3DGPU.com heeft na de aankondiging van de nVidia Quadra direkt twee vragen richting Derek Perez, PR ventje van nVidia, afgevuurd:

Q: Is the Quadro just a GeForce 256 GPU marketed to the CAD/CAM crowd?

A: No, not at all. While the Quadro GPU is based on the same core processor as the GeForce 256, it is its own GPU. It is enhanced and optimized for the 3D workstation market.

Q: When can we expect to see the Quadro available?

A: All I can say at this point is we should see them some time before Christmas.

Rivastation maakt een eind aan geruchten dat de TNT2 in Unreal Tournament sneller draait met de Creative Glide emulator dan met standaard Direct3D acceleratie:

So wake up! I was a bit surprised that the TNT2 is faster than a V3 using Glide. In Unreal it was way ahead of D3D cards. But as you can see on the results of the GeForce: graphic card performance is not the point here. It seems the CPU is the 'problem' (or still a bug in UT timedemo code...??)

Check de cijfers op Rivastation.com.

Arme Bill, in het nauw gedreven door de rechtszaak die de Amerikaanse overheid tegen Microsoft heeft aangespannen, vraagt z'n aandeelhouders om aansluiting te zoeken bij het door Microsoft in het leven geroepen pro-monopolie 'Freedom to Innovate Network'. Techweb heeft het nieuws:

Faced with an imminent ruling in its landmark antitrust case, Microsoft has taken its cause to its shareholders, hoping the very people the company helped enrich will help it bring its case to government legislators and the public at large.

In a letter to Microsoft shareholders, the company'schief operating officer, Robert Herbold, called upon investors to join the "Freedom to Innovate Network," a group purporting to champion Microsoft's cause of battling government intervention in the software industry, according to a report in Monday's The Wall Street Journal.

The network consists of Microsoft business partners, software developers, certified network engineers, and other supporters, and is said to number 50,000.

The letter encouraged Microsoft investors to speak out about government intervention in the software industry and warned that continued intervention could negatively impact the industry and the economy at large.

Systemlogic heeft een review gepost van de 3DLabs Oxygen VX1, een videokaart die zich vooral richt op de professionele 3D modeller en CAD gebruiker:

The VX1 does what is was designed to do, and that is deliver a professional graphics solution at a low price. In terms of gaming, this card was not built with gamers in mind. Although it does provide decent performance in games. It definitely shines in terms of professional application performance. I've tried the card out in 3D Studio MAX, AutoCAD 2000, and Truespace, and I must say that I'm happy with how the card handles these applications. 3Dlabs has a fine product here and they haven't misrepresented it at all.

Some may be disappointed at its lack of a geometry unit. However, it compensates for that by making efficient use of your CPU(s) through its PowerThreads SSE OpenGL drivers. It's ideal for small to medium sized models. I am really impressed by how this card performs despite some minor imperfections. For it's great OpenGL and DirectX performance as well as all the features it has, it receives an 8.5/10 SystemLogistics on the product review meter. By the way, look for an update soon, testing some newly released drivers with PowerThreads support.

Tja, ik vraag me af hoe dit kaartje presteert in vergelijking met de GeForce of Quadro. Volgens mij kan 3DLabs dan wel inpakken...

Hardware.fr heeft een Pentium III 733 richting 1 GHz overgeklokt met de hulp van een Asetek koelsysteem:

Admittedly, to 1 Ghz Pentium III 733 MHz was not perfectly stable, and this same with the assistance of a system of cooling Vapochill de Asetek. However with a version improved of the system it y' has extremely to bet that this frequency can be reached rather quickly in a stable way with Pentium III 0.18 Microns.

Da's zeker niet slecht. Voor een engelse vertaling van het artikel kun je terecht bij Altavista's Babel Fish.

nVidia heeft vandaag de Quadro (yup, die naam kwamen we al eerder tegen in de nVidia Win2k drivers) aangekondigd, een aangepaste versie van de GeForce bedoeld voor CAD en 3D modelling. Hier de bijna volledige press release:

NVIDIA creates discontinuity in workstation market with new Graphics Processing Unit

NVIDIA Quadro Workstation GPU Radically Redefines Price/Performance for Design and Authoring Professionals

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 1999-- Leveraging over 500 man years of 3D expertise, NVIDIA(TM) Corporation today announced the Quadro(TM) workstation GPU, the newest member of the company's performance-leading family of award-winning graphics processors.

