Er zijn nieuwe drivers en bios verkrijgbaar voor de Leadtek Winfast S320 II kaart

Tjek hier.

Schijnt erg populair te zijn, als Internet spel: Starsiege Tribes. Ik heb het spel zelf ook even gespeeld, maar behalve dat het er 'leuk' uitziet kan ik niet overlopen van enthousiasme. Maar goed, voor diegenen die het wel leuk vinden:

Tribes Extreme announced Ever wished you could play Starsiege: TRIBES in single player? Well you soon can. Dynamix has just announced "TRIBES Extreme - Sequel to Starsiege TRIBES." Tribes Extreme includes a full single player campaign as well as bots to play against. Here's a snip from the press release:

en dat vind je verder hier.

Volgens deze posting domineert de VooDoo3 2000 PCI de Retail videokaart markt. Laat nVidia nu precies hetzelfde beweren...

3dfx made an announcement today harping on their domination of the video card market in May. Here are some snips from the press release: SAN JOSE, Calif., June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (Nasdaq: TDFX - news) today announced its Voodoo3(TM) family of graphics accelerator boards continue to rank as the hottest selling video cards in retail stores throughout North America. 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 once again captured the top two spots in research firm PC Data's tally of best-selling video cards for the month of May. Since they first reached retail shelves in April, the 3dfx boards have dramatically outsold competitors. The report follows 3dfx Interactive's announcement last month in which PC Data named the Voodoo3 family as April's best-selling product line. According to PC Data, which measured retail sales of the video card market for the month of May, the Voodoo3 2000 PCI was the No. 1 selling board in terms of both unit shipments and revenues, while the Voodoo3 3000 AGP was ranked second. Overall 3dfx unit shipments accounted for 37.6 percent of all video cards sold at retail, while sales generated by 3dfx products were more than double those of its closest competitor

JC heeft een link naar een Poll bij Maximum PC geplaatst, omdat daar volgens hem (nog) weinig mensen echt geinteresseerd leken in de K7-Athlon. Inmiddels lijkt dat al een beetje anders geworden te zijn, maar nog niet ver genoeg.

Klik hier om ook aan deze poll mee te doen (de hoeveelste al van vandaag?).

David Laprad van The Adrenaline Vault heeft de link naar de Win98 SP1 gepost.

Microsoft has posted the downloadable updates that compose the Windows 98 Service Pack 1. These updates correct several issues associated with generating dates on your computer on or after January 1, 2000. They include the display of leap year calculations in some circumstances, entering expiration dates in Microsoft Wallet, handling of some date and time settings, and incorrect logging of on-line calling. For users who don't already have a Year 2000 compliant version of the Microsoft virtual machine, it will also be included, adding 4.3 megabytes to the download. Numerous other patches and updates are available as well.

Klik hier.

Ja hoor, de South Park hype wordt tot het volle spectrum (wow, wat klinkt dat mooi) uitgebuit. Na de windows-vernaggelaar en het (domme)spel met de kalkoenen, heeft Acclaim nu ook een Cart spelletje aangekondigt: Southpar Rally.

Acclaim Entertainment has officially announced its upcoming cart-style racing adventure, South Park Rally, developed by Tantalus Interactive and based on the popular comedy series on cable. In the game, people race through multiple courses and have a choice of over 15 characters to choose from, each with a vehicle to match their individual personalities. Cartman screeches through town in a 4x4 SUV, Chef joyrides in his old wood-paneled station wagon, Grandpa careens the hills in his jet-propelled wheelchair, Officer Barbrady cruises for action in the police cruiser, and Stan borrows his father's mid-life crisis hot-rod. The characters will also have gadgets with which to thwart the competition, including the Mexican Staring Frog, rats, chocolate salty balls and more. The show’s creators are recording original one-liners specifically for the game. All versions will include multiplayer modes that feature competitive races and cooperative game modes. The PC version will support multiplayer gameplay for at least eight players via a LAN and the Internet. The console versions will support two to four-player multiplay.

De Voxel 3D engine van NovaLogic (Commanche) wordt ook gebruikt voor Delta Force 2. In het Interview met Wes Eckhart wordt dan ook uitgebreid gesproken over deze alternatieve manier van 3D renderen, t.o.v. Polygonen-gebaseerde 3D engines, zoals Quake en vriendjes.

