6Sept99 Well, I guess you've noticed that ad banner right above this? It's the small price we'll pay to have the FSBench site hosted on AVSIM. It is a pretty good deal, really, when you consider the other options.

16Mar99 Ever want to use multi-monitors but didn't have an extra PCI slot? Matrox has announced the G400, spiffy little follow-up to the very good-looking G200, which can run two monitors at a time. Due Q2 99.  Thanks, MURC.

14Mar99 I haven't heard from anyone with a Rage128 who experienced the same problems that Dave Kelly did, so maybe his situation is unique.

Canopus is getting out of the video business completely, except that they will support all hardware they have made, they will still release driver updates, and honor the 3 year warranty.  Evidently they figure there is a lot of money to be made in "non-linear" (non-real-time) video program editing.

On the horizon now: the Voodoo3 (end of March), TNT2 (a very well-kept secret, due mid- to end-April), Permedia3 (Q2-99), and the Savage4 (Q2-99).  All do single-pass multitexturing, have very fast RAMDACs (to support high refresh rates at high resolutions, if your monitor supports them), huge memories (32 MB at least), and 32-bit rendering (except the Voodoo3).

11Mar99 Buy.com is taking preorders for the Voodoo3 boards.  The Voodoo3-2000 (faster than V2-SLI) is $100, and the Voodoo3-3500 (blazing) is $207.

Here is a Word97 files wherein Steve Christiansen debugs a problem with the TNT card.  Very informative, lots of details about the system settings that can influence how your card behaves. (260KB)

10Mar99 I got a very interesting email from Dave Kelly.  He just got the Rage128-driven Fury board.   Make sure you look at that groovy screenshot he took:

Hi Bruce..

I just installed an ATI Rage Fury 32 Mb into my P2 350....

some initial impressions you may be interested in...

On FS98..  I'm getting constant lockups after a few minutes of flying..
Have tried various driver sets including the latest ATI release drivers and
various BETA releases I've found.. . I use 3rd party panels exclusively..
Mostly Ralph Toffelemire's panels so it could be part of the problem, but
these are what I use.. and FS is locking up..

I also use X-Plane (open GL)  If you'd like to see what the ATI is doing to
X-Plane textures look at an image I uploaded
http://arundel.net/demos/atiRage32.jpg

I've been told it is a driver issue with the ATI drivers.. but why do most
Open GL games run fine with the ATI.... yet X-Plane seems to struggle with
many Open GL drivers..?
The creator of X-Pane always claims it is a driver issue but I have to
think there is sometimes more to it than that..  But I could be wrong..

Frame rates are excellent for the most part..  But most likely I'll go back
to my Permedia 2 till the TNT 2 or Permedia 3's are released..

Regards
Dave

Can anyone confirm this?

And another email from last week, from Graham Stewart, concerning 3D pauses in FS98:

During a call to FS technical support team in London today, I asked
them about the dreaded "Pause" issue.  I was taken through numerous
probable causes but there is no defined answer as we all know anyway.

I was assured that this problem will be fixed for the release of
FS2000 since they have a mass of data on file regarding the problem to
the extent it's been a serious issue.

I will personally adopt the "wait and see" attitude to this just in
case :)

Regards
Graham

9Mar99 Looks like the PentiumIII is not overclockable.  Anand and others have been trying, but can't get one to go more than 5 MHz over the rated speed, which indicates it is both bus-locked (=clock-locked) and multiplier-locked.  Celeron A's rule.   But hunt the web for K7 news if you're bummed about the PIII news.  It's looking to be a very sweet CPU.

Gamespot has an article about DirectX7 (well, D3D7).  It's getting more powerful, but will the programs comming out support all the fancy stuff it does?  I don't know very many programs that support everything D3D6 does (multitexturing, specifically).

Fly! has more screenshots and info available.  Clouds look nice (they didn't say what API was used to render those screenshots, I suspect Glide from the look of the alpha-blending).  No info on performance yet. Visit the AVSIM front page for more info.

Matrox has announced the G400.  Looks like a Rage128 clone, but it isn't.

The TNT2 is previewed.  Looks like it's the same advance over the TNT that the Voodoo3 was over the Voodoo2.

4Mar99 Tyler (Dynamix front man) posted a little teaser about SPP2000.  Here's the bit about the graphics:

Well this might as well be the time to pop the cork on a few things. I haven't heard anything about 1024x768 and don't think that's correct, but 800x600 will definitely be in PP2, which will definitely exist. There will also be additional 3D API support, details to follow. Transatlantic flight seems likely but isn't certain.

I'd bet the additional API is OpenGL, maybe the miniGL command set.  It's the easiest port from Glide, and isn't nearly so cumbersome as D3D.  That's be cool.  Open the sim up to a lot of people who'd like to try it but don't want to buy a new card.

31Jan99 There is a nice table detailing the features of the newest 3D chipsets by Joe Lux over on VoodooExtreme.

As most of you know, this site specializes in General Aviation sim performance.  Papa Doc (not the Haitian) runs a web site for Falcon 4.0 Benchmarks.   If you know of any other mil sim benchmarks, please let me know.

30Jan99 The SPP99 patch seems to be a winner.  I need a few links to Fly! sites.  If you know of a good, informative site, can you email me? And is there a release date on Fly! more definitive than just "March"?  Do we have a release date for FUIII?  And are there any other General Aviation flight sims out there or on the pike I haven't got?  I suppose I should do some benchmarks for X-Plane, if it is in a final version. 

By the way, if you want to know what I'm teaching this semester, visit http://bwilson153.sdstate.edu.

29Jan99 Here's the latest on the ProPilot 99 patch:

This is the v1.1 patch from Sierra. New bugfixes and features in this patch are:

• 1) Exaggerated over-banking tendency with banks greater than 30 degrees have been reduced.
• 2) Bonanza fuel selector, right fuel selection no longer drains fuel from both tanks.
• 3) Fuel consumption of all a/c have been improved for accuracy.
• 4) Excess ballooning effect when applying flaps (especially first notch of an a/c), has been adjusted in all a/c.
• 5) Attitude indicator's miniature airplane is no longer 1-degree pitch up when straight-and-level with a/c using an EADI, (B200 and 525CJ).
• 6) Trim wheel jitters with A/P ALT HOLD engaged has been smoothed out.
• 7) Trim adjustment for joystick; due to excess input with repeat, the smallest trim adjustment using joystick control was 2-3 times as great as using the keyboard and has been corrected.
• 8) Trim command effect can now be defined in the [Aircraft] section FLIGHT.INI for each a/c by assigning the ini variable names: "172Trim=", "V35=", "B58=", "B200=", and "525CJ=". Values can range from 1 to 32. The best way to create this entry is to run the program, then open the ini and enter the values (you will not see the field until you run the flight.exe once).
• 9) Excess tachometer values for the V35 and the B58, with throttle at idle has been corrected.
• 10) Speed brakes on Citation jet have been reduced in effect (about 50%).
• 11) Takeoff acceleration for all a/c is more appropriately modeled.
• 12) Rolling friction for all a/c is more appropriately modeled.
• 13) P-factor/slipstream effects are effective (with auto-coordination off).
• 14) Prop RPM on B200 is no longer entirely dependent on prop lever position.
• 15) N1 and N2 gauges now reflect spool-up and spool-down on the B200 and 525CJ.
• 16) Landing bounce has been dampened.
• 17) Excessive pitch up tendency when reaching airspeed at which elevator begins to lose effectiveness has been eliminated.
• 18) Wind milling effects engine rpm and is reflected on tachometer, with engine either on or off on prop a/c.
• 19) A feathered prop on either the B58 or B200 will now reduce drag, thus helping to eliminate the "yaw" of a "dead" engine, or the drag of two "dead" engines.
• 20) Vmca and Vyse are modeled more accurately on the B58 and B200.
• 21) Lift and drag characteristics in a/c have been improved in steep banks over 60 degrees.
• 22) Low altitude VOR's range over 18,000 ft is now domed to 19,500 if a/c is within 40 nm; whereas a terminal VOR's range is now domed to 13,500 if a/c is within 25 nm.
• 23) European waypoints are now displayed on GPS.
• 24) Propeller visual for the King Air B200: right propeller now rotates clockwise, not incorrectly in a counter-rotating fashion.
• 25) Spinning propeller after shutdown in the V35 and left-engine on the B58, if the prop advance for the appropriate engine was not positioned at full pitch, now stops.
• 26) Baron, and King Air prop animations can now be feathered with prop lever.
• 27) Nose-down camera rotation effect accompanied with braking with a high throttle setting now only occurs with the forward cockpit view active.
• 28) Stall warning is no longer a pulsing intermittent sound, toggling off and on incorrectly, but is now a constant sound, given that the stall warning is active.
• 29) Changing prop pitch on the King Air now has a discernable effect on sound.
• 30) Bonanza warning horn sounds if the throttle is retarded below 12 in Hg manifold pressure with landing gear retracted.
• 31) Baron warning horn sounds if the landing gear are retracted and either or both throttles are retarded below 20 in hg. This warning is disabled if airspeed is above 119 knots. With flaps full the warning horn will sound regardless of airspeed and throttle position if the landing gear are not down.
• 32) King Air warning horn sounds with flaps in Up or APR and N1 below 80% or flaps full and landing gear are up
• 33) Citation master warning occurs if gear are down or flaps extended and airspeed is over 186 knots; or if gear are up and airspeed is under 110 knots; or if flaps are fully extended and airspeed is greater than 161 knots; or if flaps are partially extended and airspeed is greater than 200 knots; or if flaps are on GND in flight, or on the ground and N1 is greater than 85%.
• 34) Artificial autopilot disengage warning sound has been removed, thus eliminating the five-second delay for the autopilot to disengage.

Primary Download Sites:
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe

Mirror Sites: (Mirrored Nightly)
ftp://ftp.epix.net/pub/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe
http://ftp.telepac.pt/pub/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe
ftp://ftp.saix.net/pub/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe
ftp://ftp.iol.it/3dfiles/patches/pp99101.exe

 

28Jan99 First, to everyone who has submitted Benchmark Reports, a HUGE THANK YOU!!!  Without your participation this site would be pretty useless.

I was surfing over at the MS FS98 web page, and noticed a lot of new content.  Okay, it's brobably been there for a long time, but I haven't seen it before.  The best of the new stuff was the Captain Hal's page, with lot's of tips and advice on configurations (did you look at the video card advice page?   Seem familiar?).  The Tips and Support page was pretty good, too.  And why isn't this site listed there?

27Jan99 There is a new logo on this page.  Click on it for more info.  And yes, it's simply to get my hands on FS2000 as soon as it's out so I can get the Benchmark tests for it set up.  I'll try to get Fly! and FUIII as soon as they are out also.  This semesters classes aren't as time-consuming as last semester, so I'm thinking or starting up the Audio News again.  Since my old encoder passed it's demo time limit, I'll need to find another way (I hope one that won't cost me).

I noticed that the Information page has become very dormant lately.  If you have a site that would be of interest to the sort of person who visits this site regularly, send the link to me and I'll be happy to add it to the info page.

The new video cards are getting some pretty good drivers.  There is still a TNT panel problem, and I've heard the Rage128 drivers are not optimized yet.  If you know of driver problems, let me know.

There is a new Audio News posted!   Click on the Daily Audio News link to hear it.  I know, I need a better mic.

And as always, if there is some part of this site you feel passionately about, and you'd like to contribute, let me know and we'll work something out.  Like the Report System, it takes more than just me to make this site worth visiting!

17Jan99 If you haven't noticed, Pierre has updated the Results page (actually, it was a few days ago).   Thanks, Pierre!

There is a comparative review of WWII combat sims at Gamecenter.   EAW wins! (and you always thought the Allies were victorious)

DirectX6.1 is done.  Look for it under Windows Update.  Probably won't do much for speed, but it should solve a few of those pesky bugs that crop up.