Based on NVIDIA's revolutionary single-chip integrated QuadEngine(TM) transform and lighting architecture, the Quadro is targeted for the digital content creation and MCAD design markets. Able to process more than 200 billion operations per second, the Quadro shatters the performance scores for entry-level and mid-range Windows NT® workstation markets. The Quadro delivers up to 17 million triangles per second and a texture fill rate of up to 540 million pixels per second.

In addition to delivering a breakthrough in performance, Quadro offers advanced features demanded by content creation professionals such as anti-aliased points and lines, two-sided lighting, front buffer 3D clipping and shared back-buffer support. NVIDIA Quadro-based products will ship with Intel®'s next-generation Pentium® III- and AMD Athlon(TM)-optimized OpenGL® drivers for Windows® 2000, Windows NT and Linux.

The NVIDIA Quadro workstation GPU will be offered in the new GLoria II professional graphics accelerator board from Elsa Inc. The GLoria II will allow engineers, animators and other creative professionals to achieve higher levels of real-time interactivity and image quality, thereby reducing overall design time and costs.

``Quadro is a critical element of our `top-to-bottom' strategy to offer a single architecture that spans the consumer to the workstation market. With Quadro, we are putting a powerful content creation platform in the hands of any 3D professional - not just those who can afford expensive workstations,'' said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. ``Our goal with Quadro is to enable content creators to quickly adopt breakthrough 3D features and capabilities. The broad availability of compelling and rich content will ultimately drive demand for our GPUs.''

``Our Quadro equipped ELSA GLoria II exceeds all expectations for real-world CAD P. and DCC applications. It clearly outperforms everything we see in today's professional 3D NT graphics space,'' stated Theo Beisch, President and CEO, ELSA AG.

Benchmark Information

Based on measurements with pre-release drivers on a 550 MHz Pentium III Xeon(TM) single-processor machine, NVIDIA Quadro delivers outstanding 2D and 3D performance compared to other high-end boards that cost as much as ten times more. For example, Quadro delivers a Viewperf Advanced Visualizer score of 74, compared to the more expensive Intense3D Wildcat 4000 score of 57 and 3Dlabs GVX1 score of 27. On industry standard application benchmarks like Gbench99 for Pro Engineer, Quadro posts a score of 84, compared to 77 for Intense3D Wildcat, and 78 for 3Dlabs GVX1. This equates to more than 5-times the price/performance of the Intense3D Wildcat. On other industry standard benchmarks like Indy3D, Quadro scores 38 on the Animation test, which measures the GPU's capability to replay data sets in real time.

``Maya customers in the film, video and game development markets are already buzzing about the Quadro GPU, and so are we -- the breakthrough price performance allows Maya to really strut its stuff on very affordable systems,'' said Bob Bennett, Maya Product Line Manager at Alias|wavefront.

2CoolTek heeft een socket370 heatsink roundup neer gemikt. Onder de kandidaten bevinden zich o.a. de GlobalWin FDP32 en de HP Polor Logic heatsink! De laatstgenoemde is niet zomaar een doorsnee koelblokje:

Het door 2CoolTek geteste exemplaar (met de naam "Panaflo Orb") ziet er iets anders uit, maar het idee is vergelijkbaar. Wat betreft prestaties ging-ie de andere koelers ruimschoots voorbij:

The Panaflo orb is the obvious top performer here. It is using a lower output fan than the other top performers (19.1cfm as compared to the 27.2cfm of the Alpha, FDP, FEP, and CPM) yet cools the TEC to 3.7 degrees cooler than the nearest competitor

Check 2CoolTek voor de info & pics.

Ik kwam op HardOCP.com dit erg coole kunstwerk tegen:

...anders, maar ook cool:

Een beveilingsdeskundige heeft uitgefriemeld dat de RealJukebox software van RealNetworks de activiteiten van de gebruiker registreert en deze gegevens ongemerkt naar RealNetworks terugstuurd, zo schrijft de NY Times. News.com heeft een artikeltje over deze mogelijke schending van privacy regelgeving:

Dave Richards, RealNetworks' vice president for consumer products, told the Times the company gathered the information to customize service for individual users.

He and other company executives said the practice did not violate consumer privacy because the data was not stored by the company or released to other companies, the Times said.

But privacy advocates and security experts agreed that it was a violation of the privacy of the 13.5 million registered users of RealJukebox, the Times said, particularly because RealNetworks has not informed consumers they are being identified and monitored.

