Op Battleground: TS zie ik dat Westwood een patch heeft uitgebracht voor Tiberian Sun. De 3.4MB patch kun je downloaden via de auto-update feature en fixt het volgende:

Tiberian Sun Patch
Ver. 1.13
September 29, 1999

The following is a list of bugs and additions included in this patch.

Design related issues. Only effective in multiplay and skirmish:

Nod Artillery: Rate of fire decreased
Damage decreased, approximately 20
Less effective against infantry

Nod SAM site: Power requirements are now double.

GDI Disc throwers: Disc throwers now explode when killed and damage any nearby units.

Concrete and Firestorm walls: These walls now build like laser fences. If you place one wall section and then place a second, a line is drawn indicating that a wall segment will be built between the two sections. You are only charged for the cost of the end pieces of the wall, not the connecting pieces. Also, walls can be sold but you will not receive money for sold sections. Note: If there is an obstacle such as a unit or structure that appears between the sections during placement, the two sections will not connect.

Bug fixes:

Structures cannot be built off of laser fence posts.
If you wall your MCV in and undeploy it, it no longer disappears.
Holding down 'X' (scatter) key or any other keyboard 'event' generating command causes disconnect in modem or dialup internet game.
Hunter Seeker code prioritizes targets that could affect end-game situations in multiplayer.
When harvester truce is enabled, hunter-seekers will no longer destroy harvesters.
Trainer programs can no longer cheat to unshroud the map.
Trainer programs cannot be used to disable Fog of War during a game where Fog of War has been enabled.
When the message 'Computer has been defeated' is printed when an AI loses, the message is printed in the color that matches the AI's units.
The crash caused when an engineer captures a construction yard while the building placement cursor is active is fixed.
Banshees can now fire on enemy units or force-fire on the ground within the area of effect of a stealth generator.
When ordering air units to travel to the top few spaces of a map where there is a lot of water, aircraft now land on the nearest spot of dry land rather than directly on the water.
The Firestorm defense no longer stays up indefinitely when power goes low.
The crash when destroying a vein hole monster has been fixed. This crash usually only happened after an extended period of gameplay once the vein hole monster has been killed.
The game can now run from any valid CD drive, not just the one with the first drive letter.
French and German sidebar text no longer overflows onto sidebar icons.
Ping meters are no longer partially covered by the scrollbars in the WOL lobby.
Find game dialog has been sped up.
Occasionally when joining a full game channel an incorrect error message was displayed in your message window. This no longer happens.

Was eigenlijk dus niet de bedoeling geweest van Westwood om dit te doen, maar ja, het was dus wel nodig...

Op dit moment is de 366MHz Celeron een errug populaire processor om te overklokken. Bij Thresh's FiringSquad hebben ze echter eens gekeken hoe het staat met de overklokbaarheid van de 400, 433 en 466MHz Celerons. Check de resultaten hier.

From our limited exposure to several Celeron chips, the average maximum speed that we're beginning to see for all of the new Celeron chips is somewhere between 550MHz and 600MHz. Okay, so which Celeron should I get? The results of our tests has us leaning towards the Celeron 366 or 400.

The relatively low 5.5 and 6 multipliers of the 366 and 400 let us use the 90-100MHz bus speeds. On the Abit BP6, the 1/3 PCI Bus divider doesn't kick in until you reach the 92MHz bus speed. The Celeron 433 and 466 force us to use FSB speeds in the mid eighties with a 1/2 PCI divider, and that PCI bus speed in the 40s won't be good for stability. We'll stick with the Celeron 366 or 400 and our hard disks will appreciate the mild PCI bus.

Bij de USB Workshop is een preview te vinden van de nieuwe USB uitvoering van de Iomega Zip 250. Hier een hap uit de preview:

The switch to Universal Serial Bus is good for couple of reasons -- increased in performance, Plug and Play and easier cable handling. USB cable is indeed much easier to carry than a parallel cable. Plug and play allows hassle-less installation and hot-swapping. Increased in performance reduces time to transfer files to the Zip drives. It is good to see there's something like USB has finally taken its rightful place in peripheral connection. SCSI interface is sometimes too difficult to install and users have to factor in the cost of SCSI cards; parallel interface is slow and lacks hot-swapping capability. And USB overcomes all these problems. Iomega Zip 250 USB reads and writes 250MB Zip media as well as the ubiquitous 100MB Zip disks. However, lack of support for traditional 1.44MB floppy is a major drawback for all of us. Zip 250 USB is a great add-on for those who own hundred of Zip 100 disks and want to move to something faster and larger. We say that 250MB cannot par with CD-R but given Zip 100 popularity (almost 20 million Zip disks shipped to date), Zip 250 USB would make an excellent investment for current Zip owners. For those who plan to backup their behemoth hard drives, Zip 250 USB is not a recommended solution as media cost sits high at 6 cents per megabyte. Imation LS-120 disk, 3 cents per megabyte, is only half the media cost of Zip 250 cartridge.