If you have $50, the Diamond MX-300 is a good deal.  Look for it at CompUSA.com (backordered, of course). The MX300 wond the advanced sound card shootout at Gamecenter.

13Jan99 There are some screenshots of Looking Glass's Flight Unlimited III posted over at Through the Looking Glass (an RPG site).  head over there al take a gander:

TTLG's first Flight Unlimited 3 screenshots are here! These are posted at the memeber-only site, FlightSim.com, and sent to us by MrMills. These look very nice to me, someone who never had much interest in flight sims. (All shots are 800x600 and 100-200 K in filesize)

Beechjet over Mountains #1
Beechjet over Mountains #2
Beechjet over Seattle
Lake Renegade #1
Lake Renegade #2
Mooney over Airfield
Mooney over Mountains
Mooney over Seattle
Seattle
Stemme over Flatlands
Stemme over Mountains
Download All Shots Zipped (1.5 meg)

I really hope that this will spark some interest in this game for the readers of this site, and even attract new ones. Please visit and participate in our Flight Series Forum!

8Jan99 Well, it's been almost a month since I last updated the site.  I've had a hectic couple of weeks at the end of the semester (writing finals, doing grades), then a nice holiday (which took up a lot of time), and now the semester is going again.  I'm writing an update to my Full Throttle article on 3D, so that's taking the rest of my time.  What I'm getting to is this: there won't be a lot of updates coming in the near future.

But I added a link (to the left) for viewing the most recent entries in the Report System.  I noticed that we have over 250 Reports now.  Very nice to see.

5Dec98 If you haven't looked at the new Results page yet, head over there now!  Pierre Poirier has taken over the Results page, and he's doing a nice job in making all the data in the Report System more meaningful and easy to read.   Thanks Pierre!  The Results page has always been the real center of this site, and I haven't had time to keep it up like I used to, so it's a real favor Pierre has done for all of us.  If others want to take over some other aspect of the site, please mail me and we can get you on board.

Some news about Fly! has come from one of the AVSIM.com forums:

One of the other big questions I see is regarding video resolutions. FLY! will support 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 in our initial release. There is, however, a caveat to 1024x768 support: some accelerator cards allocate their Z-buffer from the fixed video frame area. On cards that have a 4MB fixed frame buffer, you cannot allocate a 1024x768 buffer AND have room for a 1024x768 Z-buffer at the same time. Cards that have this limitation are the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 series (among others.) With current Voodoo 2 designs, you will be limited to 800x600 resolution; Voodoo 1 users will be limited to 640x480. If you have an AGP accelerator, you should be able to run 1024x768 with no problems. We natively support 3Dfx Glide and Microsoft DirectX (and NEC PowerVR, and Rendition Redline). There is nothing inherent with our design that limits what resolution FLY! can run in. We do, however, use custom artwork depending on the selected resolution while inside the game (i.e. in the cockpits and windows). If and when higher resolutions become more commonplace, you can be sure we will offer support for these technologies.
Richard Harvey
Project Leader
Terminal Reality Inc.

30Nov98 There is a Demo of Red Baron 3D now available for download at Sierra. It uses Glide 3D acceleration only.

Red Baron II Multiplayer lets you experience the excitement of World War I air combat against human players—across the room or across the world. Red Baron II Multiplayer can be played by one team against another; every player for himself; or even solo, to get used to the Red Baron II Multiplayer world. Depending on the game type, you may be assigned to destroy a number of enemy targets, or just to try to shoot down as many enemy planes as possible.

NVIDIA Corporation

21Nov98 A brief analysis of the effect rendering settings in FS98 have on performance.

What I did was use the FSB2 situation and record the frame rate with different display settings toggled off one at a time, to find out how much performance hit each had.  The system used was a P225MMX with a Creative TNT card and a Voodoo2 card, 1024x768, 16-bit color, and everything was by default turned on except cloud thickness effects.  I noted a couple things right off: Using the TNT 0.37 drivers, the TNT rates are slowed about 3-4 fps when text was displayed on the screen, including the "paused" message and the F-rate counter digits.   Add 3-4 FPS for a proper comparison to Voodoo2 frame rates.

So, as you see, most 3D effects come for free.  If you have trouble with frame rates during landing, the obvious one to turn off is Ground Scenery Shadows, since it will give you 10% more performance and not change the appearance of the sim very much.  textured Ground also has a large effect, but things look far worse with it disabled.  Textured buildings gives a small improvement with the Voodoo2 card, but probably isn't worth turning off.  Additionally, turning off the Aircraft Display settings had no effect on the frame rate during a cockpit view.

There is a nice general 3D card review over at Gamespot.

19Nov98 A Standing Offer: If there is anyone who feels passionate about some aspect of the FSBench site, passionate enough to take what's there now and develop it further, you are invited to sort of "take over" that area, to make it your own little fifedom.  The Results Page is already claimed.

I have come to realize that now that I have a real job, my time tending the site has dropped to almost nothing a day, and that isn't good.  Areas that could use some tending: 3D and FS news, the Image Comparison page, the 3D Glossary (maybe), and of course the individual card pages.

I keep working on that idea of a User News area, where you can add news items to this page, but I keep getting some very odd CGI errors and I haven't had the time to debug it yet.  Maybe this break I'll get the chance.

17Nov98 Lots of big news today.  First, the 0.25 TNT chip will probably be renamed to avoid confusion with the current 0.35 technology.  It is still due Spring 1999.

The Voodoo3 has been announced.  Sometimes called the Avenger, and due out in the Spring, 1999, it will come in two versions, the -3000 for gamers, the -2000 for office applications:

The Voodoo³-2000 will be the OEM-friendly silicon strapped with:

• 300MHz integrated RAMDAC
• Maximum resolution of 2048x1536 @ 65Hz
• 250Mtexels/s fillrate
• 125MHz internal clock speed

The retail-ready Voodoo3-3000 will come packing:

• 350MHz integrated RAMDAC
• 366Mtexels/s fill rate
• 183MHz internal clock speed
• Maximum resolution of 2048x1536 @ 75Hz

The early samples of the Voodoo3 are turning in some pretty amazing results, the goal being 60 fps for any game.  Quake2 is getting about 100 fps at 800x600.  The downside to the Voodoo3: still 16-bit color, chosen to keep performance very high.  For more info look at GameCenter, at www.voodooextreme.com, www.agn3d.com, www2.3dnews.net, and at the 3Dfx Voodoo3 site.

Savage3D cards are showing up.  Despite S3's tragic ViRGE, it looks as though they've fixed up the Savage3D to give some pretty good performance.  It hasn't been Benchmaked in FS98 yet.

nVidia announced thier next 2D/3D chip, the Vanta.  Due out next year, it will be aimed at a market less demanding than gamers, the broad OEM market.  This means the performance will not be top-flight (it will use the TNT core), but the chances are higher that you'll have one.  It also does hardware MPEG, DVD, video out, WebTV and propably other fancy video stuff they invent between now and its release.

And the ATI Rage128 chip, another contender for the 'Voodoo2-killer' title, is almost out as well.

There are (finally) some new TNT reference drivers (v0.41).  I haven't tried them yet.

And finally, for those who do things other than fly, Sierra's other big game, Half-Life, is due out this weekend.

14Nov98 Congratulations to Tim Parr for submitting the 200th Report in the Report System!

Here is an email I got with a solution to a vexing problem for some: The TNT cards, the cheaper ones, don't come with chip fans.  Some seem to get by fine, but others have experienced overheating problems that cause lockup after a couple hours.  Here's what sounds like a good solution:

Bruce, seems I have solved the TNT heat problem.

I purchased a Radio Shack 12v drum fan (2600 rpm Cat #273-260, $10) The fan opening is 1 in square. Placed just above the V 550 so as to blow air on both sides of the board-which is needed for the non heatsink side gets hot also. The unique position does NOT block the adjacent PCI slot like other chip coolers. Wow, this mother really blows allot of air and you can barley hear it.

If you have trouble picturing fan setup, you must go to RaidoShack and look at the fan. BTW, heat is a problem only when doing heavy gaming and it will increase the longevity of the card. I now run with my case closed. 

In addition, I think FS98 runs smoother since I have installed the fan.

Regards,
Gary Hinkle
ghink@mindspring.com

13Nov98 Well, I got my Creative Labs TNT card installed.  Took a bit of trouble because my old card, the Hercules Stingray, had a video BIOS TSR running, and I forgot to remove it.  These are very nice cards, and will be even nicer when the updated driver comes along.  I'm also going to try to work up a version of the Benchmarks for CFS.

And now, the winner of the Writing Contest.   Sorry the news of this is late, but I've been waiting for the second-place entrant to respond to my email (informing him that he won, and get permission to use his name, etc.).  But here it is, the Winning Entry.  It was a bit peculiar, because when I first read it, I didn't think it was as funny as I later found it to be.  It was submitted by Jim Kanold, and he chose the Stingray 128/3D video card as his prize.   Here it is:

Depression Elevation

   One uneventful night of searching and surfing the web for some specific details on depression, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys came to mind. I called up Infoseek to my browser and entered the following string into the search engine: "spends most of time in bed, Wilson" and hit enter. To my surprise only one link was displayed. The link was http://fsbench.bw.ml.org. Thinking this can’t be right and that maybe I had typed "bench" instead of "bed" I examined the search string and found my assumption to be wrong. Then, acknowledging this must be a valid site, I clicked the link.

   Real Audio, oh! good, a new Beach Boy tune. To my dismay I got someone who sounded like Chris Pirillo from http://www.lockergnome.com. (Check it out if you don’t believe me.)

   Searching further down into the posts I found out this Beach Boy also has a PHD and is a chemistry professor to boot. I thought I might take a minute to pass on, to the benefit of some of his students, the correct answers to some the quiz questions .

QUIZ 1

Chem112  Section 1

1.  What are the states of matter and how do they differ from one another?

The state of the matter is Pro Pilot 99 blows all other Flight Simulators out of the water.

How does it differ? Go to www.avsim.com and find out for yourself.

2.  Balance the following reaction.

              ATI + VOODOO2 ® PP99

These answers will induce passing marks from your professor.

   Since finding FSBench, I have upgraded to a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo II card @ $ 199.95 US. Seeing that I’m Canadian that’s $ 1007.31 up here. As well, I had to take out a second mortgage on my house to afford my new motherboard and a AMD 300 K6-2 processor just so I can fly a $50 flight sim.

I hate the day I ever found this malicious site.

I’m now more depressed than when I first came here and this tone deaf Beach Boy can’t even supply a link to his famous cousins' web page.

And now the sad luck story…

   The company that I have given my life to for the past fifteen years has gone tits up. I’ve been married three times. I have just been diagnosed with diabetes and two years ago, some brain dead idiot put a casino in my home town. I have yet to win a dime out of the place. I’m a looser, always have been, and always will be. I even get cereal boxes void of promised prizes. I am sure Bruce will Email me with the latest unfortunate news.

I should mention that the sad luck story didn't influence my desision at all.  I just put it up to show those who didn't win what real tragedy is.  Congrats, Jim.  I'll get the card in the mail right away (now that I have a TNT card in my system).

8Nov98 A reminder: the writing contest ends in two days (I had to extend it because in one announcment I said it ended on the 10th and in the others I said the 8th), so get to work, I've seen some of the entries and the competition is considerable!  Remember, the prizes are Sierra's Pro Pilot 99, and my old Hercules Stingray 128/3D card (I know, it's not such a great prize, but it should help some newcomer into the 3D arena). Read below (26Oct98) for the details.

