» Videocards from 2001 and earlier «

Keep an eye on the News pages too - for instance, the GeForce2 can be had for about £110 all in, if you know where to look.

Companies like Hercules are now selling the NVidia3 based based boards.
The Hercules 3D Prophet III is priced around £340 with 64Mb. I've seen others for circa £259, so shot around for prices.


Meantime (August 2000) The various version of ATI's RADEON are now available to order...

And in the opposite corner we have the contender for the crown....

I'm tempted to say "Winner takes all, but I'd rather see a healthy market dominated by three or four giants, thank you very much. The naming is easy - Matrox, S3, 3Dfx, ATI and Nvidia. This may be stating the obvious, but before you choose, *know* why you want the card / upgrade. Unless your pockets are deep you'll be living with your decision for a year or two, longer even.

Here's my choices:

For largely 2D applications like CorelDraw and MS Office etc. then Matrox G400 Max (or it promised replacements - the G450 and G800 series).

For 50-50 games and business then the ATI Fury Maxx

For largely 3D games, then its the Voodoo 5 or upcoming GeForce 2. I've not seen the Voodoo 5 in action, but even so, I'd choose the Nvidia card. Not just because the card rocks, but because Microsoft has licenced some of it's technology for DirectX 8, due out in the fall. This means the cutting edge games in development will put it on a pedestal if for no better reason than to sell copies on the back a tip box of features...

For *a* program. Well, all I say say is look at them all, then some. Some cards are designed from the bottom up for certain applications. You can say 3Dfx and Quake in the same breath, Elsa are good with video-editing ones and some of the Oxygene cards for CAD and rendering are plain scary. Yet others tune their drivers to one product - Photoshop

Finally, and I really can't stress this enough, the card is a lump of plastic without the drivers and that for all the platforms you use:

• Apple Macs - not on this site Matey!
• BeOs - never tried, can't say
• DOS? Yeh, right!
• Linux / Unix flavours and your choice dives
• Windows 2000? Too new for comfort, vast numbers of "features" you really can live without, like a basic problem with all older ATI cards...
• Windows 3x? Yeh, right!
• Windows 9x. Getting better, but remember to update the DirectX too.
• Future: trade gossip says MS is ripping support for "legacy" hardware out of future versions of Windows. It's then that support gets critical, especially as no-one, not even Bill has defined in stone a definition of "legacy"...

Links to suitable reviews to follow shortly.

[www.3dfx.com] 3Dfx's upcoming new releases sport:

3dfx's upcoming Napalm board will offer anti-aliasing (though not full-scene) when it ships in Q1 2000. It will also offer other effects, such as motion blur and smooth shadows.

Voodoo 5 6000 AGP

• 128MB Graphics Memory
• 1.33 - 1.47 Gigapixels per second
• 32-bit color rendering
• T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects

Voodoo 5 5500 AGP

• 64MB Graphics Memory
• 667-733 Megapixels per second
• 32-bit color rendering
• T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects

Voodoo 5 5000 PCI

• 32MB Graphics Memory
• 667-733 Megapixels per second
• 32-bit color rendering
• T-Buffer Digital Cinematic Effects

Voodoo 4 4500 AGP and 4500 PCI

• 32MB Graphics Memory
• 337-367 Megapixels per second
• 32-bit color rendering

Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 - 3dfx's new VSA-100 chip to power two new lines next spring.

3dfx T-Buffer - 3dfx's Director of Product Marketing speaks about the T-Buffer

Earlier this month (March 2000) NVIDIA Corporation announced it's new ultra-high performance cards.

Offering lightning-fast frame rates, higher resolutions and increased color depth, it can be ordered through electronic kiosks at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Staples or through HP's e-commerce site as the new GeForce is available as part of HP's build-to-order program for Pavilion PCs.

According to Jeff Fisher (vice president of sales at NVIDIA), "This new 64 MB DDR GeForce delivers an unbelievable visual experience for users who want to push the performance envelope to levels never before dreamed of."

The architecture of the NVIDIA DDR technology almost doubles the usable bandwidth between a frame buffer and a graphics controller. The DDR interface uses SSTL-2 signaling and has become the industry standard for advanced frame buffer applications. With the DDR technology reads and writes at both rising and falling edges of the clock, a two-times higher bandwidth can be achieved when compared against traditional RAM technology. With the new VTC format developers will be able to unleash a new level of realism, allowing them to incorporate cinematic realism in interactive 3D applications. According to Dan Vivoli, NVIDIA senior vice president of marketing. "Users can now experience richly textured scenes at extremely high resolution without sacrificing framerate."

"This is the same board powering the Dimension XPS B800R system, which received Maximum PC's first perfect 10 in the March issue," said Sean Downey, hardware editor, Maximum PC. "Dell's GeForce Plus is the first video card to mate NVIDIA's graphics processor with 64MB of DDR memory, which translates into a more powerful memory subsystem than most PCs currently have."


Nvidia also score an ace for getting Volumetric Rendering and Texture Compression into DirectX 8
Read this Company Press Release (the full version could be found on [biz.yahoo.com/bw/000323/ca_nvidia_1.html] Yahoo's business pages)

Microsoft Licenses Breakthrough 3D Graphics Technology From NVIDIA
NVIDIA's VTC formats for Microsoft's® DirectX® enables rich graphics for Internet and games. In a move that will help bring stunning 3D graphics to internet users, NVIDIA and Microsoft® announced the adoption of NVIDIA's technology for VTC - Volume Texture Compression Format for Microsoft DirectX APIs. Today's 3D internet sites are plagued with inadequate image quality due to bandwidth constraints of transmitting high resolution textures over standard communications systems. Even for high-performance PCs, the limited amount of texture storage forces game developers to use lower resolution textures, resulting in imagery that lacks detail. NVIDIA's VTC format enables a superior level of image quality that allows web and content developers to produce 3D objects that depict their natural characteristics.

