Systemlogic heeft een zooitje benchmarks online gezet van de 3DLabs Permedia3 Create!, getest in 3DMark99 en Quake2 (Demo1.dm2 / Crusher / Massive). Helaas is er geen referentie met andere kaarten zoals de TNT2, wel blijkt uit de benchmarks dat de performance hit bij 32-bit rendering vrijwel afwezig is! Check het spul.

GA-Source heeft een interview gepost met Creative Labs. In het interview wordt gesproken over de fusie tussen S3 en Diamond en wat dit voor gevolgen kan hebben voor Creative. Hier is een stukje:

How does the latest S3/Diamond issue affect everyone in the industry?

The impact it has on the industry will vary from player to player, but it really depends how S3 will conduct itself with respect to its partners in the Far East. If S3 continues to sell chips to board companies in the Far East, our experience indicates that the Diamond brand will suffer. If S3 starts to withdraw its chips from these board manufacturers, then I would expect Intel and Nvidia to pick up some customers in that region of the world. So, its really too early to tell.

Beyond3D heeft een review gepost van de Gigabyte BX2000, een slot1 moederplank met 2 BIOSsen (da's handig voor het geval er eentje dood gaat):

The Dual BIOS is the main, innovative feature of this board. This means that there are two system BIOSes on the motherboard; one is the Main BIOS and the other is a Backup BIOS. Under normal circumstances, the system works using the Main BIOS. If the Main BIOS becomes corrupted or damaged, the Backup BIOS can take over when the system is powered on. This means that your PC will be stabilized as if nothing has happened to your BIOS. When you boot the machine, you have the option of pressing F1 to enter the Dual BIOS Utility.

Verder helaas geen info over de overklokbaarheid van het bord.

Billy van Voodoo Extreme heeft 4 screenshots gepost van Return to Na Pali (Unreal expansion pack). Hier heb je de tumbnails:

Screenshots.net heeft een zooitje Tiberian Sun screenshots op de site gedumpt. De shots lijken geript te zijn uit magazines, de kwaliteit is in ieder geval niet al te best.

Online heeft een preview(tje) van Soldier of Fortune in elkaar gedraaid. Hier heb je een stukje:

Based loosely on the Quake Engine (much like Half-Life), SoF's greatest strength so far is in its tremendously realistic characters and animation. The fully 3D Soldiers look and act like the real thing and, in what it probably Activision's legal department's worst nightmare, react realistically to gunfire. The gameplay is so real you can even shoot the gun out of your opponents hands.

Tevens heeft Shugashack een paar SoF screenshots online gezet: shot1 , shot2 , shot3 , shot4 , shot5

ZDNet heeft een artikeltje gepost over de 1GHz Alpha, die een paar dagen geleden op de PC Expo in New York werd gedemonstreerd. In een Lightwave benchmark werd de Xeon compleet geplet door de Alpha:

It had a side-by-side demo of a Pentium III Xeon 550 and an Alpha 750. The Alpha people say the chips will retail at "similar price points." Both computers contained the same amount of memory. They were both crunching the same file using the same software program, Lightwave 3D. For you movie fans, that's the software that did much of the animation in "Titanic." From what I saw it was no contest. The Alpha seemed to complete the task in half the time (Of course, it WAS Alpha's demonstration.) By the way, the Alpha 750MHz comes with 8MB of L2 cache, which doesn't hurt.

AMD heeft (relatieve) SPECint, SPECfp en 3D Winbench benchmarks van de Ahtlon 550 / 600 en PIII-550 gepost:

De verhoudingen in het balkje kloppen uiteraard voor geen meter, maar een 46% hogere FPU performance tov de PIII is zeker niet slecht. Uit de presentatie die Dirk Meyer twee week geleden heeft gegeven bleek dat de Athlon ongeveer 37% sneller was dan de Xeon, dus dan weet je een beetje hoe de verhoudingen tov de Coppermine liggen (Coppermine = PIII Xeon met de helft minder cache).

Ik lees trouwens bij JC dat AMD de naam van de EV-6 bus heeft verandert in "AMD Athlon System Bus".

P3D heeft reviews gepost van twee Tennmax coolers: de TNT Detonator en Viva TF P2. De eerste cooler is bedoeld voor videokaarten zoals de -tada- TNT:

During our tests we noted the fan makes a very minute amount of noise, almost unnoticeable. Performance-wise, we were able to bring our Spectra 2500 up to speeds of 127MHz (core) without freezing. The Spectra fan usually only allowed us to overclock the card to 121MHz core before game freezing/lockups. Anything over 127MHz with the TNT Detonator gave us trouble..