Other news that I've not posted: CFS is out, to some pretty great reviews.  Seems that those aspects of the game that have to do with regular flying are very well done, and those that have to do with fighting aren't as good as EAW.  So the upshot of all this is that FS2000 looks to be a very good product.  I have no idea when we'll see that.  As you may remember, Fly! got pushed back to Q2'99, so for half a year, SPP99 will be the best thing out there.   Soem screenshots from FUIII also look marvelous, again I have no idea when it is due for release.  I think this may be the Golden Years for flight sim, where the competition has all the programmers on their toes, making sims better than we have dreamed might exist.

Later today I'm going to pull my Voodoo2 out and test SPP99 with my Rush card.

30Oct98 I've added Benchmark tests for SPP99.  Look for the link in the left-hand frame.

28Oct98 Remember, the Writing Contest entries are due 8 November. See below (26Oct) for details.

Therer is a curious article about the benefits of low-resolution at Redwood's.

The Red Baron 3D superpatch is out.   You can find it at 3DfxMania. Avault looked at the update:

The addition of 3D support is what makes this game a winner. The new textures give a better sense of realism than any of the previous installments in the series, and the game played very smoothly on my machine. A couple of anomalies do exist, however: you can still see the squares where the tiles were put together in order to create the terrain, and the muzzle flash of the machine guns is a little lame. Other than that the graphics do a great job of portraying the era and making the player feel that he or she is really flying. The cutscenes and option screens are very beautifully done, with pictures from the war interwoven into the menu system

CPU prices are falling again.  C|Net has a news blurb.

So the TNT people don't feel left out, here's the TNT tweak guide.

27Oct98 I should mention   that if none of the entries to the FA(wFE)WICLWFSBWC are judges satisfactory then I'll give the prizes to randomly-chosen entrants.

GameOver.net has a reivew of MSCFS. They were for it. BattleZone also has a review. They too were in favor.

Got a hankerin' to tweak your Banshee?   Go Here.

Got a 'nother hankerin' to overclock anything?  Go Here.

There are some new drivers out there: The Creative Banshee has a new Flash BIOS and some cards have new drivers, and the TNT cards have new driver sets this week. The G200 cards have new drivers. Sorry I don't have links to them individually, but there are many different makers, and by now you should have the driver page for your card bookmarked.

Here's an interesting comparison of 3D API's by Tim Sweeny, programmer of UnReal:

In an interview on Voodoo Extreme, I gave my opinion in the ongoing OpenGL vs Direct3D debate, and I wanted to add some more information here.

First of all, both our DreamForge partners working on the OpenGL support, and our Direct3D partner have both done a very high-quality job, given the constraints of Unreal and the 3D card drivers available.  My feelings on the two 3D standards are based completely on their API's and the quality of drivers available.

Next, I wanted to give some more detail on the code.

API support layer	Lines of C++ code
3dfx Glide	1711
Direct3D	3123
NEC PowerVR	4049
OpenGL	5697

Now, the Glide is the simplest, because it's aimed at the Voodoo family of 3D cards, which are very standard and straightforward to support.  For programming to 3dfx cards, Glide is the ideal API.  For people thinking "If Glide is so great, why don't other 3D cards support it?"  The short answer is, if Glide supported other manufacturer's 3D cards, it would pick up all the complications  involved in real-world Direct3D and OpenGL programming: Testing for core capabilities, working around driver bugs, etc.

The Direct3D code is next in simplicity.   It began as a working 1600 line driver, then expanded as it was optimized and support was added for 3D cards that lack key features.  The Direct3D API follows the traditional Microsoft model of being not very beautiful code, but dealing with real-world hardware robustly, by providing a capability-querying mechanism and well-tested drivers.

The PowerVR code is large because the PCX2 chip's rendering approach is very different than what Unreal was designed for.  This makes the implementation fairly complex, though the next-generation PowerVR, currently on-hold in the PC market while NEC focuses on the Sega DreamCast, is a great chip that's more traditional in its architecture, and more optimal for Unreal.

The OpenGL code is large because of optimizations and support for lots of real-world hardware.  If reduced to plain-vanilla OpenGL, this would probably be the simplest and most stable driver of them all, because the OpenGL API is very straightforward.

26Oct98 Well, there was something screwy about the cgi programs I found (they kept going to the floppy drive and locking up), so I don't have the User News up.  I'll keep working on it, though.

Anand has a very nifty article on the latest video boards tested on non-Pemntium II systems.  A must-read if you plan to upgrade your video without also upgrading to a PII system.

But more importantly, I'll have the SPP99 Benchmarks up in a couple days.  And in conjunction with that:

I'm announcing the First Annual (well, First Ever) Why I Can't Live Without FSBench Writing Contest (hereafter known as the FA(wFE)WICLWFSBWC)!  There will be two prizes awarded.   The winner gets his/her pick of the prizes, the runner-up gets the other one.   One prize will be a Hercules Stingray video card (6 MB, based on the 3Dfx Rush chipset; it's my old one), the other is a brand-spankin' new copy of SPP99! I will be the sole judge of the entries, which will be essays on the theme of "Why I can't live without FSBench".  There will be only one criterion of judgment: Is it funny?  Pleas for pity, appeals to my humanity, and hard-luck stories will be posted for whatever snicker-value thay may have, but the winning entries will have to be Grand Documents of Mirth, Merriment, and Fun.  No half-assed entries have a chance; these need to be Purlitzer-level humor, things that Seinfeld and Monty Python would be proud of.  So get to work, boys!  The winning entry will take weeks to craft, to hone, to perfect! The deadline for entry submittal is November 8th.  Entries must be mailed to me.

23Oct98 I finally figured out how to do the User News.  Look for it later today on this new page.

AVSIM.com has put up a nice little list of free demos of some military air sims, which was so good I cannot improve it:

Top Gun: Hornet's Nest by Microprose.
(25.1 megs) Download from Gamespot

F-16 Mulitrole Fighter by Novalogic
(24.3 megs) Download from Gamespot

IF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter by Interactive Magic
(27.0 megs) Download from Gamespot

Israeli Air Force by Janes/Electronic Arts
(53.7 megs) Download from Gamespot

European Air War by Microprose
(14.3 megs) Download from Gamespot

Falcon 4.0 by Microprose
(46.0 megs) Download from Gamespot

WWII Fighters by Janes/Electronic Arts
(56.3 megs) Download from HappyPuppy

F-15 by Janes/Electronic Arts
(59.3 megs) Download from Gamespot

21Oct98 Thanks to Jim Kanold for this:

Just an F.Y.I..  DX 6.01 is now available off the MS Windows 98 Update Site.   If you have already installed the Multimedia Update off the ZDNET site then you will not see the update listed.  Go to the top of the page and hit the show all button and you should now be able to see it.   It's about 1096 KB in size and is a "must get" if you are running DX 6.0.

20Oct98 I'm still working on the news updater program for this page.  I managed to crash the server Sunday afternoon testin git, so it may be a bit before it's working.

Dynamix is about to release RedBaron 3D:

Dynamix announced that Red Baron 3D has gone gold. Red Baron 3D, designed from gamer feedback to Red Baron II and featuring a 3D graphic acceleration upgrade and new massive multiplayer engine, will be available in retail stores later this month.

For this title, Dynamix carries the Red Baron series into the age of 3D graphic acceleration by maximizing today's technology to create a truly immersive experience. The new 3D acceleration supports Glide-compatible 3Dfx cards and creates a real experience with new cloud variations and layering effects. Other 3D improvements include new textures to enhance smoke, fog, sun-glare, explosions, anti-aircraft gun fire, trees and bushes for definition of low altitudes, buildings and planes. Red Baron 3D's new massive mulitplayer engine enables Internet dogfighting action for 50+ players in Melee, Team Melee or Red Baron Tag matches on independent or rogue servers. Won.net will also supports free internet play. Dynamix has also fine-tuned the flight models in Red Baron 3D to bring the most realistic replications to the simulation. Red Baron 3D will ship with support for force-feedback joysticks and will sell for $39.99. Owners of Red Baron II will receive a full rebate when they purchase Red Baron 3D. Red Baron 3D will be available at most software retailers, as well as through Sierra Direct at (800) 757-7707. A download of the upgrade will be available as a "Super Patch" offered on the Red Baron website, www.redbaronplayers.com and Won.net.

18Oct98 So here's the deal: I don't have much time to look over the web and see what's there of interest.  So I'm going to have you do it.  I'm looking over a couple cgi scripts that will allow you, who by now know as much about 3D as I do, to submit articles directly to the News page!   That way, when you see something interesting about a 3D video card (like new drivers available, an upgrade or release date) or about 3D flight sim (a demo is out, or patch) then you can tell us all.  I ask only that you post legitimate stories, with references and links.

13Oct98 Combatsim has a full review of SPP99. I quote from the article:

I have gone through their new simulator with a fine tooth comb, and enlisted the help of a commercial pilot to fairly judge the product. 10 hours of flying later, I have come to a conclusion. Not only is ProPilot99 a better flight simulator than FS98, it just feels right, like that broken in pair of shoes. Dynamix has done their homework with ProPilot99. They have included everything into their simulator that Microsoft ignored with FS98.

What we liked

• ProPilot99 offers a refreshing feel to flying. The controls are smooth and responsive, unlike the jerky FS98 controls. During stalls, aircraft ailerons are sluggish and unresponsive to controls.
• Cockpit detail is amazing. All aircraft start-up procedures follow the same checklists as do their real counterpart. All visible switches work, providing the proper functionality.
• Air Traffic Communications AND a co-pilot. Your co-pilot can take care of most menial tasks while you concentrate on flying including talking to the air traffic controller (ATC), changing NAV aids, and setting up your frequencies.

• The ATC can also give you detailed vectoring information. And it’s real, down from the weather information channel, right from ground control, air traffic control, departure control et al. You have communications with all flight service communication facilities during takeoff, cruising, and landing. And it’s done well.
• Gauges respond accurately to the environment as you climb and dive.
• Sounds were realistic, except for one part. However, all other acoustics will put a smile on your face.
• You are actually able to maintain straight and level flight, unlike FS98 where you’re constantly fighting with your trim to maintain altitude. Here is where ProPilot99 shines through. All available trim functions are visible and functioning.
• IFR and NAV flying are accurately done. Mapped terrain in ProPilot99 also contains all real life NAV and VOR beacons.
• ProPilot99 is more realistic to fly both internally and externally. The aircraft interacts with the outside environment in a more responsive nature. Turbulence actually looks like turbulence, it wobbles your plane around in the sky, not quick left and right jerks. Wind gusts moves your plane wings, requiring realistic aileron adjustment. Loose an engine in a twin, and your fighting to keep your plane in the sky, requiring immediate attention as your plane yaws towards the down engine. Rudder adjustments during this situation may correct your flight path, but your aircraft is suddenly sideways at an angle.
• Weather emulation of clouds is fantastic. Flying through clouds seems actually real compared to FS98 Lego blocks. This allows realistic IMC navigation with IFR navigation and landing. Cloud thickness is wonderfully simulated.
• External views at high altitude are done well. Graphics with 3D accelerated cards can take benefits of sun flares, wispy clouds, and maximum resolutions.

• Built in Flight Planner. This flight planner is neat. Plot all your waypoints. Where you want to fly. With what aircraft. Even generate weather for your flight for your departure and destination location. ATC will even vector you to your destination.
• Built in navigation aids. The program can help you set up for all types of navigation by auto tuning your NAV radios.

What we didn’t like.