Frenzy schrijft: "In principe is dit al een paar weken bekend, maar het heeft nog niet echt aandacht gehad op Tweakers.net. Wat wil Cistron?: 2-8Mbit internet, video on demand, telefonie voor 5ct/min, etc, etc. En dat hele pakket voor 150 per maand! Ze zijn zelfs al gestart in Rotterdam. Den Haag, Utrecht en Amsterdam volgen nog....! Dit is oorlog!":

"Cistron wordt de kwaliteitsprovider van super-breedband Internet toegang, in combinatie met traditionele spraakdiensten, en dat alles gericht op consument, en kleinzakelijke markt. Met andere woorden: we gaan rechtstreeks de concurrentie aan met KPN! "

Cistron gaat Nederland bevrijden! .

Hardware Extreme heeft een review van de Vantec P3D-5030 Pentium III cooler gepost:

Vantec has a wonderful cooler here. Although we would rather prefer Vantec to include real thermal compound with the cooler like some GlobalWIN coolers instead of a lousy thermal pad, it still is a formidable cooler. A really good alternative to an Alpha if you are looking for performance that is almost the same, yet so much smaller and nicer looking. It's never too late to get this wonder as it works with the older generation PIIIs (Katmai - 450 - 600) as well as the recently announced Coppermine CPUs !

Beyond3D heeft weer een erg diep artikel over de voordelen en nadelen van T&L / geometrie acceleratie in elkaar gedraaid. Eén van de problemen is overdraw: het renderen van onzichtbare pixels, die een groot deel van de beschikbare fillrate voor zich op eisen:

In our previous article, talking about the problem of fill-rate limits, one of the issues we forgot to address is that of depth complexity, otherwise known as overdraw. Depth complexity is the problem of triangles overlapping to form additional triangles and pixels. This means that you create extra triangles to be rendered as well as extra pixels.

Now typically a game such as Quake II will have a depth complexity of about 3x, resulting in a 3x fill-rate hit. Now with T&L the problem is that you'll be dealing with a great deal more triangles that are a lot smaller. With that, you're going to be experiencing a great deal more overlapping of the triangles and in turn more depth complexity. To illustrate this, here is a picture of NVIDIA's tree demo running in wire frame. Looking at the screenshot below you can really see how much depth complexity there is. Now of course it should be considered that just technology demo. The purpose was to show the highest quality that an object could reach and still maintain a high level of performance. Now because of this, not only does this object look better than it would within any actual game, but depth complexity is also greater. The purpose of us showing this though is that just while T&L will make objects look better, it will also cause a great fill-rate hit and triangle rate hit because of overdraw

Billy van Voodoo Extreme was zo handig om Tim Sweeney (Epic Megagames) te vragen naar T&L support in Unreal Tournament of toekomstige Unreal engines:

We're not planning on doing anything with T&L in an Unreal Tournament patch, since the software lighting code is now plenty fast as it is (since we're not pushing insane poly counts). We might be adding this to the existing engine for the Unreal 2 timeframe along with the new skeletal animation system in the works. (Unreal 2 is being developed by Legend Entertainment, starting with our existing engine, and making some improvements but not fully next-generation).

I expect the next-generation engine won't just support T&L, it will *require* it. It's cool looking at what's possible in a next-generation game (figuring a development time of 2 years, so guessing it will be a late 2001 release) -- so the GeForce256 + P3/Athlon 700's coming out now are probably just our *minimum* system requirement.

-Tim

Volgens een wazig artikeltje van The Register zijn de socket370 Coppermines gedelayed tot het eerste kwartaal van volgend jaar. Het probleem zou bij de heatsink zitten (hoe lullig):

A shop in the Akihabara district of Tokyo is displaying pictures of Intel's Coppermine S370 flip chip product and the Via-Cyrix Joshua processor. But in the case of the former product, while Intel made an "announcement" of the S370 Coppermines last Monday, no product will be forthcoming for some time, according to the shop showing the pictures.

According to this page, the CPU heatsink and fan is somewhat different from the conventional socket.

Last week, we revealed that a problem with the heatsink has caused Intel to delay releasing the product, while other PC manufacturers have said they don't expect to see S370 Coppermine chips in volume until Q1 of next year.