Je vind het gehele interview hier.

AVault: Is 3D acceleration a possibility at any level with a voxel engine or is it entirely beyond the realms of possibility with current graphics hardware? Eckhart: It's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, but it's not easy, and the benefits 3D acceleration can yield in a Voxel Space game are limited. Current acceleration technology is all about pumping tons of polygons, so it would only affect the polygon-based objects in a Voxel Space game, not the terrain. For example, the buildings and vehicles in Delta Force 2 would be better due to the perspective correction and bilinear filtering a 3D card can provide, and you'd get slightly better frame rates on slower machines while you were very near or inside a building, but the terrain itself would be the same. Also, because it requires a lot of memory to render voxel terrain and because the new engine uses 32-bit color, 3D support could be limited to certain 32-bit accelerators that offer good use of the AGP bus, such as the RIVA TNT2. Having said all that, the teams developing our games are all interested in incorporating 3D acceleration.

Het schijnt geen nieuw programma te zijn, maar daarom niet minder interessant.

Have more than one OpenGL accelerator in your machine, and need a program that can switch between your OpenGL units? Grab OpenGL Switcher, only 54Kb, this little jobbie does a pretty damn fine job.

Downloaden kan hier.

Firingsquad heeft een review gepost van de Creative Labs (of Cambridge Soundworks, whatever je het wilt noemen) Four Point Surround 2000 speakers. Dit zijn zogenaamde digitale speakers (met de D/A convertor in de speaker zelf):

The first thing I noticed when I made this connection was the immediate absence of any background noise or hiss, even with the volume set to max. To check that the volume control for both analog and digital audio produced similar volume levels, I played an mp3, or should I say, I felt an mp3. I had forgotten to turn the volume control back to a more conservative level. Needless to say, the volumes for both sources was very comparable, this made side my side tests of digital versus analog audio very simple, more on this later.

Many of you noticed that your audio CDs sounded better when you attached the digital audio cable from your CD-ROM to the SB Live!. This is a similar technique that is used in the FPS 2000. Great sound quality doesn't only depend on the method of data transport, however, since the audio must at the end be converted to analog, the digital to analog converter is also of utmost importance. Much of the sound improvement that was seen with your audio CDs was due to the higher quality digital to analog converters in the SB Live!, versus your CD-ROM.

Een interview met Drew Prairie van AMD is gepost door SystemLogic. Er staat veel al bekende dingen in.

Dit was wel interessant om eindelijk bevestigd te zien:

SL/CTNews: Since the K7 uses the EV6 bus, will the Alpha 21264 and K7 actually be interchangeable? (Personally, I doubt it, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Those dual 21264 motherboards are pretty sweet.) AMD: Actually, the two processors are interchangeable. Don’t know why you’d want to do this though since the Alpha motherboards are very expensive and not designed for typical desktop implementations. Our engineers worked long and hard to take the high-end EV6 bus and bring it into a high-volume, standard desktop form factor motherboard implementation. No small feat to take a technology originally designed (and currently implemented) at the high-end of the technology scale and bring it down into a desktop PC targeted at the enthusiast user.

De rest vind je hier.

CRUS heeft een review in elkaar gedraaid van de Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage4:

The main difference between the Savage3D and the Savage4 is that the latter supports single cycle multitexturing because of its double texturing units and the fact that the Savage4 is clocked higher (125Mhz-143Mhz). Another thing that separates S3’s Savage series from the competition is the use of S3TC, S3 Texture Compression, the name pretty much tells you what its about –compressing textures, thus decreasing the amount of RAM needed to store textures and also the memory bandwidth required when loading the textures. And since the textures require less space you can use textures of greater resolution and that means better image quality, not to shabby, right?

Verder erg weinig info over de kaart. Overklokken komt ook nauwelijks aan bod.