• Terrain is second rate. Up close, it lacks detail, detail, and detail.
• Cities look too much like copies of FS98. We were hoping for more realistic looking buildings and structures.
• Certain realistic flight characteristics were missing or just plain wrong. During a dive from high altitude, you can both pull back and climb out of the dive or your controls are ineffective. Neither was consistent which leads us to believe that it’s all luck if you put your plane into a dive, you can pull out of it. In real life, try to pull out of a dive in a King Air at 300 knots and you’ll either rip your wings or your tail off.
• Try flying upside down. Normally, you’ll starve your engines of fuel but in ProPilot99, they don’t cut out.
• The Overspeed horn was non-existent or just not working. We hope they fix this for the release.
• Stalls are modeled well, but spins are not. All the aircraft do not want to spin. Hopefully flight models are unfinished.

• Multiplayer has not been incorporated into this program. We'll find out if it's planned or not. If not, it should be, it's a hoot in FS 98.
• Damage modeling is non existent. There are no damage points on your aircraft. All crashes are simulated by a smashed and burnt cockpit view. With today’s damage modeling being a high priority for most simulators, why can’t the aircraft have break points on the surfaces?

Why can’t I damage my landing gear if I land too hard? I should be able to damage my control surfaces if I fly too fast and my flaps if I try to extend them at high speeds. But unfortunately, there is no damage modeling in ProPilot99.

During long distance traveling, I found that for some reason, the aircraft had an unnatural desire to climb. This was most noticeable after using the autopilot. This was a beta release so I can only assume this is fixed on the release. I’m searching here folks, but you know what, I can’t think of anything else that this game is missing.

Know what this simulator needs? A full motion cockpit, 5 point harness, buttons above my head, and a stewardess tapping me on my shoulder asking me if I want the in-flight meal. Microsoft, be afraid, be very afraid.

12Oct98 Anand has a nice video card comparison.

There are some Voodoo2 D3D v6 drivers available at the 3Dfx site.  If you have a Creative Voodoo2 card, go to the Creative site for the beta drivers.

11Oct98 Tom's Hardware has a nice piece about benchmarking, if you're wanting to know what it's all about, and what it means.   Anand has an article on the same topic, also worth a read.

Since I have no experience with multimonitor, does someone want to write up a section for inclusion in the FSBench site (with your name prominently displayed at the top, bottom, or many times in between)?  I think this would be of interest to a lot of people with Win98 and FS98, expecially those who, due to upgrading, have multiple video cards handy.  Perhaps something that describes getting set up, hints needed to make it a success, what to expect in terms of performance, the best set-ups; things like that. Let me know, or respond in the 3D Forum (hosted by AVSIM, [thanks, Tom!]), and we can get a group discussion thing going.

10Oct98 Looks like SPP99 is almost ready.  It went 'gold' the other day, which means the code is locked, no new features, maybe a bug fix or two, but the dev team has signed off on it.  The program goes over to distribution for final installer packaging and testing, then they send the CD-ROM master off to some company who cuts the CD's, and puts them in boxes with the manuals, etc. Should be on the shelves in November.

And it looks like Fly! missed their deadline big time.  They now announce Spring '99, but I'm pretty sure they'll miss that, too.  Maybe we should just call it Fly? for now.

There has been some talk on the forum about implimenting some way of having the Reports in the Report System immediatly summarized in the Results page.  I think I know how to do it, but it requires a bit of ASP/Access/SQL programming, and more importantly, requires moving the server up to my desktop machine at South Dakota State.  I will finally have my net connection this week, and I'll test the server and see what happens.  If it looks okay, I'll move the site up here.  You won't see any difference in access, however, as I'll simply move the machine that fsbench.bw.ml.org points to.

7Oct98 It's been a while, eh?  If you are curious about what I do these days, head over to my chem class page, chem112.bw.ml.org.

AVSIM has some nice screenshots of SPP99, still in beta testing.  Looks very nice, especially for an older version of Glide.

Combat flight sim has gone golden, and is ready to duplicate then ship:

Microsoft today announced that Combat Flight Simulator, the highly anticipated World War II historical air combat simulation game, has gone gold. This means that the product is completed and is expected to start showing up on store shelves in the U.S. as early as November 5th.

Combat Flight Sim includes eight realistically modeled aircraft, each with its own authentic flight model and all featuring accurately detailed cockpits. CFS is built on the realism of the immensely popular Microsoft Flight Simulator engine, but with the excitement of air combat and head-to-head competition. Players experience real-world navigation, based upon historical information and atlas data. Combat Flight Simulator allows each PC aviator to define his or her own experience by choosing from a variety of aerial combat scenarios. Options include historical missions and campaigns, Free Flight and Quick Combat.

2Oct98 Looks like X-Plane has upgraded the sim.  I'll download it and see if I can get it to run on my Voodoo2 properly (if you recall I get black test in a black window during the first-time startup, and can't seem to select a plane to start in).

1Oct98 Hi all.  Sorry I haven't been around very much lately.  I was moving internet providers, and now my parents are visiting, so time is short.  Besides, there hasn't been very much 3D news lately.  There were some more TNT reviews up, more of the same as before, really.   What I'm waiting for is here in the Report System: the TNT cards.  Maybe there is a Banshee report by now.  I'm especially curious (for personal reasons) about how the PCI TNT does in a P200MMX system (like my own).

Just about all the new cards have new drivers this week.  Go to the respective manufacturer sites to find them.

GameCenter looked at 3D sound cards, becoming increasingly important as system performance increases.

If you want to overclock a Banshee, go here.

25Sep98 18:30 Guillemot has shipped their Banshee card, the Phoenix.

Voodoo2 fans should watch the 3Dfx site the next couple days.  The Direct3D v6 drivers will be posted in beta form.

23Sep98 22:12 Jane's has released a demo of WWII Fighters.  The best page for downloading it is at 3Dfxmania. It's 59 MB, and uses Direct3D.  Looks like CFS and European Air War have some competition.

21Sep98 21:30 Speaking of new, fast cards, the Banshee-driven Creative Labs 3D Blaster Banshee will sell for $130, with a $30 rebate.  This is a 16 MB card, and is the only card out that will be fully OpenGL, Glide and Direct3D compatible.  And almost as fast at the TNT.  Not bad! The only real drawback: 16-bit color, not 32.

And for the X-Plane fans, FastGraphics has looked at a bunch of OpenGL cards:

OpenGL thoughts. I've been benchmarking quite a few cards yet, and here are some of the impressions so far:

• The 3DLabs Glint Gamma / Dual MX cards with 96 Mb rule the scene.
• The Mitsubishi chipset on the ECLIPSE II is pretty cool too.
• The FireGL 3000 performs really bad, most of all considering its price.
• Permedia II performs excellent, most of all considering its price.
• Riva TNT performs worse in professional OpenGL applications than Permedia II, especially when the polygon count increases.
• The Intel 740 chipset performs really bad when the polygon count increases..
• I didn't test G200 yet (No ICD available in the near future according to Matrox).....

20:34 Here's a followup to Steve's letter, addressing the anti-aliasing in the STB TNT drivers, from Dave Whittingham:

The antialiasing option 4x4 Sub sampling would setup the case where you compute the picture to 1600x1200 and then
anti-alias the WHOLE image down to 800x600 - or maybe I mean the 2x2 Sub sampling - not sure. The idea is that things like the edges of the runways and taxiways and any other "skinny" polygons would appear to have much reduced jaggies and therefore the image quality would be much higher even though the resolution is somewhat lower than 1024x768. We do most of our Out-The-Window graphics (on a $4 million Evans and Sutherland ESIG 3800 system) with an image that is downsampled to 960x720 and displayed for the pilot to fly to. The lack of jaggies really makes the scene much more real especially for landing. Also, the antialiasing reduces the "dancing" of nighttime light points.

So if you didn't get all that, if you select 2x2 sub-sampling then your card really draws everything at a resolution that is twice as big as the display resolution, in both dimensions.  So if you are running in 800x600 mode, your card is really drawing everything at 1600x1200, then sampling back to 800x600.   This results in the 'jaggies' of straight, diagonal egdes being reduced to about fouth the size they would otherwise have been at 800x600.  It's a very nice techinique if you have the video memory and the rendering horsepower to do it.  The performance while this is happening is a little slower than if you were running the program at 1600x1200, so there can be a significant performance hit if you get to high resolutions.  I'm still not sure what 4x4 sampling is.  Maybe it only works at 640x480?  By the way, this sort of whole-scene anti-alising is a crude, brute-force method.  Some cards due before christmas advertize the more sophisticated 'per edge' anti-aliasing, where only selected egdes are antialised (by a sort of 'averaging as you travel down the edge' method, without as big a hit to performance, but needing a lot more silicon).  If you want to see an example of antialising, go to the 3D glossary and look it up. Dave also pointed out that his machine is sub-$1000, not sub-$100 as I'd listed below.  Sometime I say the dumbest things.  Thanks, Dave.

20Sep98 14:12 I just got a very interesting email from Steve about the TNT drivers, in response to my asking if anyone knew if the Reference Drivers were any better than the OEM drivers:

I tried the nVidia TNT reference drivers a couple of days ago, and was unable to decide if they were slower or the same in FS98.  Definitely not faster than the newest STB drivers.

One thing you might be interested in- while the STB drivers don't let you change the memory or processor clock speeds, they DO have several interesting tweaking options.  For example, you can allocate the on-board memory between frame buffer and texture memory.  For example, I could set it to 12 and 4 for FS at very high res (don't know much about the logic, just an example) or 4 and 12 for a low res game like IAF with lots of textures.  THat's a PCI-only option.  Other configurable options- the anti-aliasing method (wish I knew what that was, but options range from disabled to "Super-Sampling 4x4"), select bi- or tri- linear filtering, and some weird option "Direct3D Texture Addressing: Origin of Non-Filtered Texels: choices are Top Left Corner or Center.

There's also an OpenGL options page, allowing you to configure for "Best performance", "Best Quality", etc., as well as gamma.

The best part is that you can save and load different profiles for different programs, so if the settings actually make a difference (yet to be tested) this could be a very convenient feature.

All these options, but they are well hidden and documentiation doesn't explain any of them.  When I get a chance I'm going to play around with them to try to find the optimal FS98 setup.

In case you didn't know, there is an update to PowerStrip that allows you to OC the memory and chip on TNT boards.  At least one of the big three hardware sites (for me, that's Tom, Cyrellis, Anadtech) had an article on overclocking the TNT.  Probably in the next week I'm going to try to come up with a cooling solution of my own and play around with it.  It should be interesting to find out whether overclocking will have any effect with a relatively "slow" (K6-266 OC'd to 300 at 4x75) system.  If you're interested, I can keep you informed or post to Avsim.

Oh my, I wrote quite alot considering that I was just going to say that the reference drivers weren't anything special. ;)

Regards,
Steve "TNT-boy" Wisniewski
Founding Member of the Branch nVidians

08:25 Curious about what OpenGL is?  Here's a presentation from OpenGL.org that's very enlightening.

19Sep98 15:38 I don't know if you folks have noticed, but there have been a flurry of Reports coming into the Report System, mostly having to do with the TNT cards.  For example, check out Dave's report #147.  Very impressive results form a sub-$1000 machine!

18Sep98 19:00 AGN3D has a review of the TNT.  Very good review, it is.

07:08 NextGen has an article up about Plane Crazy, an aerial racing arcade game.

A review of the Diamond Viper 550 TNT card, preferred because it setup without a hitch.

A comparison of the Voodoo2 with the TNT.

GameSpot looks at the three TNT cards.

Creative Labs Banshee card, the Voodoo Banshee 16 MB, is due 10Oct, for $130.

17Sep98 06:49 Dimension128, a Riva site, has posted some TNT Reference Drivers.  Anyone know if they are better/more recent than the drivers you get from Diamond/STB/Canopus? Here's a TNT demo, by the way, 9 MB, let's you play with different 3D efects to see how they change a rendered scene (I noticed it over at VoodooExtreme).

RivaRave put up a review of the Canopus Spectra 2500, a TNT-based card.  They were for it.