Limited texture storage has historically been a problem for game application developers, forcing compromises in image quality and performance. The texture storage problem is exacerbated by volume textures, which are truly 3D data, unlike traditional 2D textures. Volume textures are so much larger than 2D textures, that the texture compression format becomes extremely important. NVIDIA's VTC format organizes 3D volume texture data to take advantage of the 3D nature of the data, which increases the effective texture bandwidth by an enormous factor. NVIDIA has developed a proprietary method to reorder the 3-Dimensional data within a volumetric image cube to account for the linear accessing required for the optimal use of the memory system of a typical computer system.

NVIDIA Products
Company sales blurb follows :-)
The first 3D graphics semiconductor company to deliver a complete top-to-bottom family of 3D solutions, NVIDIA gives developers the advantage of one unified driver and one architecture across all implementations. The proven graphics architecture and massive gate counts translate into stunningly realistic, high-performance results. NVIDIA single-chip processors enable high-frame-rate 3D graphics, benchmark-winning 2D graphics, and VGA and video acceleration for unequaled visual realism and real-time interactivity. Optimized for both Direct3D(TM) and OpenGL® APIs, the NVIDIA products currently include:

• NVIDIA GeForce 256™ for the PC enthusiast market. The world's first graphics processing unit, GeForce 256 delivers an order-of-magnitude increase in geometry processing power and enables unmatched access to interactive content.
• NVIDIA Quadro 256™for professional workstations, digital content creation, and MCAD markets. The Quadro processor integrates the revolutionary QuadEngine™ architecture for optimized transform and lighting functions.
• NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 256™ for the performance PC market. The RIVA TNT2™ and RIVA TNT2 Pro™ feature NVIDIA's award-winning, fourth-generation, 128-bit 3D architecture that has garnered more than 400 industry awards.
• NVIDIA Vanta 256™, Vanta LT and RIVA TNT2 M64™ for the mainstream and value PC markets. Also based on the award-winning RIVA TNT2 architecture, these processors offer low-cost, highly integrated choices for entry-level add-in card and motherboard applications.
• NVIDIA Aladdin TNT2™ for the sub-$1000 PC market. The first truly integrated, graphics chipset, Aladdin TNT2 redefines the possibilities for the lowest-cost platforms.

Reviews...

3D Blaster Annihilator Pro - When you want top speed at any price

GeForce 256 - NVIDIA's new "GPU"

Elsa ERAZOR X vs. ERAZOR X2
The Elsa ERAZOR X and ERAZOR X2 are both based on the Nvidia GeForce 256 GPU--the only difference is the type of memory. We put both cards to the test to find out whether the higher pricetag of a GeForce DDR is justified.

Anandtech on the 64 MB GeForce (April 6th, 2000 7:27 AM)
Wondering how NVIDIA's latest addition to the video card market performs? Have some general questions regarding the GeForce? Curious about the leaked 5.13 reference drivers? This review deals with all of these aspects as well as rates the value of the 64 MB GeForce card.

Microsoft adds Volume Texture Compression to DirectX
NVIDIA's technology to be used for 3D web acceleration

ATI Rage Fury Maxx
The Rage Fury Maxx represents ATI's first attempt at getting a slice of the lucrative high-end gaming market. Is it a worthy contender?


I'd love to do a full suite of graphics tests myself and see which is best, but I have had a play with Quake III on a couple of different setups including the Creative GeForce, Matrox G400 and the ATI Fury Maxx. The GeForce won hands down, which isn't to say the others wheren't impressive. I'd really have liked to get a better feel - seeing them render 3D Studio animations and re-drawing complex CorelDraw pictures. Until then I have to say, that GeForce looks tasty...

However! As I've mentioned before the Matrox G450 and G800 are due this spring and I had the chance to nail one of their staff to a demonstration system. After dire threats failed to get anything out of him, I pointed out the files I'd downloaded from Matrox's own site and he admitted they are planning an announcement shortly, but he was damned if he'd add anything further.

Interview with ATI's Rage Fury MAXX Product Manager

Savage 2000 - Serious gaming power from S3 at last?

A late contender arives in the form of GigaPixel who are promising bigger, better, faster using tiles.

A article at The Register tells us that the US 3D graphics specialist GigaPixel claims its GP-1 chip, based on its Giga3D architecture, has rival products well and truly licked on both image quality and performance. What makes GP-1 interesting is its use of a tile-based rendering scheme instead of the traditional polygon approached used by every other mainstream graphics accelerator. Apparently the GP-1 breaks a scene into a series of small tiles and renders each individually, which allows the chip to render a fully anti-aliased image without a massive processing overhead. Tiling the image also considerably reduces the card's bandwidth requirements by a factor of ten, increasing performance.

GP-1 is fully compatible with the Direct3D and OpenGL APIs, Haber said. The chip takes the polygon-based description of the scene and converts it into the sequence of tiles. Each tile is rendered and shaded as required then sent to the frame buffer.

Later reports, again at The Register, give the reply. Basically, it follows Gates school of thought, if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.

Also like the PowerVR series chips, it only processes visible parts of a scene

3dfx Investor meeting today in New York City
Company seeks approval of GigaPixel Corporation accquisition

I still remember the very first graphics card coming out, and years later paying over £300 for a 4Mb VRAM S3 card. (A lot then)

At some point I'll maybe dig out details of those early cards, a kind of homage to Oak, Tseng and all the over early innovators - who made life hell for us technies trying to support them in DOS and, worse Windows 3x.