Gamecenter verblijdt ons met een review van Micorosoft's balloze muis, de IntelliMouse Explorer. Hieronder vast een stukkie over de perormance van dit beestje:

The Explorer is very precise. You can set it to a high sensitivity so that you can control it with relatively small movements while still maintaining accuracy. With wheel mice, there's a tendency to overshoot a target and have to backtrack when the sensitivity is set too high. The Explorer's precision, though, makes that less likely to happen.

This precision isn't really useful in general desktop work; I'd be surprised if it increased productivity. However, it's absolutely fantastic for aiming and moving in first-person shooters such as Quake III Test or Unreal Tournament. Using the rocket launcher in the Quake III Test, I found that my accuracy improved, so much so that I felt as though I was using an aiming bot. The precision of the Explorer allowed me to instantly zoom smack-dab onto a target and fire.

This precision allows you to increase the mouse sensitivity, letting you use much smaller, more controlled movements to turn and aim. This means you have to move the mouse a smaller distance to get the same effect, allowing for less stressful gaming.

However, Gamecenter's Quake expert, Bill "Crash" McClendon, found the Explorer to be unsuitable for his style of superfast-twitch Quake playing. Microsoft confirms that it is possible to move the mouse faster than it can track. I expect that the average gamer will see an improvement in play on first-person shooters with the mouse, but top players may want to stick with a traditional mouse. As with any mouse, I recommend that you try out the Explorer before you buy.

We also encountered some driver incompatibilities with Logitech's mouse drivers. You shouldn't expect the Explorer to coexist with non-Microsoft mice, so I recommend that you uninstall any other mouse drivers before installing the Explorer.

Deez Tech heeft de AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold mobo een getest. Dit is een Slot-1 BX plank met 5x PCI, 2x ISA en 3 Dimm gleuven. Grappig is het gouden heatsinkje dat voor betere koeling zou zorgen. Hm, overklokken schijnt in ieder geval goed te gaan met dit plankje:

Overclocked stability for this board can be summed up with one word. "Awesome". As a matter of fact, I will go out on a limb and say that this board is a bit more stable than ABIT's BE6. With the BE6 I could only get to 600 MHz using 2.3 volt core voltage, where on the AX6BC Pro I could get to 621 Mhz using 2.2 volts. If I had the choice of going to 2.3 volts with this board, a stable 621 Mhz would probably be a reality. Keep in mind that for these tests I used Vantec's P3D-5030 pimping ass cooler for my overclocking madness. Check out our review of the P3D-5030 here. The cooler got a bit toasty to say the least at 621 MHz. In other words, don't try this at home with any sissy coolers.

In deel 2 van 3D Rage's cooling guide bespreken ze het koelen van je videokaart. Ze gaan in op verscheidene koelers, waaronder 'The Card Cooler' en de 'Stealth V3 Fighter'. De review kun je hier vinden.

Video card cooling is extremely similar to that of CPU cooling, with the same principles and basic procedures. As said before, a heatsink is currently the most efficient way to transfer and dissipate the heat that is generated from the video card's chipset, and a fan is a good idea to cool the heatsink and disperse the heat, as you don't want that radiating heat making your system hotter than it already is. Space is also a major consideration when cooling a video card. This is because unlike a CPU, which has a nice, large interface and allows extremely large heatsinks and fans to be utilized, the video card must share space with other peripherals, and the space between them is pretty tight. Even with an extra PCI slot open(which is not too common these days), the space is not substantial, so we must utilize much smaller heatsinks and fans in order to cool our video cards, as well as some other third party devices that do not attach to the card at all. Before choosing a cooler, remember that many heatsink and fans will only work with a certain video card or line of video cards, and many manufacturers do not consider third party devices when producing their cards.

Adhesive pads are perhaps the simplest way of attaching a heatsink and fan to your video card, but over time the heat can slowly cause the device to detach over time, which could wind up with an extremely hot video card that could be damaged. When a particular unit was made for device however, you may find small holes which will easily accept the screws or other pins of a third party device, which is much more secure than an adhesive.

IGN heeft een preview in elkaar gedraaid van Command and Conquer Renegade. In deze C&C is het de bedoeling dat je in 3D als Commando Nod opruimt. Hieronder heb je vast een gedeelte uit de preview:

Lou describes the game as "C&C up close and personal." Those of you who remember the sixth GDI mission of the first C&C game will remember the Commando unit. He was the ultimate super soldier and could take on a whole Nod army without too much fuss. In Renegade, all the missions are commando missions. What's more, they take place in a beautiful 3D world, that's rendered with all the design elements from the first C&C. Lou says that the idea was "to make a game within the C&C universe but make it an action game" instead of a strategy game.