Here are gome new G200 drivers (v. 4.24, from Matrox), maybe they'll fix the runway lights at night problem.

From everything I've seen so far, the TNT is the current leader in performance and image quality, at least when it's running on a PII with AGP video.  I haven't heard much about the TNT running on a P200MMX/PCI, though, so the Voodoo2 may still have an advantage there, I just don't know.  The Banshee isn't far behind the TNT in performance, and it's way ahead of the TNT in compatibility with 3D games/programs (the Banshee will run Glide games, the TNT won't, a big advantage if you play a lot of different types of games, including SPP99).

Speaking of the Banshee, here's what I got from 3DNews:

Joe H. sent some mail that will interest people interested in the CompUsa Diamond Monster Fusion (Banshee card) and MX300 (3D-Soundcard) for $199.95. Here is how to order it:

After talking to a CompUSA employee who accually reads this site (yes I had to pick up my jaw from the counter) said that he had still not yet got any info from inside the CompUSA system and his dept manager did not know a thing about it. So if you don't want to depend on your average staffer to get this offer set up, it is available on the CompUSA direct web site (http://www.compusa.com). Look under video cards (graphic boards) and keep paging until you find the Fusion/MX300 bundle at $199.95

You can also view the product page @ CompUsa On-Line store right here.

16Sep98 There is a review of CFS at OGR:

It is the graphics that truly sets MCFS apart. Running under a pair of Voodoo 2's allows for a crisp 1024x768 display that hauls in terms of frame-rate. The landscape is perhaps the best I have ever seen, rich in color and detail that really lends credence to the fantasy of flying over France or the English Channel. The terrain isn't simply a flat rendering either, as players will find valleys, rolling hills, small cities, and packs of convoy's snaking their way through the sea.

14Sep98 00:00 <---Audio news is up.

12Sep98 21:20 Well, I guess most of you have noticed that I don't have as much time to work on this site as I used to.   I'm teaching two Chem 112 lectures (General Chemistry for Science majors), and gave a quiz yesterday.  That meant I spent most of last night and a bunch of today grading and recording and sorting 380 quizes. (What was I thinking when I put ten quizes in the syllabus?!).  So like I said a while ago, if someone who knows 3D pretty well (they don't have to be an expert; I wasn't when I started doing this a year ago) wants to help out, has the time and a little html skill, head over to the Site Overview link and read The Plan thing at the bottom, let me know and we'll talk about getting you on the News team.

There is a new demo, this time F-16 Multirole Fighter, by NovaLogic. It's 23 MB. Uses Glide, or will do 2D.

Canopus says they'll have some drivers out next week for the TNT that will get you 20% more performance.  I don't know much beyond that, and don't know if the other TNT cards will benefit likewise.

HangSim has an updated demo.  It's hang gliding.   On your computer.

Here's a likk to an article on tweaking your system for gaming.  Maybe it can get you a couple FPS.

10Sep98 00:00 There is a comparison at Riva3D of the Voodoo2 v. the TNT.

There is a 24 MB demo of iF/A-18 Fighter.

FastGraphics (a great site) has done a big roundup of OpenGL cards.   Interested in X-Plane?  You'll be interested in this.

CPUMadness has a little rundown of the Q4'98 3Dcards.  A nice summary.

The Canopus Spectra 2500, the best of the TNT cards, can be preordered by mail for $190.

MURC has posted info on the new PCI G200 cards. Here is the info:

Marvel G200-TV PCI

Matrox Graphics Inc. today announced a PCI version of the Matrox Marvel G200-TV. An all-in-one video and graphics accelerator, the Matrox Marvel G200-TV now delivers equally high performance for 2D, 3D and multimedia video applications in a single PCI (or AGP) board design. Targeting home and business users, the Matrox Marvel G200-TV accelerates all 2D and 3D applications as well as offers unparalleled performance for hardware Motion-JPEG (MJPEG) video capture and editing, TV on the PC and out to TV. Fitted with 8MB of SDRAM memory and upgradeable to 16MB, the Matrox Marvel G200-TV is priced at $299 and will ship in Q4 1998

9Sep98 18:25 Looking Glass has a FUIII page up now, but not much content.

07:09 <---Audio News is finally up.

8Sep98 21:40 A bit of news about CFS (I got this from VoodooExtreme):

Microsoft today announced the official retail shelf date for the much anticipated Combat Flight Simulator.  Reaching software resellers' stores on November 5, 1998, Combat Flight Simulator is a World War II historical air combat simulation game that is built on the realism of the immensely popular Microsoft Flight Simulator engine, but with the excitement of air combat and head-to-head competition.

Combat Flight Sim includes eight realistically modeled aircraft, each with its own authentic flight model and all featuring accurately detailed cockpits.  Players experience real-world navigation, based upon historical information and atlas data.   CFS allows each PC aviator to define his or her own experience by choosing from a variety of aerial combat scenarios. Options include historical missions and campaigns, Free Flight and Quick Combat.

To view a special Combat Flight Sim AVI movie, listen to a collection of voice clips and sounds from the game, read an in-depth Q&A with the Development team, or get additional information visit the official Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator Web site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/combatfs/

Combat Flight Simulator will start appearing on store shelves on November 5th, for an anticipated street price of $55

I watched #62 fly into the stands on TV. Very cool.

Sharkey did some tests of the TNT on slower systems.  Seems that on a K6-2 the TNT was still a might slower than a single Voodoo2 at higher resolutions, and a lot slower at 640x480.  So, while the TNT may not be a full-fleged 'Voodoo2-killer' it is certainly a sweet card for flight sim.

Speaking of the TNT, Steve W. over in the 3D forum informs us that the current set of TNT drivers have real trouble with frame rate when the panel is displayed, but positively hum with the latest beta drivers.  Thanks for the info, 'TNT-boy'!

Brian Hook recently had some good things to say about the i740 and the recent drivers.  He tested a lot of boards for medium-density triangle rates, and the i740 won over all the cards he has (he probably has them all).  His conclusion: the driver-writers have done a marvelous job, turning a mediocre card into a good one.

7Sep98 00:00 <---Audio news is up.

6Sep98 19:51 Rather than post links to all the great TNT reviews out there, here's a link to a page which keeps track of these things.

00:00 <---Audio news is up.  There are some new MonsterII drivers out, head over to www.diamondmm.com for more info.

5Sep98 12:47 Sierra has a new site for ProPilot, www.propilot99.com.

Computer Games magazine has a fluff piece about flight modeling.  Instead of discussing the pros and cons of different techniques, they start with some grade school math and use that to explain European Air Warrior's flight model (which is said to calculate over 10,000 parameters) AOA method for calculating the flight path.  No surprise here.  He also mentions Flight Unlimited II's approach of calculating the path of the aircraft in the air, then letting the air move.  So does everyone else.  Like I said, a fluff piece.  In another article they name the Starfighter card (i740 in a PCI card) the best 2D/3D card to get.  Someone's behind times.

3Sep98 21:30 <---Here's the Audio news up a little early.

Tom's hardware has a big Voodoo2 article up, an excersize in how to choose among equals.  I say: price, then game bundle.

NextGen has previewed MiG29 Fulcrum. PCME reviews F18 Carrier Strike Fighter.

BXBoards reviews the Celeron 300A running at 450 MHz.

AGN3D reviewed the Hercules Terminator Beast (Savage3D chipset), which can be had for $119 (8 MB,retail).   Almost Voodoo2 speed for that cheap.  A good buy.

8 MB Voodoo2 cards will be in the $130 range soon.

I tried X-Plane on my system: I still get black text on black backgrounds, so I still haven't gotten the program started.  And I just tried IAF demo, but it did not go into 3D mode, so I'll find the setting and tell you what I see (that is, if it's worth a download).

08:46 There is a huge (60 MB) demo of Isreali Air Force over at AVault:

Jane's Israeli Air Force™ delivers the state-of-the-art in flight simulations with the best terrain ever seen on the PC. Finally, a realistic sim that lets you dogfight through canyons at low altitude with fast gameplay and graphic detail that redefines photo-realism. Fly the real Israeli planes with accurate avionics, realistic cockpits, and detailed 3-D shapes, then use real tactic including radar evasion and pop-up attacks, and coordinated air assaults using multiple formations. With both historical and hypothetical missions, the only way to get a more realistic experience is to join up.

X-Plane 4.15 is out, with a 16 MB demo or a 6 MB patch.  3Dfx support.

00:00 <--- Audio news is up a bit early.

Gamecenter put up a big new chipset comparison. A very good read.

Creative Labs will have a TNT card, which they hope will be faster than the Reference design.  Time will tell.  Also, there will be a faster version of the TNT coming out next year, with a higher clock speed. So far the TNT is beating everything except the Voodoo2 SLI running QuakeII.

2Sep98 00:00 <---Audio news is up.

1Sep98 18:54 Lots of news today:  There are some new Permedia2 drivers.

3Dfx Glide 3.0 is finally Official.   We've had it for months, but it's now supported.

TNT cards announced today: Canopus Spectra 2500, and 4 form ASUStek:

AGP-V3400TNT/8MB(SGRAM)
AGP-V3400TNT/TV/8MB(SGRAM)
AGP-V3400TNT/16MB(SDRAM)
AGP-V3400TNT/TV/16MB(SDRAM)

08:00 I just added a thing on the bottom of the Hints page about how to disable the video IRQ, for those who need another one in your system.

07:05 Mercury Research has published the latest bunch of D3D tests.  These tests are scorned by most gamers, but they are pretty good predictors of FS98 performance.  Here's a rundown.  Keep in mind many of these cards do not have DX6 drivers (like the Voodoo2) so the DX6 results a kinda screwy.

DirectX6		DirectX5
TNT	1550	Banshee	1290
Savage3D	1260	Savage3D	1190
i740	1240	Voodoo2	1140
Revolution IV	1170	Revolution IV	870
Voodoo2	1140	i740	850
G200	1080	G200	828
Riva128ZX	993	Riva128ZX	809
Rage Pro Turbo	895	Rage Pro Turbo	763
Riva128	887	Riva128	717
		V2200	607
		PermediaII	588
		V2100	383
		ViRGE	115

In the "oh boy another new chipset" Department:

Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:DIMD - news), a leader in interactive multimedia acceleration, today announced the SpeedStar A50 graphics accelerator designed for cost-conscious system integrators.

SpeedStar is an AGP 2D/3D graphics board based on the 6326AGP chip from SiS and is available in 4MB or 8MB of SDRAM memory with a 200 MHz RAMDAC. SpeedStar accelerates an array of popular 2D/3D business and gaming titles written to DirectX 5.0/6.0 and OpenGL.

Producing rich, razor-sharp gaming and smooth-running 3D business applications, Diamond's SpeedStar A50 features an AGP 2X interface running at speeds up to 133MHz and a wide 24-bit color pipeline for exciting gaming with fast frame rates.

Additionally, the SpeedStar has Z-buffer support with 8-bit stencil and per-pixel precision, full hardware triangle 3D setup with per-pixel texture perspective correction, trilinear texture filtering, fogging, alpha blending, primitive transparency and video texturing.

For fast, full color 2D performance, the SpeedStar A50 has compelling value with impressive, photo-quality color and resolutions up to 1600x1200 as well as high, ergonomic refresh rates to 200Hz. The SpeedStar A50 is upgradeable to Diamond's DTV 2000 TV tuner/video capture board and is fully optimized for Windows 98.

I can't begin to guess how this one will perform, but I'll add it to the list of cards in the Report System. If I've left other new chipsets out, let me know.

Cyrellis has a review up of the Celeron 300A ('Mendocino'):

It's plain to see that Intel has accomplished all of their goals with the Celeron 300 A, it's a fantastic CPU. We're talking super low cost for a super high return, as well as a super-extreme overclocking ability here. It's important to note that Cyrellis used an "OEM" version of the Celeron 300 A for testing, meaning that this is the type of CPU that will come equipped in pre-assembled PCs from various vendors.