Overclockers' Workbench heeft nog wat info gepost over de nieuwe busspeed settings van de Abit BH6 Rev 1.1 met KK BIOS:

Yesterday I just mentioned that I already have this mainboard, now here is what I discovered :

Components used are from big time players like MOLEX and FOXCONN

32 FSB settings in order registered in BIOS : N - normal, S - spread spectrum

- 66 (1/2) N, 100 (1/3) N, 75 (1/2)S, 83 (1/2)S, 112 (1/3)S, 133 (1/4)N,

- 78 (1/2)N, 81 (1/2)N, 113(1/3)N, 117 (1/3)N, 118 (1/3)N, 122 (1/3)N, <>- 122 (1/3)N, 126 (1/4)N, 135 (1/4)N, 137 (1/4)N, 138 (1/4)N, 142 (1/4)N,

- 144 (1/4)N, 155 (1/4)N

- 66 (1/3)S, 90 (1/3)S, 95 (1/3)S, 100 (1/3)S, 105 (1/3)S, 110 (1/3)S, 115 (1/3)S,

- 120 (1/3)S, 124 (1/3)S, 124 (1/4)S, 133 (1/4)S, 140 (1/4)S, 150 (1/4)S

Anand heeft een dikke Super7 videokaarten comparison bij elkaar geschreven. De kaarten die werden meegenomen in de test zijn een Ultra TNT2, G400 Max, Voodoo3-3000 en Savage4 Pro:

With the conclusion of round one of the comparison, NVIDIA has taken the overall lead due to 3dfx's poor performing OpenGL ICD. Among the important points illustrated by the benchmarks, one of the most important is that the clock speed of your graphics processor increases in importance as the resolution of your games increase. At 640 x 480 the TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, and overclocked TNT2 Ultra performed virtually identical to one another, however at 1024 x 768 the differences grow to 12% and 5% respectively. If you're debating as to whether or not a Voodoo3 3000 is worth the added cost over a 2000, or whether the TNT2 Ultra is all that much faster than a regular TNT2 for your Super7 system, ask yourself this question, what resolutions do I plan on running at?

Handige info over K6-2 en K6-III gebruikers. Check 't bij AnandTech.

Anand heeft een link gepost naar ZDNET, die op hun beurt weer een sneak preview van Merced hebben. ZDNET's Sneek Peek vind je hier.

At an invitation-only event held recently for software developers, Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) showed a prototype of a four-way Merced server with 64GB of memory. Sources say Intel showed a diagram of the machine at its Fall Intel Developers Forum and also has run software simulations of four-way Merced servers. Intel would not comment, other than to say that Merced's design is ongoing.

Extreme Hardware heeft een review gepost van de dual BIOS Gigabyte BX2000 mammaplank. Naast de unieke dual BIOS feature doet-ie ook aan STR: Suspend-to-RAM:

The BX2000 also includes STR, or Suspend-to-RAM, a function that you’ll find very familiar if you own a laptop. Essentially, it’s an enhanced version of Sleep Mode, with low power consumption (3 watts) and a very fast (7 seconds) recovery time. Again, this is a function that would be more important to a cost-conscious SOHO owner than a gamer, though it might come in handy in the dual-purpose PC. Personally, I turn off power saving in my PCs, as it usually find it more harm than help. I still remember an extended game of X-wing vs. TIE where my HD went into sleep mode and the game crashed when it tried to write the savegame immediately after. Thankfully, STR can be controlled through a jumper setting, or activated through software.

Voor overklokken blijkt het bord totaal ongeschikt te zijn. Meer daar over lees je in de review.

The Tech Zone heeft een artikeltje gepost waarin ze beschrijven hoe je inmiddels befaamde Alpha cooler kunt ombouwen voor gebruik met een Pentium III (daar past-ie normaal gesproken niet op):

Converting an Alpha P125 to work with a Pentium III takes allot more work than converting a Global Win VEK 12, but the end results may be worth it. After the installation of the P125 to the PIII-500, I was able to overclock the CPU to 620Mhz with the L2 latency set to 1 and 645Mhz with the L2 off. 100% stable! The Global Win VEK 12 can take the same PIII-500 to 620Mhz. However it wasn't 100% stable. There were the occasional crashes and lockups once in awhile. The P125 was also able to take the PIII-450 to 600Mhz. The best the VEK 12 did was 580Mhz.