The guys at Westwood stress that this game isn't just a shooter. It combines action and adventure elements within an "objective based" narrative. The game avoids relying on a linear script, Lou explains. "C&C is about the big strategy and the big plan, not about small levels and certainly not about linearity." The objectives include rescuing Dr. Moebius, blowing up SAM sites and generally spoiling Kane's plans for world domination.

You'll be doing all this as the Commando. Tal's the one who got a chance to actually play the game while at Westwood, so I'll let him fill you in on all the details…"It is safe and lucky play of the recovery, more like trunks than the robber of the grave. I like it. Therefore my name is hot and is my body. I am then for taking the juice." Thanks, Tal, that's great. Go get some juice. What Tal meant to say, was that the game controls a lot more like Tribes than like Tomb Raider. The reliance on third-person perspectives allows you to get a better sense of the scale of the world than would be possible with a first-person viewpoint. You can also get a much better sense of character from the Commando himself. It's really cool watching him run around all those Nod buildings.

Full On 3D heeft een interview gepost met Brian Bruning van 3dfx. Ze hebben het uiteraard (vrij diepgaand) over de Voodoo4/Napalm, hier heb je wat vraagjes:

Fullon3d: You seem to be promoting anti-aliasing more than any other T-buffer effect, is this because current technology makes AA the most achievable effect?

Brian: We concentrate on anti-aliasing because it’s an obvious benefit to anyone who sees it. I mean it just looks beautiful when you do see it on screen, and it can be applied to existing games just as much as up-coming games. So it’s an automatic upgrade for everyone. If you buy a Napalm card you automatically get an improvement in everything. So it’s something that we spend more time on because it’s so important, and we also believe that anti-aliasing is a prerequisite to having lots of triangles on the screen. When you add more triangles all you’re doing is adding more edges which gives you more aliasing. So you need to have anti-aliasing if you want to put more & more triangles on screen. So that’s why we think it’s so important.

Fullon3d: You talk a lot about bringing ‘movie’ effects into computer games, but each is a different medium. In the movie industry a director may use ‘depth of field’ to control where the audience is looking, but in real life it is the gamer who chooses. How do you see effects like ‘depth of field’ being used in games?

Brian: Well these effects can obviously be used in cut-scene and scripted sequences, but I think that developers will find ways to use them in the games themselves. One example that a developer came up with was using ‘blurring’ when a player was hit by a missile to give a sense of disorientation. We talked to Mark Rein yesterday and he said that it would be cool if ‘depth of field’ could be used in ‘Unreal Tournament™’ to blur everything except the view down the sniper-scope when it was being used. Now that would be cool!

Klik hier voor de rest van het interview.

Anand heeft een part 1 van zijn "Next Generation Motherboard Platforms" online gezet. Zoals gezegd gaat deel 1 over Athlon planken, namelijk de AMD Fester reference bord, de Gigabyte GA-7IX en de FIC SD11. Hier heb je een gedeelte, klik hier voor de rest van de editorial.

For overclockers, you can expect to see the return of the race for the most overclockable motherboard. There are a few smaller motherboard manufacturers that will be coming out with "overclockable" Athlon motherboards that simply support more FSB settings but, the true trick will lie in the ability to control the clock multiplier of the Athlon CPU. This is definitely possible, and it is only a matter of time before we see a motherboard that either ships with support for such a modification or ships with the modification module itself.

Stability will be key to the success of Athlon motherboards, being able to deliver the proper amount of current to the processor and making sure that the signal's integrity remains strong are very important factors. This will be accomplished by using high quality components and a superior QA testing methodology, so what motherboards are there to look out for?

By the end of this year, you will have seen at least some information on a few very hot (supposedly) Athlon boards, including the elusive ASUS board as well as boards from Tyan and AOpen. The latter two should be very interesting, as we've only seen a handful of AOpen boards that were truly inferior in quality, and judging from what Tyan was saying about their upcoming Athlon motherboard, it should be a winner as well.

Both of those companies have consistently produced very solid motherboards, but also worth noting is that they both have traditionally produced inferior products (when compared to their usual standards) when dealing with non-Intel chipsets. AOpen has gotten much better about the quality of their VIA based motherboards as we've can see by their latest Apollo Pro 133 based offering, and we are beginning to see the same from Tyan. It seems like most motherboard manufacturers are coming to the conclusions that going Intel isn't always the best option.