Several overclockers that we routinely communicate with seem to agree that in the case of the Celeron class of CPUs the "Retail" models overclock slightly better than their OEM cousins. We've already heard reports of people taking their new Celeron 300 As up to the 504MHz level (4.5 x 112MHz) with proper cooling. Cyrellis was never able to achieve this speed, or even come close to it, but again each CPU manufactured is unique especially when they're comprised of over 19 million trace routes as the Celeron A is.

Also worth noting is the fact that we weren't able to select any other multiplier with the Celeron 300 A besides 4.5x, even with the Abit BH6 mainboard. The Celeron 333 A will be equipped with a permanent 5.0x multiplier, so it's really unknown how "good" the 333 A will be for the overclocking-motivated buyer.

...And so does CombatSim.

Here's a good bit of news: the Matrox G200 drivers are out will full support for the 3DNow! instructions set used in the K6-2.   In the past the G200 didn't seem to benefit much from the K6-2 (at least it didn't benefit as much as the Voodoo2 did).  Here's what I lifted from the 3DNow now site:

Here are the Matrox 3DNow!™ Drivers for the G200 from MURC. This is what the new version includes:

1) Full DirectX 6 support
2) Optimised for AMD K6-2 (3DNow!)
3) Full support for ALI Aladdin V and VIA MVP 3 chipsets under Windows 95

Special thanx to Shane and Eric for letting me know. Click here to download the Matrox G200 Drivers v4.12 for WIndows 95/98 - 1677_421.ZIP.

00:00 Audio news is up.

Gamespot has a big review of F-16 and MiG-29.

OGR previews European Air Wars, which has a nice demo you can download.

Ripped from AGN3D:

Over at Combatsim they have taken another gander and posted their opinions and screenshots of Falcon 4.0. On the other side of the sim web page market, PCME has taken their 3d look at Israeli Air Force (IAF) and written down more info as well as screenshots on the game.

31Aug98 21:54 Sharkey has looked at the Banshee Reference card.  It's pretty cool!

There exists a Permedia3 FAQ if you like that sort of thing.

Also, here are some informal game benchmarks (no flight sim) of the TNT-based STB Velocity 4400 (ripped form VoodooExtreme):

They aren't calling it a full fledged review, but it's not a preview either...but the guys over at MPOG have tossed up, ummm, their thoughts on the Velocity 4400, TNT based guy -- Lots of information here!   Here's a few of their benchmarks (done on a P2-333):

TNT Benchmarks:
Quake 2 (timedemo 1 demo1.dm2) @640 x 480 = 60.6
Quake 2 (timedemo 1 demo1.dm2) @800 x 600 = 56.6
Quake 2 (timedemo 1 demo1.dm2) @1024 x 768 = 39.9
Quake 2 (timedemo 1 demo1.dm2) @1600 x 1200 = 16.4

Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @640 x 480 = 46.1
Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @800 x 600 = 44.9
Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @1024 x 768 = 36.3
Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @1600 x 1200 = 16.2

Quake 2 Crusher Demo @640 x 480 = 29.9
Quake 2 Crusher Demo @800 x 600 = 29.0
Quake 2 Crusher Demo @1024 x 768 = 27.8
Quake 2 Crusher Demo @1600 x 1200 = 14.3

Turok @640 x 480 = 93.7
Turok @800 x 600 = 93.3

And their V2 scores:

Voodoo 2 Benchmarks (Single Board):
Quake 2 demo1.dm2 @640 x 480 = 72.8fps
Quake 2 demo1.dm2 @800 x 600 = 56.1fps

Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @640 x 480 = 52.2fps
Quake 2 Massive1 Demo @800 x 600 = 44.6fps

Quake 2 Crusher Demo @640 x 480 = 32.4fps
Quake 2 Crusher Demo @800 x 600 = 30.3fps

Turok @640 x 480 = 88.6

Voodoo 2 Benchmarks (SLI):
(SLI) Quake 2 demo1.dm2 @800 x 600 = 73.7fps
(SLI) Quake 2 demo1.dm2 @1024 x 768 = 64.5fps

(SLI) Quake Massive1 Demo @800 x 600 = 52.8fps
(SLI) Quake Massive1 Demo @1024 x 768 = 34.0fps

(SLI) Quake 2 Crusher Demo @800 x 600 = 32.8fps
(SLI) Quake 2 Crusher Demo @1024 x 768 = 32.5fps

(SLI) Turok @800 x 600 = 88.9

19:05 Terry Turner graciously submitted an Image Quality contribution for the i740 chip.   Looks like the alpha blending is a bit different (lighter) than most cards.

There is an interesting article called "Microsoft and 3D Graphics: A Case Study in Suppressing Innovation and Competition" you can read about MS's effort to keep 3D technology under it's control.

00:00 Audio news is up, long this time.  I talk about video IRQ's and video priority issues.

30Aug98 17:10 Below I include a very interesting email from Pierre Poirier about the relationship between views in FS98 with and without panels:

I recently changed PC and fooled a bit with different video cards: Asus I740 and G200.

The clear winner is G200 without a doubt. Look at my new results record no 112,113 and 114. It does not beat the VoodooII, but it is close. However, there is one area where the G200 beats it. I have an aircraft Kingair350, full blown panel.  Well, when i stand at Meiggs airfield and watch fps, here is what i found out:

with VoodooII
with panel: 16 fps (everything is at maximum);
less panel: 55 fps

with G200 with panel:
60 fps (same everything, maximum)
less panel: 60 fps. 

This would tend to confirm the theory that these panels are treated differently than the rest of the scenery.

Regards
Pierre Poirier

I think his observations confirm the advantage of two things: a card with a very good 2D sections, and AGP.   Panels can get very big (the amount of data, I mean), and they consume time being transmitted on the data bus.  Normally this isn't too much of a problem, but it can be a factor when the screen resolution gets above 1024x768.  I think this same advantage will carry through to the Banshee and TNT cards, and others when they show up.   Thanks, Pierre.

16:32 The first TNT card, the STB Velocity 4400, is now shipping:

STB Systems, Inc. ^® (NASDAQ-STBI), a leading supplier of multimedia and convergence products, today began shipping its groundbreaking new Velocity 4400^™ multimedia accelerator. The Velocity 4400 is today’s fastest and most powerful accelerator for 3D games and business applications. The Velocity 4400 has a suggested retail price of $199 with a software bundle that includes a complete version of the award-winning game Forsaken^™. The Velocity 4400 is the first accelerator available to feature the advanced RIVA TNT^™ (TwiN Texel) architecture from NVIDIA^® Corporation.

STB’s Velocity 4400, which will soon be available at Babbages^®, Best Buy^®, CompUSA^®, Electronics Boutique^®, and Fry’s^® features high-performance 128-bit 2/D graphics, high quality video playback, and impressive 3D rendering for Direct3D^™ and OpenGL^™ API’s. The Velocity 4400 has a 250 MHz RAMDAC that supports a maximum refresh rate of 160Hz. True color display of 16.7 million colors is supported at resolutions up to 1900 x 1280 for crisp, clear photo-realistic images. With this combination, the Velocity 4400 meets or exceeds global standards for ergonomics. The ability of the Velocity 4400 to display images on a standard television allows business users to deliver presentations, and game players to play computer games on a large format television in addition to a PC monitor. The Velocity 4400 is available for the AGP 2X or PCI platform with 16MB of high speed SDRAM, and is targeted at the high-end performance PC and professional PC segments.

Warzone has reviewed Red Baron II with the 3Dfx patch.

28Aug98 00:00 Audio news is posted.

27Aug98 21:32 Sort-of sim news: a new demo, Spacefighters, is out.  It's a shooter/sim game, runs under OpenGL, but will run on a Voodoo with the miniport.

Another 2D/3D chip is announced: the ATi Rage 128. From the spec sheet will be in the Banshee/TNT range, if you believe spec sheets.

The Canopus Spectra 2500 will be TNT-powered.

MSFS98 has plummeted from the top-selling game in November all the way to number 10.  Talk about longevity!

12:54 There are some new screenshots of SPP99 at GamePen.

07:28 Diamond has new drivers for the V330: Release Notes, AGP Drivers - 2.30MB, PCI Drivers - 2.30MB. Let us know over at the AVSIM 3D Forum (see link at left) how they run.

F22-ADF has a patch.

Some chap at GeoCities has a nice chipset comparison, which is recently updated.

S3 put up some Savage3D screenshots. No airplanes, though.   Just a flying saucer is as close as they get.

BuyComp is listing the 16 MB STB Velocity 4400 (a TNT card) for presale at about $160 retail, $150 OEM. Click on the link and look at the bottom of the list.

Tom's Hardware looks at the new 450 MHz PII'sm and the new Celeron "A" processors (the ones with the 128 KB full-speed cache).

00:00 Audio news is up.

26Aug98 18:05 Diamond announced they will sell a Banshee card, the Monster Fusion. 16 MB RAM, $150 for the PCI version, $200 for the AGP.  If you buy the Monster Sound card with it, you'll get $60 back.

PCGamer talks about video cards, with some PCI v. AGP thrown in.

25Aug98 21:25 I'm not doing an audio news tomorrow.  I can't think of anything to say!

17:34 Here is another review of a TNT card. They compare it to the Voodoo2 and the G200. 3Dxtc has a big review of the G200.

I ripped the following from VoodooExtreme:

ATI has released new beta drivers for their Pro Turbo chip.  Binky seemed to sum it up well: These are Beta OpenGL ICD Windows 95/98 Display Drivers Version Lonsdale b37f. Lonsdale b37f is a full Windows 95/98 driver set with an integrated OpenGL ICD component and DirectX 6 support. Make sure you check out the release notes before trying out the new drivers. You can download them from here.

00:00 Audio news is up.  Some site news is all it is, a request that if you know of some 3D news, post it on the AVSIM 3D Video forum (see forum link at left) or email me.  School will get very busy soon, and I won't have as much time as I've had the last few months.

24Aug98 13:05 Gamespot UK has a series going on 3D this week.  Today they have an article on the G200.  Look over there daily for more good stuff.

00:00 There is a new driver for the i740, supposed to be much faster then the old ones:

The secret is out. As a little treat for all you hard-core gamers out there Intel is releasing a special unsupported demo driver through my page. The boys at Intel came up with a way to increase Direct X game performance anywhere from 5-25%. Instead of sitting on this until the next official driver version is finished (once they're done the Unreal ICD I'd imagine), they decided to get it into your hot little hands as soon as possible. Now if you'd just kindly accept this little license you can start downloading the Spicy Driver.

23Aug98 21:35 This is cool: a non-technical review of the G200 over at GaGames.

The Number 9 T2R4 will come out in a--get this--32 MB version for about $220!

MURC jput up the second part of a G200 review they started a couple weeks ago. Pretty neat graphics for a review.  Ant does good work over there.

00:00 Audio news is up.  Not much new, though.

22Aug98 12:20 The Red Baron 3Dfx patch is out.  Here's some info from AVault:

3Dfx patch (8.3 MB)
FTP: RB2_3D.EXE - From ftp.avault.com

v1.05 patch (3.3 MB):
FTP: RB2_15.EXE - From ftp.avault.com

RivaRave has looked at the TNT-powered STB V4400.  The conclude it isn't a Voodoo2 SLI-killer, but that it is faster than a single Voodoo2, and has lots of 2D power to boot.

PCME got their hands on CombatFS:

The 2D-cockpit art in each of the aircraft is amazingly sharp. A 3D-virtual cockpit and the other views you'd expect to find in MS Flight Simulator 98 are present too. I liked the new visual effects of flak and smoke, as well as the fiery hot explosions. They've really added a lot more detail to CFS that you won't find in MS FS98. I only wish MS FS98 looked this great.