If you want to take your Pentium III to speed it has never dream off before, installing an Alpha P125 is a good way to get there. So, exactly how did I get a P125 to work with my Pentium III-500? Let's find out.

...en dat kun je dus uitvinden in dit artikel.

De gasten van Speedy 3D hebben een e-mail ontvangen betreffende de verwachte specs van de Voodoo4. Dit als reactie op dit artikel dat ze eerder hadden geschreven over wat ze hoopte wat de Voodoo4 specs zullen zijn.

Dit was de e-mail:

"I have several friends at 3dfx working on it, and it's not called Napalm, not V4

It'll be 64 megs, and the texture size only goes up to 1024x, not 2048. Not sure why they didn't make it higher, to be honest.

Pretty much everything else in your article is right on the money. BTW, it will be blazingly fast. I asked and there is no decision on SLI. If they do SLI, though, it will probably not be done with an external pass-thru cable. Now that they manufacture them directly and have more control of these hardware issues, they will avoid the external cable as it degrades signal quality.

Personally, one of the programmers and I doubt a "V4" SLI will come out. The reason being is that AGP will be a factor in this board, not the just available so you can save a PCI slot as in the current architecture. This card will be CPU-limited, doubtful that it will be fillrate limited. Whether it does a high res or a low res, it will probably not matter."

Dit is dus niet officieel!!

VIA praat met National Semiconductor over de overname van Cyrix, meldt Electronic Buyers' News.

The talks have not been completed, and a spokesman for Santa Clara, Calif.-based National said it is considering Via as but one of an unnamed number of prospects at this point. But officials at Via's headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, said they anticipate an announcement shortly; observers expect it by Wednesday.

[...]

According to Taiwan-based sources, Via intends to purchase the Cyrix operation and then pay National either royalties or cash for the use of the X86 processor cross-license National separately negotiated with Intel Corp. One Taiwanese source said he anticipates co-branded National/Via chipsets to be produced in National's fabs beginning as early as July.

The deal, if finalized, could be seen as a defensive move by Via in its ongoing patent fight with Intel. The Santa Clara, Calif., processor market leader filed a lawsuit in a San Jose federal court last week, charging Via with breach of contract, unfair competition, and false advertising.

Ik zag bij The Register een nieuwsartikeltje over 1000Base-T Ethernet. Dat moet lekker snel zijn

The IEEE has finally dotted the Ts and crossed the Is on its IEEE 802.3ab standard, known less formally as Gigabit Ethernet over copper cabling or 1000Base-T.

The spec. was to have been ratified earlier this year, but a dearth of physical layer chips prevented manufacturers from shipping product. That in turn persuaded the IEEE to hang fire on final ratification until the supply situation was rectified.

The new standard describes how Gigabit Ethernet communications can take place over four pairs of CAT-5 copper cabling of up to 100m in length. Gigabit Ethernet has already been defined for fibre-optic cabling, but the new spec. allows the technology to be implemented over users' existing cable infrastructures, which is likely to speed its adoption. ®

De deal tussen S3 en Diamond begint gevolgen te krijgen: Creative zal z'n 3DBlaster Savage4 (nog helemaal niet zo lang op de markt) in de herfst uit produktie nemen Hier heb je de details, uit een artikel van MaximumPC:

Creative Labs will end its short relationship with S3 when it lets its Savage4-based video cards fade into history this fall, officials confirmed Monday.

The Savage4-based 3D Blaster, which has been on store shelves about three months, will not be picked up for Creative's Fall line up. The card would have lasted about six months normally, but Creative will accelerate the phase-out period as well. That doesn't mean the company will stop releasing driver updates to who have purchased the card already.

[...] Carlton said whether Savage4 competes with TNT2 isn't a factor. It's a business decision not to feed Creative's competitors.

"We're not necessarily inclined to give S3 and a competitor a revenue stream," Carlton said.

Although Creative has decided to dump its S3 line, Number Nine says it will continue to sell its SR9 card, which uses the Savage4 chipset.