Het volgende deel zal overigens over de i820 moederborden gaan, ben benieuwd

nVidia heeft bekend gemaakt dat z'n aandeel in de OEM (systeem bouwers) markt met een vrolijke 140% is gestegen in de eerste helft van dit jaar. Hier de info van GA-Source:

NVIDIA announced today that the company's market share in the system builder desktop PC market grew by over 140% for the first half of 1999.

According to the market tracking report by industry research group Visionquest, NVIDIA's first-half growth was the largest of any company represented in the survey. NVIDIA's momentum in the system builder channel is being fueled by the combination of a dedicated program launched earlier this year, a universal driver offering compatibility for all NVIDIA processors and the PC industry's only top-to-bottom graphics processor family.

With the recent addition of the GeForce 256, the world's first GPU, and the ALi Aladdin TNT2 integrated graphics chipset, NVIDIA's product portfolio promises to provide the best price/performance/quality combination for everything from the sub-$1000 PC to the extreme enthusiast PC.

Nintendo gaat support voor S3 Texture Compression in z'n next-generation Dolphin console verstoppen, zo hebben S3 en Nintendo saampjes aangekondigd:

Nintendo and S3® Incorporated (Nasdaq:SIII - news) today announced a partnership to employ S3's industry-leading graphics technology on Nintendo's next home video game console, code-named 'Dolphin.'

Dolphin is the first home video game console in the world to embed S3's advanced texture compression technology right onto the graphics chip. The results will include elimination of blurriness, blockiness and monotonous repetition of the same elements on screen. Furthermore, S3 will help to make indistinguishable the lines that separate art from photography, fantasy from reality.

``In just the past few years, the graphic improvement in video games has been stunning. S3 will be a major force in accelerating the performance we'll achieve on Dolphin,'' explained Howard Lincoln, Chairman, Nintendo of America Inc. ``With their unique graphics compression technology, developers will be able to provide players with more complex and colorful graphics. Coupled with our previously announced strategic agreements with companies like IBM, Matsushita, ArtX and MoSys, incorporation of S3 technology will make Dolphin a console without equal.''

``Our agreements with companies like Nintendo, Intel and Microsoft show we're an emerging leader in the push to define video game and PC technology,'' said Andrew Wolfe, Chief Technology Officer, S3 Incorporated. ``A high-performance, highly efficient application that is simple for developers to program for, S3TC should enable a wealth of unparalleled content for Nintendo's Dolphin console. This is another example of S3 expanding its technology presence into new markets.''

Deze grap gaat Nintendo dus geld kosten, terwijl ze net zo goed 3dfx FXT1 (voor noppes) hadden kunnen gebruiken...

Volgens The Register zal de release van Red Hat 6.1 volgende week plaatsvinden:

Red Hat will launch the latest version of its Linux distribution next week, according to US newswires and, in effect, according to Red Hat itself, which has organised a press tour for next week to promote the new release.

It probably feels it needs to hype up the release a bit, what with Corel getting closer to the release of its major mainstream-user oriented Linux distribution and the new version of Red Hat Linux being just a point upgrade, taking the software to version 6.1.

The release will offer improvements to the installer, including the ability to gobble up bandwidth by pulling the latest versions of apps and utilities off the Web rather than the CD, extra network management tools and presumably the usual round of kernel upgrades and bug fixes.

Hmm, komisch artikeltje bij The Register: GSI (grote distributeur in de UK) is overvallen door een kudde DRAM robbers, alleen hebben die sukkels de verkeerde reepjes meegejoept...

But despite being a victim of crime, GSI was able to laugh at the thieves' own misfortune. According to Dean Johnson, GSI operations director, the robbers only got away with returns - all the stock taken was faulty.

Johnson said: "Luckily they only stole returned modules. If anyone gets offered cheap product that doesn't work, please contact GSI."

The Tech Zone heeft een review van de Asus V3800 Ultra Deluxe op het net gegooid. Uiteraard deed men ook een poging op de kaart middels overclocking tot z'n uitersten te drijven. De limiet bleek erg ver weg te liggen...195/245MHz!

Unlike most TNT2 cards, the Asus V3800 has all its RAM on one side of the card. Other 32 Meg TNT2 cards (like the Viper V770) has half its RAM on the front and the other half on the back. The way Asus did it is a really good idea. It made cooling the RAM chips a lot easier during my overclocking test. Asus seems to have designed this card with overclocking in mind. The heatsink is really easy to remove. It's like Asus is saying "Come on! Remove that small sink and put a real cooler on it! We even put all the RAM chips on one side of the card to make it easier for you to cool." During the overclocking test I was able to get the card running 100% stable at a blistering 195Mhz core and 245Mhz memory!