Ik lees bij Betanews dat er een Win2000 versie van Powerstrip beschikbaar is gekomen:

A special build of the graphic card tweaker, Powerstrip, is now available for Windows 2000. Features include hardware color correction and in-game gamma hotkeys, real-time clock adjustments, custom refresh rates and screen alignment controls, and extensive AGP device diagnostics - in short, all the graphic controls and tweaks you're used to under Windows 98. Missing are the driver-dependent switches like disabling vsync, simply because they aren't in the current crop of released drivers. This release is backwardly compatible with Windows 95/98 as well as NT 4.0 for those of you working with dual-boot systems, but checked/debug builds of Windows 2000 are not supported.

De Win2k beta versie (692Kb) kun je hier downloaden.

hermanb schrijft: "De Consumentenbond waarschuwt voor kabel en internet. Veel mensen zijn ontevreden":

Een internetaansluiting via de tv-kabel levert zelden de voorgespiegelde surfsnelheid op en is alleen voordelig voor wie vaak en lang internet. Wegen voor u de voordelen op tegen de nadelen, dan kunt u het best voorzichtig beginnen, met de goedkoopste abonnementsvorm. Als u maar een paar uur per maand wilt internetten is een aansluiting via de telefoonlijn goedkoper.

Uit onze enquête blijkt dat internetters met een aansluiting via de tv-kabel vaker ontevreden zijn over hun provider dan internetters met een aansluiting via de telefoonlijn.

En ik ben ontevreden over de belachelijk hoge telefoonkosten van KPN. Hmm, misschien leuk voor een poll?

wildhagen schrijft: "Er is een nieuwe versie van Nero beschikbaar: 4.0.7.0!":

A new version of Nero has appeared on the Ahead Software FTP site. Nero is a CD recording program that can create audio CD's from MP3, Video CD's (VCD), disc copy, and much more.

- Download Nero 4.0.7.0
- Download Nero 4.0.7.0 update

meendering schrijft: "Surfde net langs Shugashack en daar hadden ze een artikel over Wolfenstein 2000!! ":

Wolfenstein2000 has been rumored more than once around here. Ever since the Xatrix Entertainment shake-ups shortly before the release of KingPin word has been leaking out. Well this LA New Times feature on Xatrix Entertainment finally spills the beans. The article is a pretty big feature on Xatrix and violence in video games, but this quote was the one thing that grabbed me most:

"...the West L.A.-based Xatrix Entertainment, is already well into the creation of its newest game, a reformulation of a popular World War II POW fantasy that has enjoyed two previous incarnations by other companies. Markham and his handful of computer artists and programmers hope to have their Castle Wolfenstein 2000 in stores by Christmas next year."

Firingsquad heeft een review gepost van de ATI All-In-Wonder 128 huis-tuin-en-keuken TV & video editing kaart:

The ATI All-In-Wonder 128 32MB is a good all-in-one card with several nice features such as hardware DVD support, the new Rage Theater video decoder/output chip, and multiple video capture formats. The All-In-Wonder's 3D performance is disappointing, but 3D isn't very important to most people looking at all-in-one cards; they're more interested in the video capture and editing performance.

meendering schrijft: "Als je een overgeklokte proccessor hebt moet je deze link ff checken, op deze pagina staan Intel Wallpapers ":

If you have an overclocked Intel PII/PIII/Celeron or AMD Athlon, then our BBS pal Kami has got you covered. Everything from the classic Celeron 300A at 450MHz to the PIII 550 at 616Mhz is represented (Athlon wallpapers are coming soon). Each is represented at 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, and 1280x1024.

Voorbeeldje:

Raymond schrijft: "Niet echt nieuws maar wel leuk om ff te lezen, dacht ik maar zo."

Het is dus een artikeltje dat in eenvoudige mensentaal beschrijft wat Alpha Blending is en wat voor effect het heeft in spellen. Lees hier verder.