Een kleine preview van Quake III Arena is hier te vinden. Hier heb je vast een stukkie over de multiplay in de game:

Multiplayer is the central focus of Quake III Arena, and mechanically it will be very similar to the single player game in many respects, with live players replacing the AI-controlled bots. Deathmatch play with this title is more heavily oriented towards fast action than it was in earlier versions of Quake; in addition to featuring faster character movement, ladders have been all but removed from the game in favor of jump pads that will hurl the player in a given direction. Weapons have received some work as well—a number of perennial favorites such as the super shotgun and the rail gun will be making return appearances, but Quake 2's hyperblaster has been nixed in favor of more useful weapons such as the plasma rifle and a flame-thrower. If the recently released deathmatch test is any gauge, Quake III Arena's weapons look to have the same visceral appeal that has helped to make past id titles popular.

Hier staat de rest.

ZDNET heeft een handige "superguide" in elkaar geflanst voor de Windows 98SE gebruikers onder ons. Hier heb je een plak uit de intro:

Microsoft is always adding things to Windows and occasionally they bundle up all their changes into a new full CD version. They did this for Windows 95 but only made the complete set of changes available on new computers. For Windows 98 they've decided to make updating easier with the release of Windows 98 Second Edition (Win98 SE to its friends).

There's some interesting new features in the Second Edition, but don't be mislead by the Microsoft marketing machine. Some of the lauded features of the new release are already in Windows 98, you may be tempted to buy SE for something you already have!

Our Help Channel Superguide will work out what's really new in Win98 SE and what's already available in other ways so you can decide if its worth upgrading from the original Windows 98. We'll tell you the best and cheapest ways to get SE.

Samsung zal nog dit jaar beginnen met de levering van de eerste 1-Gigabit 350Mhz DDR SDRAM samples. Hier heb je de info uit een nieuwsbericht van EBNews:

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. today announced it has developed a 1-gigabit Double Data Rate synchronous DRAM, which operates at 350 MHz.

The 1-Gbit DDR SDRAM was developed with 0.13-micron design rules, said Samsung, which claimed to be the first chip maker to create such a device. Samsung officials said that the 1-Gbit memory is 30-40% smaller than similar chips developed by competitors. The memory operates at 1.8 volts.

Ik kwam bij Ace's Hardware nog wat nieuws tegen over de socket versie van de Athlon. Het lijkt erop dat-ie gaat komen:

According to this EE Times Taiwan report, AMD's answer the above question is "Yes, K7 will go socket when the time is ripe in the future," This comes as a no surprise at all, since Intel has decided to move PIII over to Socket-418 to cut cost and put price pressure on K7. Anyway, there is more to this report: VIA is reportedly almost done with its K7 chipset, VIA KX, and is only waiting for AMD's signal to announce it publicly, possibly in September.

Also, according to this interesting report in PC Week Taiwan, AMD had already decided on launching a new Socket format (400+ pins) next year long before the Slot-A K7 was announced. However, Intel was afraid that AMD may establish a new Socket standard in the industries with that, and so it went ahead and announced its Socket-418.

Ik kwam via Slashdot bij ORF ON Futurezone, een duitse site waar ze een artikel hebben over nieuwe 1-Gigabit memory chips van Samsung: 128Meg op 1 chip!

Samsung schliesst Entwicklung von Ein-Gigabit-Chip ab | 0,13 Mikron-Technologie | reif für Serienproduktion | weltweiter SDRAM-Umsatz heuer 18,5 Milliarden Dollar

[...] Bei der Herstellung des 1 Gigabit RAM-Bausteins soll ein 0,13-Micron Verfahren angewandt werden. Diese nochmalige Miniaturisierung erlaubt es, die Chips noch kleiner, dafür aber leistungsfähiger zu bauen. Acht Gigabit-Bausteine ergeben ein Speichervolumen von 1 Gigabyte, auf herkömmlichen 168-pin SDRAMs sind 16 Bausteine angebracht. Auf SDRAM-Technologie umgelegt, ergibt das ein RAM-Modul von 2 Gigabyte Grösse.

Die Technologie soll demnächst auch bei 128- und 256 Megabit DRAMs eingesetzt werden, um die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu steigern: Siliziumwafer sind sehr teuer - je kleiner der Chip, umso mehr lassen sich aus einer einzigen Siliziumscheibe fertigen.