Midden oktober kunnenn er serieuze tekorten ontstaan aan Super I/O chips, SRAMs, condensators en oscillators. Verder heeft VIA in navolging van Intel de prijzen van z'n chipset omhoog geduwd. Kortom: alle ingrediënten die een moederplankje maken zullen moeilijk verkrijgbaar zijn en daarom duurder worden, aldus Digitimes Taiwan. Ace's Hardware heeft een engelstalige samenvatting:

According to Digitimes Taiwan , Super I/O and SRAM chips are in serious shortage and motherboard makers can run out of supplies as soon as the second half of October. AOpen pointed out that it is almost impossible now to obtain Super I/O whereas SRAM prices have gone up 30%. Other motherboard components like PCB, chipset, capacitor and clock oscillator etc. are also going up in prices due to shortage.

In a related report, Digitimes Taiwan mentions that VIA will raise prices on their PC100 and PC133 chipset within the next two days or so. Also reported is that other than Micron, VIA has added IBM, Compaq, Packbell NEC, HP and several Korean OEMs to their list of Apollo Pro Plus 133A (APPP-133A) customers. Another Taiwanese chipset maker, ALI will also announce shortly the 5-10% price hike for their Super-7 chipsets.

Rivastation heeft wat info bijeen geraapt over de GeForce 256 kaarten van Asus:

The earthquake delay our schedule of NV10/GeForce design about one week. New ASUS's GeForce board is called V6600. It will be with three models:

- V6600/32M or V6600/64M
- V6600-Deluxe/32M
- V6600GL/32M or V6600GL/64M or V6600GL/128M

Tim Sweeney heeft een dikke update gepost op de Unreal Tech page, over hardware problemen met de Unreal Tournament demo:

- We received some more confirmations of Unreal working better on TNT's with the Creative Labs unified drivers using Glide than Direct3D. If you have a Creative Labs TNT card and have having performance problems, try that. Especially if you have under 128 megs of RAM.

- Lots of reports of slowdowns from users with Monster Sound's who have enabled the "Advanced Options / Audio / Use3DHardware". If you're having this slowdown, disable Use3DHardware and try again. Then please email utbugs@epicgames.com and let us know whether that helped. I've seen three confirmations from users that their problems (huge slow down) went away after disabling this.

- Jack and I have been tracking down the performance problems with the TNT on 64-meg (and lower) machines. To our great surprise, it appears that the TNT is keeping duplicate system memory copies of all our textures--we saw system memory grow and shrink in almost exact proportion to our "supposed" video memory texture allocations. Thus the game uses an extra 12-26 megabytes of system memory--a very inefficient allocation of resources. This is a big surprise, because the NVidia guys has always told us this isn't the case.

Problem in my code? I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I'll follow up with our henchmen at NVidia and Microsoft and see if we can track this down...

Direct3D Anomalies

We've been looking at the feedback on Direct3D performance and investigating some strange reports. Recently, we've mainly been testing on 96-meg and 128-meg machines (I have a Celeron 400, Jack Porter has a K6-2 450). On these machines, TNT1 performance is good -- average 28 fps at 648x480, 25 fps at 800x600. The TNT2 performance is significantly better.

However, upon removing some RAM and testing Direct3D on a 64-meg K6-2, the "precache" time increased by about 5X, and performance dropped to a few frames per second. These performance drops don't occur in the software renderer, and don't occur in Glide. Something is going wrong between Unreal, Direct3D, and the TNT's Direct3D driver, and we're investigating.

Overall, the feedback indicates a very wide variance in performance among TNT users, much more so than with any other card. Our internal testing has indicated this too; for example, we've found (and worked around) a lot of driver bugs that only happen on one machine, and not others with otherwise similar configurations.

Don't Try This At Home Dept.: Some TNT users have reported that tweaking their BIOS's "AGP Aperture Size" improves performance on 64-meg machines. We have tried this and couldn't find any differences on our 64-meg test machine. Others report that the Creative Labs unified drivers (with TNT Glide support) outperform Direct3D on their cards. If anybody finds definite improvements or workarounds, or has insight into what's happening, please email utbugs@epicgames.com and let us know.

Thanks.

Athlon In The House

Mark Rein walked into Best Buy and picked up a 650 MHz Athlon off the shelf -- an IBM Aptiva with a TNT2 Ultra bundled in. Fastest off-the-shelf machine we've ever seen! Click here for our in-depth Athlon review.

-Tim

Kickass! (die Athlon).

Sharky Extreme heeft een update gepleegd aan hun Weekly CPU prices column, met o.a. info over de release date van de Athlon 700:

While its official release date isn't publicly known, sources at the two resellers indicated that October 4th is the day they've been told by AMD the Athlon 700 CPU will officially debut.

As to when the Athlon 700 will actually reach their warehouses, a guess on our part is a time table of approximately four to five weeks from October 4th.