If you didn't know any better, you'd never have thought this was using the MS Flight Simulator 98 engine, until you had to deal with the interface. Even the frame rate on a PCI Starfighter board (Intel i740) with 16MB of RAM on a 266MHz PII with 64MB of RAM was a lot smoother than I had expected it might be at 800x600 and 1024x768!

More Exclusive Screen Shots from Combat Flight Simulator

00:20 The RealMedia versions are done.  Here are several versions.  The first one is the low-quality 32 kbps version, followed by the high-quality 80 kbps version.

00:00 There is a movie of Fly! at AVault. I'm downloading it now, and if I can, I'll convert it to realVideo and put it on the sight.

21Aug98 17:10 Here is something I forgot to deal with before the move (actually, I couldn't download the mail until today, so I couldn't get my hands on the graphic).  One reader, Allan Winsa, ran some Benchmarks on a PPro200.  Here's what he said. I quote it all because it's all pretty good.  His main point, that only FSB1 is really descriminating between cards, is correct.  This is the first time I've seen it demonstrated so well.   FSB1 is the only test that does not display the instrament panel.  FS98 is doing something odd when it draws a panel, something very un-3D-like.  It has to do with the way the panel is sent to the card.  Instead of sending the panel as 3D data (that is, a polygon and a texture), FS98 pre-assembles the panel as a bitmap, then bitblt's it over to the 3D card.  Most 3D cards have a very slow bitblt function.   I believe this is the primary reason FS98 behaves so much differently than other 3D games.  In a way this method serves as a great 'equator', making 3D cards run at a more similar frame rate than they would otherwise.  Of course, if there is no panel displayed the cards will show differences more readily.

Here's what Allen said:

Bruce,

I ran FSBench on my equipment which is: Pentium Pro 200MHz,
128MB, dual Voodoo 2 SLI, Matrox Millennium II, PDPI game card.

Attached is a chart of the results which I have entered in your
reporting system.

Per your information, I presume that when I ran the case
(Primary Display Driver (Direct 3D)), I was using the
Matrox Millennium II 3D drivers (which are enabled on
my system).

I ran both 800x600 and 1024x768.

Thus, I ran cases:
1. Software only
2. Matrox Millennium II 3D drivers
3. Voodoo 2 3D driver (disconnected one voodoo 2)
4. Voodoo 2 SLI 3D driver.

Note cases 3 and 4 are virtually identical -- which, makes sense.

Note case 2, 3, and 4 are virtually identical for FSBench 2
and 3. However case 2 differs radically from case 3 and 4
for FSBench 1.

My quick conclusion is that FSBench cases 2 and 3 which use
the instrument panel are "different" from normal 3D somehow
because all the cases were similar -- even the software only
handled these fairly well. I presume the instrument panel is
computationally intensive but uses simple 3D features. Thus,
the rate at which the instrument panel draws is CPU dependent.

However, the full screen view really shows the difference
between the cards (software only, Millennium II 3D, Voodoo 2).
Probably it does this because it uses most of the 3D features
that the better cards accelerate -- but poorer ones do not.

Although, most fly with the instrument panel "ON", those
cases do not seem to discriminate 3D cards. In fact, the
results may be almost 3D card independent (but CPU dependent).

I suggest that you consider charting your data for FSBench 1
because that may give the best picture of the real differences
between advanced 3D cards.

Also, please add a Pentium Pro column. Many work at home types
use the Pentium Pro -- and play games to. The Pentium Pro is
interesting because it has a different mix of cache speed,
floating point math speed relative to Pentium and Pentium II.

Thanks for any feedback you may have time to give,

Edward "Allen" Winsa
ewinsa@raex.com

16:39 There is a big chart comparing the features of about every 3D chipset made.

08:05 Tom's Hardware put up a comparison of the Banshee v. G200 v. Savage3D. Big article, the way comparisons should be made.  He also updated the CPU Roadmap.

One thing is for sure, the days when 3Dfx’ Voodoo2 was the only real thing for 3D games are going to be over soon. Two Voodoo2 cards in SLI configuration will stay on top for a longer time, but you have to spend a serious amount of money for it too. Getting a Voodoo2 right now is mainly interesting for Quake 2 players and people who are planning on upgrading to a second Voodoo2 card later.

07:48 Avault has previewed Fly!, the nifty, new GA flight sim:

All of this detail and interactive realism has a strong pull on the processor, and a rugged system will be required to get the most out of FLY!. In fact, the minimum specifications call for a mid-level Pentium PC with a 3D accelerator. The product will support a variety of APIs, including Microsoft Direct 3D and 3Dfx Glide, and take advantage of AGP-based video cards. The programmers are adding polish to the visuals as time allows, including lens flares, beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and full environment mapping on the planes, enabling the sun, clouds, and ground to reflect off the surface of the fuselage and wings. As if that were not enough, the correct moon placement and phases have been modeled, and the 400 stars brightest to the naked eye will be in their correct positions for the time of day, year, and viewer location.

• Accurate Great Circle Navigation system
• Fully scalable satellite scenery for increased ground resolution
• Dynamic scenery system with realistic vehicle movement
• Global Digital Elevation model database for realistic terrain
• Real-world flight models
• Detailed cockpit interiors with fully functional avionics and radio stacks
• Integrated Air Traffic Control system
• True time-of-day and passage of time
• Configurable weather system for complete control over flight conditions
• Built-in GPS navigation systems for each aircraft
• Extensive airport and NAVAID database
• Native support for popular 3D accelerators and Direct 3D
• Support for all popular joysticks and flight yoke configurations
• Internet support for flight parties and live microphone communications

00:00 Audio news is up.

20Aug98 14:03 There is a GameSpot preview of SPP99. Overall very positive.

00:00 Audio news is up.

19Aug98 17:00 There is a big benchmark test of the TNT card ar 16-bit and 32-bit color at the RivaZone. Looks like 32-bit color will cost about 15-20% performance, but with much better-looking video.

I didn't do an audio news last night (got overwhelmed with all the news) but I'll have one tonight. I won't cover all the news, just the big news items, and all the flight sim news I find.

Looks like rumors of the Voodoo2 rev3 board are true.   It's a redoing of the Voodoo2 Reference board to make it more stable at higher clock speeds.  The Voodoo2 chipset is no different, but the board is clockable to about 110 MHz (V2's are 95 MHz by default), a 15% increase.  No word yet on who will sell the rev3 boards, and when they will be on the market.

I realise this isn't all that helpful, but for those of you waiting for the TNT cards to show up, here is a Quake2 performance chart with a TNT.  Maybe it'll give you an idea of FS98 performance.

18Aug98 I'm back!  Listen to the audio news for a bit of blathering, if you want, because I'm surfing the web right now for all the news I missed in the last week or more.

Okay, lot's of news, commin' at'cha!

The Win98 Media Update is up in the Product Update link in your Start menu or the IE help menu.

PCME has a preview of the 3Dfx patch for Red Baron 3D. They quite liked it.

Riva3D has a look at the TNT running on a K5/133. It did an okay job, so it'll be pretty fast on a P200mmx or faster.

3Dxtc updated their continuing coverage of the new 3D chipsets.

Keep an eye out for $170 12MB Voodoo2 cards.   Electronics Boutique says that next month it will sell the Creative cards for that price, and maxiGamer cards will be $10 less than that.

PCFan compared a Voodoo2 and a TNT card.   The TNT drivers weren't up to par, but the TNT put up a good fight.  I think the TNT is THE card to use for flight sim.

Here is a Glide programming site, for those who want to know what the chaps over at Dynamix are up to.

If you have a Riva card, and need more performance, here is the Riva Tweak Guide.

Here's a comparison of the TNT, V3300, and the V2.

9Aug98 Wanna win a TNT card?  Go here, and have your wits about you!

Matrox posted some info about a jazzed-up verson of the G200, the G200SE:

Millennium G200SE Info

The Millennium G200 SE is specifically designed to work with the new wave of high res CRT 21" monitors which are able to accept video data at speeds of over 320Mhz. The Millennium G200 SE will be available exclusively through monitor companies such as Viewsonic as part of a special bundled deal with their new Viewsonic P817 21" monitor. Only with these types of monitors will users be able to achieve the extra resolutions and refresh rates offered by the Millennium G200 SE.

• Integrated 320 MHz RAMDAC for the
• highest screen refresh rates1
• Resolutions as high as 2048 x 1536 for
• high precision detail and unmatched image quality

There is some news about the Win98 update.  It'll be here 18 Aug, and it will be called the multimedia update, to clear up some confusion about what is in it.  Didn't clear up my confusion.

00:00 Audio News is up.  Short.

8Aug98 17:35 Gamers Alliance has a review of DX6 posted. Explains a lot of what is in the core, what's new in the drivers, etc. They conclude it's mostly a K6-2 patch of DX5 until better sound and video drivers come along.

14:30 Here is the new DirectX 6 Control Panel Applet. Save it right into c:\windows\system.

Looking to buy a used card?  AGN3D has a trading message board up for jus that purpose.

About SPP99: I just realized something.   It was programmed using Glide 2.43, which predates the Voodoo2!  That means there are a lot of questions I didn't need to ask, had I realized this earlier.  Your Voodoo2 card will still work, but it will be nothing more that a Voodoo with a faster clock.

02:40 I'll be on the #fsbench channel at irc.dal.net again Sunday at 0200 GMT (that's Saturday night, 9 Mountain)  Drop by if you have any 3D questions.

00:00 I just posted my thoughts on SPP99 and on the Win98 driver situation with DX6. So now I'm certain that a Voodoo card is entirely sufficient to run SPP99.  You'll need (or want) a Voodoo2 only if you run on a very fast PII, if you need the extra 30% performance, or if you run other programs that get a big benefit by using a Voodoo2 over a Voodoo.   Daily Audio News is over 16 minutes.  Sorry about that. I noticed a couple times I said 'Voodoo2' when I meant 'Voodoo'.  You should be able to figure it out.

Games.net has an article on DX6:

The guts of DX6 are six times smaller than DX5’s, and the remaining code has been optimized to handle a broader range of 3D functions. Microsoft claims this reduction and optimization will improve stability and speed. DX6 will also supposedly increase the number of D3D features available to most D3D accelerators. When 3D video-card makers talk about DX6 compatibility, this is what they’re referring to.

DX6’s goodies can be broken down into two categories. Phase one in DX6 includes CPU and 3D-performance tweaks. Then, possibly by year’s end, Microsoft will release DX6.1, which will include a broad assault on sound and positional-audio playback standards.

NextGen has a preview of SPP99:

The game will focus heavily on supporting 3D acceleration to provide the most impressive and realistic imagery seen. The engine will support cloud translucency and layering, as well as haze and sun-glare effects as long as you got the hardware to support them. The land formations have been created with the use of U.S. geological survey data to provide hills, mountains, canyons and bodies of water that are as true looking as they are in real life.

7Aug98 00:00 Audio news is up, talking about SPP99 3D features.  It seems the Voodoo card is completely sufficient to run SPP99, with the Voodoo2 being about 50% faster (Voodoo2 people will not see any extra features).

6Aug98 18:02 Cool!  FTP is fixed.  Sorry about the lack of updates there.  I'll have a big Audio News up in a couple hours, talking about what I've learned about SPP99.

PCWorld has looked at a bunch of 2D/3D PCI and AGP cards. A very big article, and a very good one, I think, concluding that you shouldn't run out and buy a new system just to get AGP; while AGP cards were always faster, they were not always better-looking.  They have some charts to help you decide if an AGP card is what you need for why you need.

STB is offering a $50 rebate on the BlackMagic 12 MB Voodoo2 card.

Hercules has announced their TNT-based card.