Beide reviews vind je op deze page.

Beyond3D heeft een viertal nieuwe screenshots gepost van de Videologic Neon 250 in Quake 3. De nieuwe screenshots hebben de framecounter in beeld. Daaruit blijkt dat de framerate tussen de 33 en 38fps ligt, op een resolutie van 1024x768 met 32-bit rendering. Niet slecht!

Sharky Extreme heeft een review van de Skywell Magic TNT2 gepost. Het is geen Ultra versie, maar de core speed is toch default op 150MHz gezet. Het geheugen van 32MB draait ook op 150MHz. Hier kun je de review lezen.

Hier heb je een stuk over de 3D performance, geen overklokkers info helaas...

As you can see by the benchmark scores , OpenGL performance is high. We tested not only Quake 2 but also Half-Life, SiN and Kingpin and they all hummed along nicely as expected. Even at the higher resolutions, at 1024 x 768 x 32 there was nothing to complain about in terms of performance from any of these "MiniGL" titles.

Of course we also had a go at Quake 3: Arena on the Magic TNT 2 and, as we expected, performance was very solid. Though not as fast as an UltraTNT2, the game remained playable with the highest detail settings in 32bit, even up to and beyond 1024 x 768. When cranking up the detail levels we did refrain from using tri-linear filtering as performance wasn't quite up to par with our needs. Oddly enough enabling tri-linear filtering didn't add much to the overall visual quality of the game anyway.

Direct 3D performance was also great, Expendable was actually quite playable at 1600 x 1200 at 16bit. With 32bit rendering enabled however the game wasn't quite as fluid. Still, as we prefer to side with speed over resolution, we usually play at 1024 x 768 at 32bit which gives a nice boost in performance and still looks very snazzy to the human eye.

And last but not least we let the Magic TNT 2 rip though a golden oldie, Rogue Squadron (from LucasArts). Why? Simply to see how wickedly fast the TNT 2 can handle titles that aren't quite as demanding as the latest visually sparkling titles are. At the maximum resolution supported by the game, 1280 x 1024, the TNT 2 performed admirably without any jerky motion anywhere. Nice!

Ugh, ik dacht dat we dit nu wel gehad hadden, maar Tweak3D heeft er toch weer een stukkie over geschreven. Hij test de games Quake 3 en NFS:HS voor de verschillen tussen 16 en 32 bit, later volgen waarschijnlijk nog meer games.

Is there a clear winner between 16-bit and 32-bit rendering? In my opinion, no... not at this time, and there won't be until all games that utilize 32-bit rendering actually offer sufficient graphical improvement to warrant the performance hit. The visual quality is definitely more impressive when playing Q3Test, but not in all areas. Some items in the game clearly look better, while others look almost the same. Are these extra features worth a massive hit to your frame rate? Sure, if you have the performance to spare... but not everyone does.

My P2 450 / TNT2 Ultra system running Q3Test at 1024x768x16bpp has relatively no performance issues: the game runs great. Occasionally the frame rate drops to about 30, but for the most part it stays well over that and runs smooth. However, when using 32-bit color, even 800x600 drops below 30 FPS when there is plenty of action on the screen. And there's no way I'm going to resort to using 640x480x32bpp just to ensure that I'll always have 30 FPS. At this point, 1024x768x16bpp seems much more appealing. When playing a fast paced game like Q3Test, I care much more about the frame rate and resolution than the image quality, and I'm certain that plenty of readers agree with me on this issue.

Voor de screenshots en de rest, klik hier.

ZDNet heeft een artikeltje in elkaar gedraaid waarin ze de web- en fileserver performance van WinNT/IIS4 en Redhat 6.0/Apache/Sambo vergelijken. Uit de tests blijkt dat de WinNT doos sneller is:

In the open benchmark using Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation's WebBench 2.0, which Mindcraft used as well, the IIS 4.0 Web server pumped out an impressive 4,166 requests per second, compared with 1,842 requests per second on Red Hat's best run (see top benchmark chart).

In comparison with Mindcraft's initial report, IIS 4.0's performance was 226 percent better than Apache, as opposed to the 400 percent difference Mindcraft found. And where Linux's performance collapsed after the client load exceeded 16 computers in Mindcraft's original Apache benchmark, Linux fared better under heavier loads in our tests. The discrepancy in results may stem from the differences between the Mindcraft and PC Week Labs testbeds.