Verder verwachten ze dat de Athlon plank van Asus midden-oktober z'n opwachting zal maken (het event waarop elke Athlon-overclocker zit te wachten).

In navolging van Apple gaat ook IBM handelen in gekleurd plastic. Volgende week zal het een nieuwe op de consumenten markt gerichte serie ThinkPad laptops introduceren, met de keuze uit 7 verschillende kleurvariaties:

Seven different colors, including silver, metallic green, two kinds of red, and IBM blue, will be available to start, while more may come in the future. The covers, which fit over the part of the case that holds the screen, will cost less than $30, sources said.

IBM's foray into the world of computer fashion underscores the trend toward style in electronics. Apple Computer started the ball rolling with its curvaceous, blue iMac in 1998. Apple has continued the push with the new iBook laptop.

Check dit nieuwsbericht van News.com voor meer info.

GamePC heeft een review van de Creative Labs Desktop Theatre 5.1 DTT2500 speakers gepost. Het setje wordt geleverd met een Dolby Digital decoder, die via de DIN aansluiting digitaal kan worden verbonden met een SBLive!:

While standard and 3D audio is incredible, the speaker set really shines in Dolby Digital. Of course, you'll need a sound card that can output Dolby Digital audio, and a piece of software or movie that is setup to play for Dolby, but when everything is setup correctly, it's flat out jaw-dropping amazing. Any DVD movie is worth re-watching if you haven't experienced it the first time in Dolby Digital, it's like hearing the movie for the first time. It's very tough to describe how something sounds with words, but anyone who has experienced Dolby Digital versus standard audio knows the advantages it gives.

Ome Tom is terug met een review van de Videologic Neon 250. Hier een plak uit z'n conclusie:

What's the final verdict? If you need a video card that is first-rate at 640x480 in all your applications and respectable at 1024x768 in some games, you may want to check into a lower priced card that can do this too(Savage4, TNT2 M64, ATI Rage 128, VD3 2000). The performance of the Neon 250 in Quake Arena is impressive when compared to the rest of its peers until you hit higher resolution 32-bit color modes (which is what you want from a card in this price range). I have a feeling that the 64-bit memory is holding the card back (imagine the NVIDIA M64 compared to the regular 128-bit TNT2). Although it's very efficient, in some cases it probably needs the higher memory bandwidth that it doesn't have. The overall package will most likely not appeal to everyone because of the competition in the $170 range. If this card was $50 cheaper then I think it would be much more of a bargain but with Matrox, 3dfx and NVIDIA offering such great cards in that price range, I can't possibly suggest buying this card. Without stellar performance at 1024x768 and lack of an OpenGL ICD, I would have to suggest looking elsewhere.

De UGC's leggen het net plat! Een deel van het amerikaanse internet is kaduk omdat een of ander ongelukkig gas bedrijf het OC-192 touwtje van de east naar de west coast heeft plat geprikt. Het gevolg is dat dataverbinding allerlei rare omwegen moeten maken:

At least four Internet service providers are experiencing severe traffic backlogs because of a massive fiber-optic cable cut that put out four OC-192 lines connecting data networks on the East and West Coasts.

Industry sources told Inter@ctive Week that the cut was accidentally made by an unindified gas company in Ohio around 12:30 EST today.

The news is sending shockwaves through the networking community, with many carrier operators struggling to understand why, all of a sudden, their traffic is routed through London and Denmark. At least four Internet service providers are being affected by the outage. Varies online sources have named AboveNet, GTE, Internetworking and MFS Communications, a WorldCom subsidiary, as ISPs hit the worst.

Volgens c't heeft VIA problemen met de AGP4x implementatie in de North Bridge van de Apollo Pro 133 chipset. Hier de (erg manke) engelse vertaling van translator.go.com:

After Intels disaster with the long expected Camino Chipsatz has now also VIA problems: The North Bridge of the announced " Apollo Pro133 A"-Chipsatzes is to be revised because of errors in the AGP-4X-Modus. After information of some Main board manufacturers still another " Feintuning " of the appropriate VIA ICs (VT82C694X) is necessary. This means that to four to eight weeks a new version of the building block is only supplied. So far still no circuit boards with this chip record are series ripe; first test samples are however already available.

From the previous version VT82C69Á the new building block differs only by the AGP-4X-Interface; all other characteristics, as for example the support of VC-SDRAM (Virtual Channel SDRAM), remain the same.

Thus can VIA the lead over Intel by the failed Camino start no longer completely as expected to be used. However the Apollo pro remains the only available chip record, with which 133 mc/s FSB and storing ATS are possible (ciw/ c't)

IBM zal nog voor het eind van volgend jaar een wearable PC introduceren, zo bericht de Montreal Gazette:

No one is laughing today as IBM prepares to market a portable PC so small that it clips on to your belt and weighs as little as four sticks of butter.

