There are some new BETA Detonators available. It's v44.65 available @ 3DChipset.com. Here's the link.
According to certain sites they do not offer a resonable performance increase or anything... so maybe you'd prefer to wait for some final ones. :)
"More than 90% of the players of EverQuest are male but only 80% of the characters in the game are male, suggesting some people are trying a bit of gender-swapping."
Here's more...
Microsoft have released Win2k SP4. Grab the express installer here or download the whole servicepack right here.
Foundations for Dark Age of Camelot has been relesed an can be downloaded from here (features a list of mirrors).
"Foundations is a free expansion for current Dark Age of Camelot subscribers. We have many options for players to download the files necessary to run player housing on their game's client. Please note that if you have Shrouded Isles, then you must download the Shrouded Isles installer for Foundations."
Hardware Analysis have done a review of the Asus MyPal a620, PocketPC 2003. New platform, nice device... here's more!
"Overall, the Asus MyPal a620 proved to be an excellent PocketPC, with great battery life, easily making it through a full day of extensive use and hours of multimedia playback. On average we clocked between 10 til 12 hours on the battery, which is a little more than we’ve seen from popular PocketPC 2002 devices. If you’re in the market for an affordable, yet powerful and versatile, PocketPC be sure to give the Asus MyPal a620 a serious consideration."
"Roseville, Minnesota
June 16, 2003
Fantasy Flight Games is thrilled to announce the acquisition of board game rights to the Warcraft® computer game series. Beginning with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans™ in 1994, the Warcraft series has garnered many awards, including Game of the Year and Best Multiplayer Game. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos™ was cited as the fastest-selling PC game ever, selling over a million copies in its first week of release*.
FFG plans to publish a large, expandable board game that captures the richness and complexity of the hugely successful Warcraft real-time strategy computer games. Innovative designs will portray the real-time strategy element of the computer games and make time itself a resource. The Warcraft Board Game is slated for release this Christmas."
Here's the PR (PDF)... for everyone into board games and warcraft, keep your eyes open for this one! ;)
Max Payne HQ have 4 Max Payne 2 screenshots up. If you want to see what the upcomming release will look like, click here.
If you've read the news below be aware, nVidia have already announced the Quadro FX Go700. Here's the PR.
"SANTA CLARA, CA—JUNE 24, 2003—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today introduced the NVIDIA Quadro® FX Go700 mobile workstation graphics solution. Designed for professional users who demand exceptional performance and flexibility, the NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700 is the first mobile workstation solution to bring the power of full programmability to market—allowing engineers and artists to accurately represent real-world material characteristics, such as corrosion between metals or highlighted human hair, in real-time within application software."
And some more from the inq though benchmarks seem to come from Beyond3D... it's Radeon 9600 Mobility versus Geforce GO 5600 time:
"In literally every test, ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility beat Nvidia's Go5600. Please be aware that because of the CPU speeds, this is not exactly a head to head competition since the ATI unit had a 200MHz faster CPU. Still, the faster CPU does not affect many of these tests, which still leaves ATI the clear winner, by as much as 50 per cent. Perhaps the new GeForce FX5600 Ultra 400/400 will have a mobile version that gives ATI some stiffer competition."
Here's the link.
"ATI has made decent chipset and it will certainly take a chunk of this integrated chipset market. If Nvidia decide to go for this rumored Nforce 5 Pentium 4 platform ATI could got some competition but until then you will be able to get a board with pixel and vertex shaders and that will have performance just a bit slower than the currently shipping low end part Radeon 9200 from ATI, and topping the performance of all integrated chipsets."
The inq mini review of a Radeon 9100 IGP motherboard can be found here.
New 4in1 drivers seem to have popped up @ GigaByte's site. Get your Via Hyperion 4.48 set here.
Yeti Studios have updated their GunMetal benchmark to version 1.20s. Here's the patch, grab it directly from their site.
DigiTimes.com do report that we might see some IBM made NV40 by the end of this year...
"Nvidia and ATI Technologies hope to release their next wave of graphics chips by year-end, sources said. Nvidia’s new graphics chips will be based on the NV40 core, while ATI will release its RV360, R360, and R420 lines of cards."
Here's more.
New drivers for ATI owners.
Control Panel of the 3.5 release... here
Win2k/XP... here
Win9x... here
And finally, those nice little release notes, they can be checked right here.
nVidia is accelerating XSI 3.5 digital content creation in combination, nice(!), here's the press release:
"NVIDIA Quadro FX Improves, Accelerates Digital Content Creation
NVIDIA Hardware Rendering Now Native in Softimage|XSI SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced that NVIDIA Quadro(R) FX hardware rendering capabilities are now fully exposed within SOFTIMAGE(R)|XSI(R) version 3.5. The integrated solution, which takes advantage of NVIDIA Quadro FX vertex and pixel shader programs in SOFTIMAGE|XSI's render tree GUI, makes production rendering an integral part of real-time digital content creation. This capability enables 3D film, broadcast, and game developers to produce cutting-edge visuals within the constraints of increasingly tight deadlines. ..."
