicked-ass. But it is the right thing to do in the long run. Micron and Rendition came together to revolutionize 3D by combining embedded memory with high-performance graphics. But the v3k was designed well before the merger, and was not an embedded memory chip. It would have only slowed us down in our long term goal if we had taken the time to finish the v3k and bring it to market. Rather, we have turned the v3k into an experimental prototype platform to help us get to our 4th generation faster.

4. What has been the problem with it? Was it that the chip simply did not live up to expectations, or is there something else behind it?

There is no great conspiracy. It would have been a great chip if it had been brought to market when we intended it to hit. But moving to embedded memory and Micron's fabs as fast as possible was deemed more important than finishing the v3k off and polishing it into a product.