Alpha blending is the 4th component that makes up a fully featured texture – RGBA. A 32bit texture has 8 bits (or 256 levels) of red, green, blue and alpha. The RGB portion is similar to a color wheel (like in Photoshop) where any color can be created from a combination of red, green and blue. The alpha component describes the level of translucency of that texel (portion of a texture). A low level of alpha would indicate an almost transparent object such as smoke, while a high level would indicate an almost opaque object like stained glass. Effects such as lens flares, dust clouds, windows, water and other cool objects you can partially see through, are all created using alpha blending

Ik zag net dat er bij Sharky Extreme ook een review staat van de pas verschenen Guillemot 3D Prophet Geforce 256 (een hele mond vol). De gewone versie dus, degene met DDR Ram is nog niet uit. Zoals we gewend zijn staan er een hele hoop benchmarks, over van alles en nogwat. Bijvoorbeeld hoeveel extra performance het overklokken geeft, t.o.v. de resolutie. Hier heb je vast een hap uit de conclusie:

Once again, Guillemot has chosen wisely when opting for NVIDIA's GeForce 256. Although the market choice isn't quite as plentiful as it was in the days before the S3/Diamond and STB/3dfx mergers took place, the GeForce 256 is the fastest available 2D/3D chip solution for any gamer's needs. In recognizing that, Guillemot has done their usual stellar job of taking NVIDIA's reference design and delivering a simple to install product with a few nifty extras for added value. At $269.99 (after a $20 mail-in rebate), the price of the card is still higher than what end-users familiar with Guillemot's previous products are accustomed to seeing. Cost-conscious gamers do have a few choices though.

You could stick with your current Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra for a while longer (there's no shame in that, as the benchmarks show) and wait a month or two for the dust to settle. With more GeForce 256-based cards on the way from Guillemot (who recently announced a DDR SGRAM version for $100 more), should you decide to wait a while, you may be rewarded by a price drop of this introductory product. With Creative, ELSA and LeadTek all vying for the same shelf space, the inevitable price war is always a possibility.

GA-Source heeft een review van de Acer CRW4432A CD Rewriter op het net gegooid. De drive (her)schrijft op viervoudige snelheid en dient op de welbekende EIDE poort aangesloten te worden. Hier een stukje over de performance:

was definitely pleased with the performance of the drive. With the CDRW writing speed being the same as CDR writing speed, it starts to become meaningful to buy CDRW instead of just CDR media. In the past I have stuck with CDR media regarless of the drive just to get the extra speed in writing. Also, for those of you who have never used CDRW drives, it takes under 1 minute to re-format a used CDRW disc.

Twee updates van Betanews:

Paul Falcon has released version 4.0 of Multi ICQ. mICQ allows you to have up to 1,000 different ICQ windows open. This will allow you to have one UIN for friends, one for family, one for business, etc., and have them all running at the same time. [break] mICQ v4.0 kun je hier naar binnen lepelen. Verder is er een nieuwe beta versie van RamDiskNT gereleased: [/break] A new beta version of RamDiskNT was posted for download. RamDiskNT is a Windows NT 4.0/2000 driver that emulates as fully as possible the low-level functionality of a hard disk (in principle up to 2GB, but limited by the OS) or a 1.44MB or 2.88MB floppy drive. RamDiskNT also allows the user to select the drive letter for the RAM disk. In addition, RamDiskNT can be configured to automatically load a disk image at startup and save the image to disk at shutdown. This allows the RAM disk to function almost exactly like a hard disk - no data is lost when the power is turned off.

...en dat proggie kun je hier downloaden.

Overclockin.com heeft een artikeltje gepost over de PIII-450 SL35D, waarvan het gerucht gaat dat het 'gedownmarkte' PIII-600's zijn, die door Intel op de markt zijn gezet om aan de vraag naar PIII-450's te voldoen:

So how did it do? Very well actually. I expected good things from this processor and it turns out I wasn't disappointed. Well, I won't hold you in suspense any longer.... The processor will run at 600MHz and 2.0V stable (L2 cache enabled) with no problems. However, it will also load Win98 and is able to run benchmarks with the L2 Cache disabled. I was hoping for the 621MHz mark, but such is life. Very difficult to complain about a processor that is rated at 450MHz running at 600MHz!!

To sum it up, it looks like this is even more evidence that the SL35D processors really are able to run some serious speeds. Admittedly, a sample size of one processor doesn't prove anything, but it does at least add more to the growing number of successful overclocks of the SL35D processors.

The Tech Zone heeft een review van de Epson PhotoPC 750Z digitale camera neer geplant:

The Epson PhotoPC 750Z is one of the best digital cameras I've ever used. I like it so much I've decided to buy it. The Epson PhotoPC 750Z is the first digital camera to come with Epson's HyPict technology. This is an image enhancement technology to boosts the PhotoPC 750Z's 1.25 megapixel CCD sensor resolution to a very big 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution. This results in color photos with sharper details even when printed out at 8" x 10".