"... "As audiences' appetites for realism in film, broadcast, and games continue to grow and deadlines continue to shrink, the need to create cutting-edge visuals quickly is critical," said Dr. Jon Peddie of the leading computer graphics market research firm, Jon Peddie Research. "NVIDIA is bringing value and time savings to this market through the hardware rendering capabilities built into its workstation line. The quality and range of effects available through hardware rendering on the NVIDIA Quadro FX series will change the nature of 3D production forever."
NVIDIA Quadro FX products combine the industry's first true 128-bit floating-point precision with an eight-pipeline, fully programmable graphics engine to deliver unprecedented levels of realism and sophisticated real-time effects for digital content creators. The programmability of the NVIDIA Quadro FX architecture allows SOFTIMAGE|XSI artists to create photorealistic shaders and to modify them in their viewport in real time-using Cg, a high-level, C-like programming language developed by NVIDIA.
"Developers using SOFTIMAGE|XSI no longer have to transfer their work to preview images on the target platform thanks to the unique hardware programming capabilities of NVIDIA Quadro FX products," said Marc Stevens, director of research and development at Softimage. "Instead, they can develop Cg shader code directly within the application to see exactly how their work will look on the target console, resulting in streamlined workflow and a dramatic reduction in development time."
Because NVIDIA Quadro FX hardware rendering capabilities are native to SOFTIMAGE|XSI, artists do not have to render their images separately to see the final results of a change. Instead, they can apply interactive shaders for realistic effects during the production process, resulting in better and faster content creation. If an artist wants to alter the sheen of a character's skin from oily to dry, they simply adjust sliders in the application and the change is calculated and rendered in real-time.
"NVIDIA Quadro FX solutions and SOFTIMAGE|XSI support DirectX(R) and OpenGL(R) so artists can quickly repurpose their effects for multiple platforms," said Jeff Brown, director of workstation product management at NVIDIA. "Artists creating effects for a movie-using Cg within SOFTIMAGE|XSI running on Linux- or Windows-based PCs-can easily reuse those effects when creating the movie-based game."
For more information on NVIDIA Quadro FX 500, NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 and NVIDIA Quadro FX 2000 workstation products and to find out where you can purchase them, please visit the NVIDIA Web site at www.nvidia.com. All NVIDIA Quadro FX workstation solutions are certified on SOFTIMAGE|XSI.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation is a market leader in visual computing technology dedicated to creating products that enhance the interactive experience on consumer and professional computing platforms. Its graphics and communications processors have broad market reach and are incorporated into a wide variety of computing platforms, including consumer digital-media PCs, enterprise PCs, professional workstations, digital content creation systems, notebook PCs, military navigation systems, and video game consoles. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and employs more than 1,500 people worldwide. For more information, visit the Company's Web site at http://www.nvidia.com .
Certain statements in this press release, including any statements relating to the Company's performance expectations for NVIDIA's family of products and expectations of continued revenue growth, are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, manufacturing and other delays relating to new products, difficulties in the fabrication process and dependence of the Company on third-party manufacturers, general industry trends including cyclical trends in the PC and semiconductor industries, the impact of competitive products and pricing alternatives, market acceptance of the Company's new products, and the Company's dependence on third-party developers and publishers. Investors are advised to read the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly those sections entitled "Certain Business Risks," for a fuller discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties.
NOTE: All company and/or product names may be trade names, trademarks and/or registered trademarks of the respective owners with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.
SOURCE NVIDIA Corporation
NOTE TO EDITORS: If you are interested in viewing additional information on NVIDIA, please visit the NVIDIA Press Room at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=press_room .
CONTACT:
Charlie Rasch of NVIDIA Corporation,
+1-408-486-8236, or
crasch@nvidia.com"
GamePC have a review up of Tyan’s Thunder K8S dual Opteron motherboard. Here's the link.
A snippet from their conclusion:
"Due to the size and feature-set of this motherboard, the Thunder K8S is very much a niche market product. This is a board for server admins who want absolutely bleeding edge hardware with all the bells and whistles included. The fact of the matter is most servers and high-end workstations simply don’t require 12GB of memory, dual Gigabit PCI-X ports, or dual channel Ultra320 SCSI. The Thunder series has never been about mass market appeal though; it’s survived over the years by catering to the high-end server admin. With the Thunder K8S, that trend certainly lives on. ..."