We also tested both operating systems on a single-processor box with 256MB of RAM to evaluate performance on lower-end hardware. NT still had a performance edge over Linux (1,863 requests per second compared with 1,314 requests per second in WebBench, for example). This amounted to a 41 percent performance difference but showed that, even on cheaper systems, NT came out ahead.

Het verhaaltje gaat verder met de fileserver benchmarks, lees ze hier.

Twee reviews voor de race fanaten: allereerst Sports Car GT, bij Gamelinks.net:

The AI in this game does live up to their contentions, perhaps even, a little too well. They maneuver very well, and are not too easy to beat. However, make one bad turn and you will lose. The AI seems to be quite capable of running itself into a wall and still managing to catch up to you, while if you spin-out or run into anything I can virtually guarantee you that you will not place at the finish line. So, yes the AI is good, but so good that it's not a simulator anymore. In a simulator, nobody should be able to make mistakes, not even the computer. [break]
En CGO heeft een review van NFS4: High Stakes online gezet:[/break] The biggest real change to the game is the new Career Mode. Players start off with $25,000 with which to buy a new car, and have to compete in tournaments to earn more money. Winnings from each tournament allow you to buy new cars, purchase three levels of car upgrades, and repair damage between races. Did somebody say "damage?" Yes, despite having an expanded roster of real-life car licenses, High Stakes lets you bang them up, break headlights, shatter windshields, and more.

Ik lees bij Betanews dat Asus een nieuw BIOS heeft gereleased voor z'n V3800 TNT2 kaarten. Hier heb je de download locaties:

V3800 TVR & TVR Deluxe BIOS 2.05.013
V3800 Ultra Deluxe BIOS 2.05.013

Ik lees bij BBC News dat de University of Teesside (in de UK) twee opleidingen (creative design & computer programming) heeft opgezet voor game developers:

The University of Teesside is introducing a degree course in designing computer games, which will mean four years of playing and building games and writing essays on such subjects as the history of computer games.

For serious addicts of screen games, there is a course unit dedicated to the appreciation of games, which will involve comparing the relative merits of the latest releases and classics such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario.

BDW: volgend jaar begint aan de HKU de opleiding "Design for Virtual Theatre and Games" (vraag me niet hoe ze die duffe naam hebben weten te bedenken). Meer info over die opleiding vind je op deze ultra-lelijke pagina.

JC heeft een paar Bryce3D benchmarks te pakken weten te krijgen. Check this (met een korreltje zout):

More leakage from one of the folks I know with one of those nice Athlonic K7 sample systems. It seems a full production release model, I would guess. This particular person reported to me that his PIII-550 completed the Bryce 3D benchmark in 123 seconds, whereas his K7 system completed the task in about 86 seconds. That's about 69.9% of the time, or about 43% faster. If somebody could mail me their scores with a PIII-550 so I can verify, I'd be delighted. As it stands, this would seem to make the 550MHz K7 more similar to a PIII running at about 800MHz, if the benchmark is linear with clock speed, and if the PIII number given isn't accidentally inflated by some unknown or unseen bottleneck. Mind you, the less linear Bryce is with MHz, the more that the K7 may have an advantage, since such benchmarks have less effect with MHz increase -- if this is the case, the PIII would have to be even higher clocked to compete. Anyway, somebody get me their PIII-550 results so I can more properly look this over. By the way, I'm trying to get my hands on some rc5 numbers for the K7 -- I'm sure nobody's really interested, but I thought you might like to know.

AARGHH, JC bevestigd wat Tom al eerder zei: Intel gaat de SMP mogelijkheden volledig uit de Celeron rippen :

Take it as you will: A friend from Taiwan has a friend who knows somebody at Intel.... Anyway, this is probably worth listening to. For any of you that are planning to get ultracheap SMP via dual Celerons, you might want to buy those parts ASAP: "Intel said that they have already started to disable the AN15 pin that allows Dual Celerons to be used (when it is supplied with 1.5v). The story is that Intel sort of hinted that the Abit BP-6 motherboard with Dual Socket 370's was too much for them to handle so they decided to cut them off at the balls". Ouch!

Dus snel die BP6 + 2x Cellery halen!

Glenn / FPS3D mailde me dat-ie een review gepost heef van de 3DCool Tripple Fan HDD cooler. Dit gevalletje ziet er ongeveer zo uit:

Het ding blijkt erg handig te zijn om een hete 7200rpm drive koud te houden:

At first I thought I'd do my usual routine of using a temperature sensor to find the exact temperature of the hard drive, before and after applying cooling. However, after a few test runs, I discovered that the drive was as cool as it was with the power off as it was with the cooling. You see, this cooling set works so effectively that it's as if the machine wasn't on at all, and the hard drive wasn't spinning. Now if only a fan could get a Celeron this cool...