THG Technews bericht over geruchten dat Apple de introductie van z'n goedkope low-end notebook gaat scrappen:

One of Apple Computer's key new products -- the low cost consumer PowerBook, or P1 – could be shelved because of serious design problems. Sources say top Apple executives met last week to vote on the fate of the notebook PC: whether it should be delayed, or scrapped altogether. The P1 is widely expected to be to the laptop what the iMac was to the desktop -- cute and friendly on the outside and powerful on the inside. It is expected to sport a colored plastic case similar to the iMac and have a 300MHz or 333Mhz G3 processor inside. But sources say engineers recently discovered a problem with the P1’s ASICs that will prevent it from being introduced at the upcoming summer MacWorld Expo in New York. The full story is posted at www.zdnn.com.

JC heeft twee Athlon systemen gespot bij Cold Fusion en ShopHereUSA.com. Dat die systemen daar in de prijslijst staan wil echter nog niet zeggen dat ze ook daadwerkelijkleverbaar zijn. De prijsinfo is wel interessant: $399 voor de Athlon-500, $529 voor de Athlon-550 en $749 voor de Athlon-600. Dit zijn dus retail prijzen. Met behulp van Pricewatch.com, de Tweakers.net pricewatch en m'n zakjapanner kom ik op een schatting van FL 1075,- voor het 500Mhz model.

De inmiddels bijna een jaar oude BH6 blijkt een behoorlijk succes te zijn voor de Abit. 1 Miljoen exemplaren hebben ze er tot op heden van verkocht!

As of May, has sold over 1 million BH6 mainboards. "This represents our best selling mainboard so far", says General Manager R.T. Wang, "it really shows you why we got so many awards and recognitions from end users, magazines, and websites all over the world". Currently ABIT manufactures about 250,000 motherboards per month, "the BH6 is a large percentage of this number" says Roland Liu, ABIT's V.P. of Sales. With newer added capacity ABIT will soon be able to handle even larger orders especially from OEM customers which is an area that ABIT is looking to expand into. "This year ABIT has an even greater number of OEM models available", says Mr. Liu, "we will be very aggressive in this regard".

Allan van AGN 3D heeft een review gepleegd van Sports Car GT. Hier heb je een stukkie ctrl-v over de playability:

The actual driving in the game is no easy task Like I said, I became frustrated using a joystick or the keypad. With a force feedback driving wheel every bump and twist in the road can be felt. The first corner on the first track is really fun because you come flying down a hill and hit an S turn. I remember the first time I did it I thought I'd just hit the brakes and zip through. Wrong. I got to the turn applied the brakes, slid right through the corner and smashed into the wall. So much for my driving skills. A tough driving model is OK as long as you can get a feel for it quickly. The more I went around the initial track the more I got the cornering down; it's a learning process but a very rewarding one.

Hercules heeft nieuwe drivers gereleased voor z'n TNT en TNT2 kaarten. De drivers zijn gebaseerd op de v1.91 nVidia reference drivers:

1. Added a crash recovery feature for Hercumeter. Detects if Windows is not shut down properly and prompts to reprogram custom engine or memory clock. This feature provides a safe recovery in case Windows locks up due to overclocking the Dynamite TNT/TNT2/TNT2 Ultra. If the system is not shut down properly, a dialog box will appear at startup, prompting to reset the clock to default values or to retain custom clock settings. Click Cancel to reset the engine and memory clock to the default values, or click OK to reprogram to custom clock settings. The default settings will automatically be retained in a few seconds if neither button is clicked. Note that if the Dynamite is not overclocked and the system crashes for some other reason, the dialog box will not appear on startup.

2. Quake 2 lockups on some ALi Aladdin V motherboards fixed. Aladdin V users must install version 1.60 of the ALi AGP driver, available at http://www.acerlabs.com/ or from your motherboard manufacturer. Note for Microstar MS-5169 users: for stable operation, disable Primary Frame Buffer under Advanced Chipset Setup in the CMOS setup program, and set AGPDataRate and FrameBufferDisable to 1 in the registry, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ALi\ALi AGP Driver\.