"As you know, ATI Technologies will launch another mainstream product code-named RV360 together with its R360 VPU later this year. Apparently, the Markham, Ontario-based company prepares yet-another mainstream graphics processor based on the RV350 architecture. Its code-name is RV380 and it will come together with the R420, as unofficial sources said. ..."
More information is available @ X-Bit Labs here. Keep your eyes open late 203 to early 2004 to catch one! ;)
Digit-Life have released an article discussing the precision capabilities of current PS2.0 supporting hardware. Here's the link.
"Obviously, precision of 16 bit numbers won't let making a correct raytracer, like it was demonstrated by ATi, but even calculation of texture coordinates in pixel shaders may lead to undesirable results. Precision of s10e5 numbers won't even let us correctly address textures of the size larger than 1024 pixels for one dimension with the bilinear filtering enabled. NVIDIA perfectly understands these limitations and has already started training game developers so that they can find areas where the insufficient precision of s10e5 numbers lead to incorrect results. NVIDIA also pushes ahead all high precision calculations in vertex shaders. "
Their test utility can be downloaded on the same site BTW.
AMD have a PDF file ready comparing the Opteron CPU with Intel Xeon & Itanium solutions. Here's it, enjoy! ;)
... a portable Dreamcast for your mobile gaming needs.
"The unit itself is made up of a mutant Dreamcast machine with Sega manufactured firmware inside (US games compatible), that has been modified with a specially designed shape. The top case of the DC machine has a built-in LCD Screen (similar to those you can plug into your PSone or your GameCube)."
Here's more. Unfortunately this is not an official Sega system and it won't be widely available so chances are bad getting one of these but it's nice to see that Dreamcast is far from being dead. :)
Matrox have released a new driver v1.04.01.003 for Windows 2000/XP. Grab those binaries here.
Besides that they now offer a Linux BETA driver. Here's more information.
"What’s New:
- Tahanea is intended to test some new refinements in the recently implemented motion estimation algorithm: a rate distortion algorithm can now be used to balance the number of bits used and the actual visual quality.
- Tahanea also hosts some rate control improvements and new features, like PSNR-driven rate control and on-the-fly bitrate changes."
Here's more + the binaries.
The following bit is mainly for german speaking visitors...
"Liebe Forumsmitglieder,
am kommenden Freitag, 13.6.2003 findet zwischen 18:00 und 20:00 Uhr der erste online Themenabend mit AMD statt. In einem Teilforum wird AMD Pressesprecher Jan Gütter Eure Fragen rund um AMD und unsere Produkte in Echtzeit beantworten.
Unsere Moderatoren werden uns dabei helfen, dass in den zwei Stunden so viele Fragen wie möglich beantwortet werden können. Um einen reibungslosen Ablauf zu ermöglichen, möchten wir Euch bitten, kurze Fragen zu stellen und Euch auf eine Frage pro Posting zu beschränken.
Ich wünsche allen viel Spass.
AMD GmbH, München"
More Information can be found here ( <- klicken um mehr zu erfahren! ;).
Just getting the news from Sascha today, cool! ;)
According to the Silicon Valley/ San Jose Business Journal or better Mercury Research Intel have shipped their 1 bilionth chip already.
"Remember the 8086? That was Intel Corp.'s first microprocessor for personal computers in 1978, back when a "hand-held" was a transistor radio, computers were immobile mainframes, and the Internet was a project by a handful of research scientists.
A quarter-century later, Intel has shipped its 1 billionth computer chip, according to figures compiled by semiconductor industry analyst firm Mercury Research and verified by Intel."
Here's more!
Kudos to Sascha for sending in this link to a press release from Micron (from/ on Silicon Strategies).
"Micron has shipped the GDDR-III devices to ATI Technologies Inc. and Nvidia Corp., according to the Boise-based memory company."
There's more, thake a look! ;)
A new version of Motherboard Monitor has been released. Grab v5.3.3.0 here. :)
Information comes from X-Bit Labs:
"When do you think NVIDIA NV40 will be announced? I suggest that roughly a year after the NV30 at Comdex Fall 2003 in November. The graphics cards itself will in this case come either in very late December or in early 2004. Note that in the second quarter next year Intel rolls out its Grantsdale platform with PCI Express-based connection for graphics cards, so, it is logical to assume that either NVIDIA NV40 already features PCI Express or NVIDIA will release another NV40 architecture GPU with the support for new bus in the second quarter 2004. And that may be already the NV45, coming out six months after the NV40 in mid-2004, I assume."
Here's the link to the news.