Check de review voor info & pics.

AGN Hardware heeft een review van de Saitek Cyborg Stick 2000 online gezet. Best wel een indrukwekkende pretstok:

Het prettige aan deze pook is dat-ie super adjustable is, alles kun je naar je eigen wensen aanpassen:

We told you that stick was adjustable, but you not going to believe the level of control that Saitek has given you over the orientation of the stick. The POV hat-switch height and angle can be adjusted to the length of your thumb, and the three button platform mentioned earlier can pivot to either side to help accommodate the orientation for either right or left handed people. The palm rest is also adjustable, and easily converts the stick for use with either hand but it can also be adjusted up or down along the length of the stick to accommodate for different hand sizes. Even the throttle can be switched to the left or the right side in a matter of seconds. Saitek even includes the Allen wrench adjustment tool, which resides at the front of the stick's base.

Intel introduceert een nieuwe i810 plank waar je als "performance tweaker" het liefst zover mogelijk van verwijdert blijft :

Intel today announced the Intel CA810 motherboard, a value-priced solution for systems integrators and PC manufacturers that supports the Intel Celeron processor, 3D graphics and on-board audio.

The CA810 motherboard incorporates the recently announced Intel 810 chipset, a chipset technology that integrates Intel 3D graphics with Direct AGP to offer 2D and 3D functionality on-board. The CA810 also features an on-board SoundBlaster PCI audio subsystem as a value-added audio solution. In addition, the CA810 supports Intel's Suspend To RAM technology, which enables PCs to enter a power-saving "sleep state" during idle periods, then quickly "wake up" on command without the time-consuming shutdown/restart/reboot process. An optional Intel 82559 LAN controller is also available that provides managed network connectivity for small businesses. Remote hardware management with the LANDesk Client Manager is also available.

The CA810 supports Intel's line of Celeron processors at speeds from 300 to 466 MHz. Intel has begun shipping the CA810 to computer manufacturers and expects systems sporting the new board to be available soon.

KAC Hardware, een Deense site, heeft een preview van de nVidia NV10 bij elkaar geschreven. De NV10 heeft een ingebouwde geometry acceleratie, waarmee de foto-realistische graphics binnen bereik zouden komen, volgens KAC Hardware:

The 3D graphics pipeline used to be handled by the CPU alone and that created, as the processor also has to control all hardware devices, operating system and application, poor and slow graphics. When the first 3D accelerators hit the market the video card accelerated the rendering stage in hardware and the CPU handled geometry stage. This way of acceleration has through the last five years been the best option for showing graphics. However games and applications have become more and more detailed and run in higher resolutions so the processor has become a bottleneck in the system hence that the geometry stage is very processor depending.

To relieve the pressure on the processor several accelerators for the professional market have support for hardware acceleration in both the geometry and rendering stage. Because the processor has been locked-down to only run hardware devices, operating system and applications the extra power available can be used to helping the video card creating smoother and more detailed graphics. The result; photo-realistic graphics generated on modest processors thanks to an unbelievable fast and technical sophisticated video accelerator.

Zoiets als dit dus:

Matrox heeft een gepost met Philip Scott van Rage Software, de ontwikkelaars van Expendable (een van de eerste spellen met ondersteuning voor evironment-mapped bump mapping).

Q: Where exactly in the game did you use true Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping to create special effects?

A: "We used it all the way through the game - from the first screen to the last, and virtually everywhere in between. We already had lots of special effects anyway, and it basically just added more to the whole thing. There will usually be an EMBM special effect somewhere on a screen anywhere in the game!"

Q: What where these special effects and how did the Millennium G400 make them look?

A: "We used the EMBM for metal surfaces, which looks really nice. We also added extra detail to some of the levels, where we thought detail was a little lacking. I changed the way some of the special effects for the shields and energy fields work, to give them a weird liquid look.

But, the crowning glory was definitely our water. This was more of an accident than a well-planned, executed effect. We had really nice water in the game anyway, but I was playing around with some stuff, and I changed the wrong thing, and 'ping' the water had a bump map on it, but it wasn't the water's bump map. I saw that there was potential, so I kept at it and found a way of generating the water's bump map so that it looked good. I then applied it, animated it, alpha-blended it, did some spotlight tricks to make it shimmer and then put a sine wave into the scaling matrix for the height of the EMBM, and voila! The EMBM water effects still impress me now."

Lees 'm helemaal op de Matrox site.