3. Color depth changes are now preserved if Restart Windows option is selected in Display Properties.

Windows 95/98 Drivers and Utilities, Version 1.70.10191 (1,81Mb)
Windows NT 4.0 Drivers and Utilities, Version 0.56.0048 (1,64Mb)

PenStar Systems heeft een editorial gepost over de huidige strategie van Intel, die vooral gericht is op uitbreiding naar zoveel mogelijk marktsegmenten:

This article shows many of the weaknesses that Intel has made within itself and how the current doctrine of expansion into areas such as graphics and trying to provide an entire platform have caused Intel to lose its ability to effectively produce the fastest x86 processors on Earth. [break]Er zit best wel interessante info tussen, zoals dit stukje over de i740, Intel's eerste poging om voet aan wal te krijgen in de graphics business:[/break] The i740 was a wakeup call for the low end marketers, but it also had a very negative effect in the industry. Here was a very advanced chipset that had good performance and great features, and it was sold under cost. This hurt companies such as S3, Trident, and SiS immensely. Graphics companies are now starting to work with competitors of Intel, and Intel will start to feel the backlash from trying to get into the video market soon. Companies such as 3dfx and nVidia are busily working hand in hand with AMD to put out products that will work well with K6 and K7 series of products. The Voodoo 3 and the TnT 2 chipsets with the latest drivers work as fast on the current AMD processors and platforms as on Intel ones. These latest drivers are heavily 3dNow! optimized, and only slightly SSE optimized. Companies such as 3dfx and nVidia will work with Intel products as long as they are dominant in the market (it would be suicide to ignore Intel!), however their interests are now lying more out of the realm of Intel. Within a year, we may well be seeing the latest products from these companies run better and faster on non-Intel platforms. Will this hurt Intel? Yes it will. This ties in nicely with what Intel is currently doing with its future motherboard chipsets.

PC Paradox heeft een artikeltje in elkaar geknutseld over de history of graphics op de pc en consoles. In dit deel 'herdenken' ze het jaar 1997. Best wel grappig om de goeie ouwe Voodoo1 weer eens langs te zien wandelen :

PowerVR and Voodoo along with the Riva128 were the leaders in performance. The Riva128 was heralded the first proper support of DirectX and NVIDIA even claimed DirectX would eventually replace native API's like GLIDE (for 3Dfx cards) and PowerVRSGL (for Videologic PowerVR cards). However there were certain things that held back the Riva128 card and PowerVR cards. The Riva128 was not as powerful as the other cards and suffered from poor image quality and the PowerVR's native API was lacking in some areas as was the technology of the PCX1 (the chip that ran the PowerVR cards). PowerVR lacked bilinear filtering and as a result made the graphics look like the had a hard edge with no smoothing, or blurring with adjacent texels (a texel is a pixel mapped onto a polygon). Also the PowerVR really required a fast CPU to be truly exploited, which on the flip side meant that the PowerVR card got faster (to a limit) with a faster CPU. Also the native API did not include all the features GLIDE was offering and image quality in certain games was poor to say the least (the original Turok springs to mind).

News.com heeft een interessant nieuwsbericht over goedkope systemen van o.a. Microworkz en iDot, die geleverd zullen worden met BeOS en daarmee de 'Microsoft Tax' ontwijken:

Last week, Microworkz and later iDot announced cheap machines running BeOS from Be Incorporated. America Online is discussing cross-marketing opportunities with Microworkz's iToaster, the company's Be box.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the price spectrum, AST Research announced Be-based multimedia machines with 550-MHz Penium IIIs for $1,999.

The strategy mirrors that of some makers of inexpensive computers based on the Linux operating system, which can be obtained at no charge. The Linux Store chief technical officer John Wise has said the $85 cost for a license of Windows is second only to the cost of the hard disk when his company builds its inexpensive Linux machines. In general, Windows is one of the rare elements of a PC that has not plummeted in price over the past two years.

In February, Be chief executive Jean-Louis Gassee issued a challenge to computer makers to install BeOS for free, but there were no takers, illustrating Microsoft's firm grip on the industry, said Frank Boosman, vice president of business development at Be.

"It's not an offer we continue to this day," Boosman said. Although the company has never signed a deal to give BeOS away for free, "pricing certainly is more aggressive than Windows," Boosman said.