Rage3D.com have something which might have already surprised many ATI accelerator owners. It's a bit old to call it news but anyways... Rage3D have some article up describing how to get the Dawn and some other GFX demos running on ATI RadeOn hardware. Here's the link.
"- It runs 15% faster than NV30 on the 9800pro, and it also runs faster than NV35 (we are unable to personally confirm this but a user with both cards and FRAPS could).
- Creates higher quality images than the original due to the normalization being done in a fragment program (dp3/rsq/mul) instead of in a normalization cubemap which the FX extensions does directly in hardware
- The OpenGL wrapper adds more overhead, as it has to interperet code calls for Nvidia extensions and map them to ATI/ARB extensions, and yet it still runs faster on the ATI card, due to its more sophisticated pixel shader engine. "
WorldOfWarcraft.net have got a link which guides to another World Of Warcraft gamplay video. Download it right here.
Update: The movie is of rather bad quality (filmed monitor) and does not show much else than a fight but still interesting for some I guess. :)
Creative Labs Soundcard softmods for your money saving pleasure. =)
It's a bit old blame us for it but thanks a lot to Marmite who let us know about the "new" v4187 BETA Santa Cruz driver which can be obtained here. As we know they work for Sonic Fury too... please read Marmites post here for more.
AMDmb take their first look at an AMD Opteron 4P Server... here's it.
"A line from one of my favorite movies goes: "Yes, yes, but what does it all MEAN, Basil?" In all truth, these numbers here don't show us the full picture of the Opteron -- we'll need many more days with this system to get that. But, through these initial SiSoft tests we can see that the Hammer core processors (both Opteron and Athlon 64) are going to be real players in the game. With memory bandwidth of that caliber, Opteron servers have the ability to overtake any other system available. HPC (high performance computing) groups will no doubt see these numbers and drool -- that is why you are seeing groups like Cray quickly gobble up Opteron processors and platforms. We'll have more benchmarks to give a more rounded look at this 4-way Opteron server soon, so stay tuned! "
OCA have released a review of the new Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz with 800MHz FSB support. Here's the link.
"From the limited experience we've had with the C revision Pentium4 in addition to what we've been seeing around the net, 3.3GHz appears to be close to a lock, 3.5Ghz+ a very real possibility, and insane lottery winner type results of the 4GHz range on the outside. These speeds seem to be achieved using any of the four different C revision P4's, the only difference it appears is the bus speed at which you're running those speeds at. Placing heavy emphasis on the "more is better" ideology, I'd have to say the 2.4GHz chip is the better bet based on the fact that it will be at the highest front side bus with it's lower 12x multiplier. Another added bonus is that it is running approximately USD$45 or so cheaper than the 2.6GHz part. Either way, you "should" be getting a stellar performer."
"The judges for the Game Critics Awards: Best of E3 are proud to announce the nominees for 2003." Right here they do.
Patch 1.06 for WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos can be obtained here. Enjoy!
Just a reminder...: In Stores Beginning July 1, 2003, that's what Blizzard.com says concerning The Frozen Throne add-on! ;)
Besides the below Tom's HWG also have a sneak preview up of ATI's upcoming Mobility RadeOn 9600. Here's it.
"What is perhaps more impressive is that, at least at the 1280 x 1024 resolution, many games (especially those older, top-shelf games) will be quite playable with the 2X AA turned on, which is really a first for mobile graphics in general. While these additional quality modes have been available before, being able to make serious use of them has always been more of an issue because of the slower performance of the mobile parts. "
Tom's HWG have a review up of the RadeOn 9800 256MB Pro. Here's it.
"The benchmark results of the new Radeon 9800 Pro with 256 MB are sobering when compared to those of the 128-MB variant. It's only in extreme situations (in the highest resolutions and high FSAA settings) that any difference could be seen. In these areas, however, the frame rates are at a low level, which is therefore not realistic and certainly not worth the extra $100. In addition, the card generates an extremely high amount of heat. This is a peculiarity of the DDR II memory, from which NVIDIA's NV30 (alias GeForce FX 5800 Ultra) also suffers. In any case, ATI now has a product in its program to rival the new NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, which is also equipped with 256-MB memory. "
Warp2Search.net (who've managed to get back to us, great! ;) have news about an update for Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9 which is said to fix some problems with multi monitor situations and comes with a new wmp.dll:
"This update (820772) brings your file wmp.dll to build 9.0.0.3003, dated 11-Apr-2003. "
Here's the link, grab it!
People liking BeOS, can read the world first preview of Zeta, which is based on the famous BeOS, and more specificaly, BeOS Dan0, which was to be BeOS6.
You can read the complete preview here