Customers will be wearing it, possibly as soon as the end of next year, when the price could be less than $2,500.

[...] The latest device comes with an eraser-sized mouse that works like a miniature joystick and a headset that holds speakers and a monitor. The monitor, about half the size of a pen cap, sits about an inch from the eye, giving the user the illusion of reading a 14-inch screen at normal viewing distances. The PC can also hook into a desktop monitor. Users can attach a keyboard but can also direct the PC through speech-recognition software that is included.

Hmm handig, kan ik nieuws updaten terwijl ik m'n dagelijkse wandeling heen en terug naar school maak (ja, m'n band is al een half jaar lek en die weiger ik resoluut te (laten) plakken ).

De laatste tijd wil het op hardware gebied niet echt meer lukken bij Intel. Een of andere jopie daaro heeft nu bedacht dat Intel in de data service business (webhosting, data mining e.d.) moet gaan:

Intel today detailed how it hopes to become as dominant a service provider to Internet start-ups and old guard industrial giants as it is chip supplier to the world's PC makers.

Intel unwrapped the first "nerve center" of a new data hosting operation that is the cornerstone of an ambitious plan to expand into a market that, at first glance, appears to be light-years away from the business of making chips.

E-commerce companies and traditional merchants moving online are examining ways to get up and running quickly by outsourcing Web site design, transaction hosting, and data warehousing functions. Intel wants to tap into this trend by getting into the business of running a data factory, of sorts, where all kinds of electronic information is processed.

[...] The extent of Intel's ambitions can be seen in the plans for the buildings themselves. Housed inside a nondescript building near Intel's Santa Clara, California-based headquarters, the 85,000 square feet of space in the first center will someday be occupied by as many as 10,000 servers that will be the virtual home, Intel hopes, of a wide range of the company's Web efforts.

The new $150 million data center is the first of more than 12 centers planned worldwide, including an operation in Virginia slated to open in the first quarter of 2000 and centers in London and Tokyo by mid-year. A facility in Folsom, California, is already operational, and will serve as the testing ground for all other centers. All told, Intel expects to spend $1 billion when the buildings are outfitted to their capacity.

Meer info lees je in dit nieuwsartikel van News.com

Beyond3D heeft een vertaling gepost van de Elsa Erazor X benchmarks die c't (in het duits) online heeft gekwakt:

The 4 parallel render pipelines of the GeForce should give it a boost in older games compared to the older TNT2 with only 2 pipelines. In benchmarks on a P3 system clocked at 500 MHz using 3DMark99 Max, Unreal 225f and Expendable we didn't notice much of this. Only using Expendable at 1280x1024x16 we noticed an increase in framerate, 48 fps while TNT2 and TNT2Ultra produced 36 and 46 fps.

OpenGL games can already use the T&L acceleration of the 3D chip. Quake3 Arena 1.08 using maximal texture detail and lightmaps produced 63 fps at a resolution of 1024x768 in 16bit colour, 16 bit textures and bilinear filtering (TNT2 only manages 33fps). When we increase to trilinear filtering the results dropped to a still impressive 60 fps.

The T&L acceleration pushes the GeForce card continuously against its fillrate limit on the P3-500Mhz system. We can conclude this from the fact that the framerate drops every time we increase the image quality. If we increase quality by selecting a 32bit frame buffer the performance drops to 42 fps, if we add 32bit textures we end up at 37 fps (TNT2 = 32 fps). The filter quality remained Trilinear. Increasing the screen resolution to 1280x960 really hurts the GeForce fillrate since the framerate drops to only 22 fps.

Mwah, klinkt allemaal nog niet erg indrukwekkend...

3DGPU heeft een kort interview gepost met Derk Perez van nVidia, over de beperkingen van de '8 light limit' in de GeForce 256:

There has been alot of questions and controversy regarding the "8 light support" inherent in the GeForce 256. Can you explain how this works, and what advantages it has over what is currently available?

GeForce 256 supports up to 8 hardware lights for EACH TRIANGLE. The scene can have as many lights as you want.

Fiets richting 3DGPU voor de andere vraag (over vertex lighting vs lightmaps).

Bjorn3D heeft de engelste vertaling van een posting van Mika Tuomi (Bitboys CEO) op een Fins message board. Zo te lezen staan ze op het punt om de eerste samples van de Glaze3D te laten bakken door Infineon (= Siemens Semiconductors):

Here's some more info on the current position of the Glaze3D. The Glaze3D chip is in the final stage of silicondevelopment, and the data will be sent to Infineon to be processed when it is finished. We will receive the first prototypes in the beginning of next year. At the moment we have a 100% accurate simulation-model of the chip which we can use to run with an accuracy of a nanosecond. From these we have been able to measure that it takes about 3-5 nanoseconds to draw a frame in Quake3, which means 200-300 fps for the graphics card. As a person who plays Quake in the clan Zetor, I know to appreciate the meaning of games. That's why we during the development process have made sure that real-world programs (games) run as well as possible on the Glaze3D.