One reason for using BeOS is crashproofness, he added, because technical support calls cost a lot of money. "At $199 [the cost of the iToaster], that's a big issue. If a CD player crashed, and you had to spend an hour on technical support, CD players would not cost what they do today," he said.

Gamespot UK heeft 12 systemen met een PIII of K6-III processor op de testbank gezet. Hier heb je een stukkie gelul over SSE vs 3DNow!:

Intel's Pentium III introduces a new set of 128bit registers, each of which can hold four 32bit floating point numbers. This means that any operation carried out on any of these registers performs the equivalent of four floating point operations in just a single instruction cycle. With the K6-2 and K6-III, however, AMD decided to use an existing set of registers, already shared between the conventional floating point unit and the MMX execution unit. This means that 3DNow! is constrained to the same 64bit register width as MMX, fitting two floating point numbers into each.

This would seem to give Intel an advantage, as the Pentium III can fit twice as many floating point numbers into each register as the K6-III can. However, the K6-III boasts two independent instruction pipelines, X and Y, that can both carry out 3DNow! operations at the same time, and both manufacturers claim a peak performance of 2.0 gigaflops per second when using a 500MHz clock speed.

De besprekingen van de afzonderlijke systemen lijken me niet zo interessant voor ons Nederlanders. De algemene K6-III vs PIII info is dat misschien wel. Check 't bij www.gamespot.co.uk.

Onze vrienden van Review Zone hebben een errug vette Ultra TNT2 videoplanken opronding op hun site geparkeerd. De vijf kaarten die werden getest heb je hier op een rijtje:

ASUS AGP-V3800 Ultra Deluxe
Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 Ultra
Diamond Viper V770 Ultra
Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32
Hercules Dynamite TNT2

De meeste TNT2 kaarten verschillen in feite niet veel van elkaar. De prestaties zijn vrijwel hetzelfde op gelijke kloksnelheden. Daarom is het interessant om te zien in hoeverre de kaarten overgeklokt kunnen worden. Niet geheel onverwacht blijkt de Hercules Dynamite TNT2 op dit gebied de kampioen te zijn:

Undoubtedly, the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra claims first place here, but for second place it looks like a tie between the Xentor 32 and the Viper V770. The other boards fared well too, but these three boards are actually quite stable at 183/200MHz. The other board worth a mention should be the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra, because it too was rock solid at 175/200MHz. Keep in mind, I’m evaluating on our units- the boards out there on the market may not perform identically. So actually stability may vary from sample to sample. This theory applies to all boards, but I did test two Hercules boards and they both made it up to 195/225MHz without problems.

Zoals we van Review Zone gewend zijn weer veel info en benchmarks. De moeite waard om te leze.

PC Rapide (een Franse site) heeft een preview gepost van de AMD Athlon. Naast info in onleesbaar frans hebben ze ook een paar leuke fotootjes van de Athlon:

Uber meister Tom heeft zijn review van de G400 Max gepost. Het is weer een typische Tom-review: weinig onzinnig gelul en véél benchmarks. Hier heb je wat soep uit de conclusie:

Jumping into the fray with great DirectX performance and innovative new features, the G400 MAX has shown its merits. The "not so hot" OpenGL performance is something that Matrox will need to change if they hope to completely dominate the competition. If Matrox is able to overcome this issue, we're confident that they'll have a technically complete product that will put them in a technically very advanced position. Let's hope that Matrox won't need as much time for fixing the OpenGL-ICD and bringing it up to speed as it required for the OpenGL-ICD of the G200. We all remember that it took forever.

G400MAX is a good performer in D3D, especially in 32-bit color mode it's clearly ahead of its competition and this has not only been achieved by the 16-bit Z-buffer 'trick', but also by its extremely fast 2x 128-bit deep memory interface. The dual-head option is a commendable feature, which will certainly be seen in other 3D-chip solutions as well. G400 supports 3DNow!, so even K6-X-owners can take advantage of it. Only the OpenGL-gaming performance is not quite what it should and probably could be yet, so here I'd expect Matrox to do a decent amount of work in very short time to make G400 and especially G400 MAX become worth its pretty massive price tag.

Wil je het allemaal liever zelf beoordelen, surf dan richting z'n review.