Regards,

CEO of Bitboys Oy
Mika Tuomi

(thanks Gerald voor de tip)

Bill heeft twee fixes in elkaar getimmerd waarmee enkele beveiligingskraters in Internet Exploder 5.0 dicht gepetst kunnen worden. Hier de info van Betanews:

Microsoft has released two updates to security holes in Internet Explorer 5.0. The first fixes a bug in the "download behavior" of IE 5 that allows web page authors to download files for use in client-side script. By design, a web site should only be able to download files that reside in its domain; this prevents client-side code from exposing files on the user’s machine or local intranet to the web site. However, a server-side redirect can be used to bypass this restriction, thereby enabling a malicious web site operator to read files on the user’s machine or the user’s local intranet. Microsoft is developing a patch for this problem. The second security hole allows a Web site to invoke the ImportExportFavorites() method, bypass any restrictions and write files that could be used to execute system commands.

- Download Behavior bug
- ImportExportFavorites() Patch

Display Technologies, een joint venture van IBM en Toshiba, verhoogt de produktie van LCD schermen. Hopelijk gaat dit helpen om het wereldwijde tekort aan LCD'tjes te verlagen, zodat de prijzen van die dingen op een iets sympathieker niveau terecht komen:

Toshiba and IBM said they will boost their joint production of liquid crystal display screens by 50 percent beginning next April to meet demand.

Display Technology Inc., a joint venture operated by the companies, will increase manufacturing capacity at two separate plants in western Japan, Toshiba spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said. The company will increase production of its 12.1 inch displays by 50 percent to 450,000 units a month and of its 10.4 inch displays by 20 percent to 240,000 units.

Display Technology will spend 10 billion yen ($94 million) at the two plants, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said, without citing sources. Toshiba and IBM officials would not comment on the figure.

Check GA-Source voor meer info.

GA-Source bericht dat de verkoop van de hardware divisie van Thrustmaster is voltooid. Thrustmaster gaat zich onder een nieuwe naam (CenterSpan Communications) op andere zaken richten. Voor de pretpookjes kunnen we nu terecht bij Guillemot:

ThrustMaster today announced that shareholders have approved the sale of the hardware business and the new company name, CenterSpan Communications Corporation.

The new NASDAQ ticker symbol will be announced shortly. The company also announced that it expects to close the sale of the hardware business to Guillemot Corporation for $15 million cash within the next 5 business days. Beginning today, the company is focusing exclusively on its Internet community, collaboration and communications software business.

Ik kwam bij JC nog wat korte info over de Intel i820 Rambus problemen:

Daiki left slight hints suggesting that Intel may have already given up on the i820 problem, and is recommending that motherboard makers make two RIMM boards only. There are some complaints about this, as DRDRAM works best in the kinds of applications that require insane amounts of memory (like heavy 3D rendering, a la 3dsmax). On top of that, there's some word that there are cropping up small problems even with two RIMM slots, though this is quite unconfirmed. But I don't think we'll be seeing 1 RIMM slot motherboards -- if we do, we won't be seeing Rambus for long. Got this bit from Boris Markov:

Volgens MacOS Rumors kunnen we in 2000 dual en quad versies van de PowerMac G4 verwachten. Apple wacht met de release totdat MacOS X op de schappen ligt. Het huidige MacOS 8.x bakt niet veel van multi-threading en dan heeft SMP uiteraard ook weinig zin:

Apple sources have confirmed that Apple does indeed plan to develop and ship dual as well as quad-processor G4 machines. These will be introduced in the next-generation desktop Mac, which should be introduced at next year's Macworld New York.

This remarkable machine, sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as "Shark," will be the first of the second-generation UMA Macs, and will sport a 133MHz main bus. The machine will also reportedly have several improvements -- including, if reports are to be believed, two processor sockets, each of which can contain a single or dual-processor card. Third parties might even be able to put quad-processor cards in each slot!

Apple's primary prerequisite for shipping multiprocessor G4 machines is not the hardware, but the software. Apple wants to have Mac OS X released and fully SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing) enabled before it ships MP hardware. This, of course, is because the company wishes to provide the best possible incentive for migration to OS X. If Apple were to ship an MP machine now, Mac MP would be poorly rated by the "experts," and there would be far less ammunition for the company to use when it has a fully SMP operating system.