09:20 Well, I can't upload to the FTP server again (lousy peer-to-peer networks!) and so this news will be late.

I'll skip the Audio News for the 6th.  Next installment: when the FTP server is back up.

CombatSim has a review of X-Plane. They liked it.  A lot.

There is another roundup-preview of the next generation of 3D accellerators at Meccaworld.

Next-Gen put up a definition of bump-mapping.  Which I'd described it that way in my Glossary.

Longbow 2 got a patch.  Go here for info.

Diamond is taking preorders for the TNT-based Viper550.

New i740 drivers.

5Aug98 17:00 Canopus is making a TNT card, too, 16 MB, a little more than $200, out in September, along with the other TNT cards.

I'll address the topic of DX6 and the relation of core drivers to device drivers, and why we simmers aren't seeing much improvement in the Audio news for tomorrow.

I'll be packing up and moving to South Dakota next week, so I'll be incommunicado next week.  No site updates, no email read or answered, no audio news.

11:38 As Basil pointed out after examining the drivers on his system, which has since been confirmed by Dylan at Creative, the newest 3Dfx Reference drivers do NOT contain elements of DirextX 6.0.  Sorry about that.  They do contain the new Glide 3.0.

According to 3Dfx, the DirectX 6 goodies are also coming up in their next driver release.  The current driver doesn't have any DirectX 6 optimizations, but DX6 and a DX6 driver (including multitexture and multiple-TMU support) are scheduled for the next release.

Early reports in the newsgroups has DX6 providing about a 10% performance advantage with DX6 drivers.  This gain isn't seen in 3Dfx card yet, for obvious reasons.

Cyrellis took a gander at the Banshee. Alpha board, so it'll be faster.  I suspect that Quake people will really miss the second TMU, but flight people won't.

Bjorn has some early specs on the Rendition V3300, due early next year.

00:00 Audio news is up, very short this time.

4Aug98 19:09 Both C|Net and GameCenter have editorials about thich Voodoo2 card is best. It's very strange because (1) they came out the same day and (2) all Voodoo2 cards are the same, so what's the point? And what Really funny is that computers.com has one too!

17:10 For those keeping track, 3Dfx today has released the final version of Glide 3 for the Voodoo and Rush (single and dual) cards.  These are the Reference drivers that contain Glide 3 and D3D v6, for Win95 and Win98.

Gamespot looks at the Riva TNT. It beats a Voodoo2 in Direct3D, but not in OpenGL. They do say that the TNT will ship with OpenGL drivers--no waiting.

11:28 PCME has a pre-release review of the WWII combat sim Screaming Demond over Europe.

00:00 Daily Audio News is posted.

There (or should that be 'their') is at SimFlight a column by Trev Morrison about what he saw of CFS and SPP99 demoed at Oshkosh.  There is some good 3D info if you get past the lousy English.

You can get the final DirectX v6.0 core files for Win98 here.   This is the same as the 0318 core. No drivers, though.

3Aug98 18:03 Voodoo Nation has some fundamental theory articles up:

Fundamentals of Visual Perception
I have met quite a few people that seem to think that the human eye cannot distinguish frame-rates above thirty frames-per-second. The following article delves into some of the concepts behind human perception in an attempt to discover the truth.

Releasing Physical Memory
One area where Windows95 falls down is in its ability to manage system memory for the current generation of demanding games. This article will help you to unlock that precious physical memory.

Video Buffering
Covers double and triple buffering techniques.

17:51 I added an entry in the glossary for triple buffering I wrote my entry before I say the Voodoo Nation article, really!).  I'll talk about it in the Audio News, as well as the influence of monitor refresh rates on your FPS.

GameCenter looked over a beta version of the Banshee:

Based upon our tests, it looks like 3Dfx isn't kidding when it says that Banshee has a Voodoo 2 core. The board we tested performed exactly as you would expect from a Voodoo 2 card overclocked to 100 MHz, lacking a second texture unit, and souped up with SGRAM. The higher clock speed and faster memory translate to faster Direct3D and Glide benchmarks than Voodoo 2, while Quake II, which takes advantage of Voodoo 2's multitexturing prowess, lags behind.

Just as Banshee performs like a Voodoo 2 card, its image quality is also like that of a Voodoo 2. Games look great, but overall there is a slight overfiltered look to things. It is worth noting, however, that because almost all 3D game development over the past year has been done on Voodoo cards, games running with Voodoo Banshee are likely to look just as the developer intended.

Get DirectX 6 here! This link will take you to the Win95 verison.  If you have Win98, you should use the Product Update feature to get it, but DX6 isn't listed there yet.

09:30 Diamond announced they will sell a Riva TNT board called the Viper v550, a 16 MB card in both AGP and PCI versions, for $200.  They claim it's 36% faster than any AGP card, and 46% faster than any PCI 2D/3D card (they didn't included the Voodoo2 in the comparison). It's the PCI version that interests me, because with local texture memory, it shouldn't be much slower than the AGP versions with normal programs.  Of course, with large-texture programs the AGP will show it's stuff.

I'll hang out on #fsbench at 9 p.m. Mountain tonight, if you have questions.

00:00 No one showed up at the chat, so maybe it isn't needed.  I'll regularly get on the #fsbench IRC channel on the irc.dal.net server, and announce when, so if you do have questions drop by.  I don't expect very many at a time.

Results tables are updated. Audio news is pretty short today.

2Aug98 14:15 I wiped out everything to do with Parachat. I never got it to work.  I'll have to find some other good chat client. So no chat there tonight.  Instead I'll open up a channel on the dal.net servers, #fsbench.  I believe you type /join #fsbench in your IRC client to get there.  8 p.m. Mountain time. If you don't have an IRC client, click here. The server I use is irc.dal.net:7000.  #avsim is on the same server.

There is some news about the upcoming Cyrix Cayenne CPU, with improved FPU:

The Cyrix Cayenne is Cyrix's next-generation processor core. CPUs based on the Cayenne core may be the first ever to leapfrog over Intel's processors, in terms of speed and performance. The weak FPU that plagued the original 6x86 and 6x86MX will completely dissapear in this new core, and these processors should be able to easily match Intel's Pentium II in any 3D application.

The Cayenne will feature a fully pipelined, dual-issue floating point unit and 15 new multimedia floating point instructions (called MMFP) to enable the highest-performance 3D graphics, DVD and 3D audio.

00:00 <--Audio news is here.

1Aug98 19:52 Anand has a little ditty about the new CPU's coming out. Pretty good read if you're considering upgrading more than the video card soon.  There really are some nifty little chunks of silicon on the way. Anand has some very cool 'CPU Quick Ratings' that make me wish I had thought of the idea.

Dying for DirectX?  Here is the DirectX6 core only.  No video or sound drivers, but it appears to be the final version of the core.

13:23  So what's in DirectX6?  Gamers Alliance has some info:

These are some of the advanced features of Direct3D:

• Switchable depth buffering (using z-buffers or w-buffers)
• Flat and Gouraud shading
• Multiple lights and light types
• Full material and texture support, including mipmapping
• Robust software emulation drivers
• Transformation and clipping
• Hardware independence
• Full support on NT
• Support for the Intel MMX architecture

00:00 <---Audio news is up.

31Jul98 21:08 Hardware Central has a list/comparison of all the 'Next Generation' 2D/3D cards, what they can do, etc.

DirectX 6 was finished today.  That is, the development team signed off on it.  Distribution now has it, and they will take a day or two to get everything packaged for release.  Then we get it.

12:41 First, welcome to all the SPP fans, who, with the recent announcement of 3D support, find they are more interested in 3D than they were yesterday!

Gamers Alliance has some screenshots of Red Baron 3D posted.

Looks like the Creative RIVA TNT will sell for $200 for the 16 MB card.  Good price, for what you get.

Dimension3D has a thing on Bump mapping. I haven't read it yet.  I will, and will redo the entry in the 3D glossary if it's any good. They also have an article on non-linear z-buffering, a trick supported by the Permedia3.

There are some benchmark results (non-flight sim) of the STB Velocity 4400, the TNT board they are going to sell

01:02 Tyler (over at the AVSIM SPP forum) confirmed that Red Baron 3D is Glide only.  Very interesting choices, over there at Dynamix. I'm not saying it's a bad or a good choice, just an interesting one.

00:00 <---Lot's of news today in the Audio News. When I refer to DX6 and Glide 3 coming out tomorrow, of course I meant Today, Friday.

30Jul98 19:49 I thought I'd say something about the SPP99 desision to go with Glide as the 3D API. (See the Glossary if you didn't understand that sentence).

The Glide API is probably the best-developed and fastest 3D API around.  Brian Hook (now at id software) helped write it, and it's a fine job.   Programming SPP99 in Glide made for a quicker release and a faster game, but it also means that only Voodoo, Voodoo2, Rush, and eventually Banshee cards will run it (and there is another non-3Dfx card which is supposed to support Glide, but early testing isn't so good).  So unless Dynamix recodes for OpenGL (the next-most-logical API to use), a lot of 3D card owners will be out of luck.

So I stand by my assertion in the Audio News that SPP should have waited until SPP2000 for release, because then they could have done the OpenGL port, or at least an OpenGL miniport, and let everyone have some fun.

19:03 Well shut my mouth and call me dumb!  One day after I say I hope SPP will wait 'till 2000 to release, they come out and say it'll be SPP99, with 3D support through the Glide API!  Here are some details, ripped from AVSIM (click on the link to read a bunch more):

Q: What is the feature set of Pro Pilot '99?
A: Here are some of the features:

• NEW - 3D graphic acceleration- Glide compatible 3Dfx based cards
• NEW - Ground texturing
• NEW - Special effects for atmospheric conditions
• NEW - Cloud layering and transparency
• Six aircraft:
  • Cessna C172P
  • NEW - Cessna C172R
  • Beechcraft Bonanza V35
  • Beechcraft Baron B58
  • Beechcraft Super King Air B200
  • Cessna CitationJet
• NEW - Movable control surfaces: flaps, rudder, etc.
• NEW - Pop Up Operator's Handbook
• NEW - Performance Data & Checklist, developed in conjunction with NAFI
• NEW - Text based tutorials on flight maneuvers and Virtual Flight Tours
• NEW - Personal Notes
• NEW - United States, Western Europe and Canada
• Over 3,500 airports
• NEW - Taxiways with lighting
• Flight Planning Wizard
• Select and click access
• Choose from any airport for departure and arrival
• Select VORs, NDBs, Victor Routes and airports to plot course
• NEW - Automatic route generation
• Weather information
• Flight information on Fuel Consumption, Duration of Flight, etc.
• Navigational Aids such as VORs, NDBs, ILS
• Global Positioning System
• Audio Air Traffic Control
• NEW – Beginner assistance
• NEW - First Flight Assistance (Audio Co-Pilot assistance)
• NEW – How to Fly Manual
• Complete Flight Companion book
• On-Line help
• Thirty training videos

RELEASE DATE

Q: When will it be in stores?
A: October 1998

PRICE

Q: What is the price and will there be a rebate?
A: The suggested retail price is $49.99. There will be a $20.00 rebate for previous purchasers of Pro Pilot '98 until December 31, 1998.

PERFORMANCE

Q: What is the system requirement to run Pro Pilot '99?
A: The minimum requirement is a Pentium 133mhz, 4x CD-ROM, 200MB hard drive space, WIN 95/98, 32MB RAM, SVGA @ 256 Colors, WIN 95 Sound Card, mouse, IBM compatible machine.

GRAPHICS

Q: What 3D graphic acceleration is supported and what will it provide?
A: Pro Pilot '99 supports Glide compatible 3Dfx based cards. The following enhancements are provided by acceleration:

• Sun glare
• Bilinear filtering (image smoothing)
• Alpha blending (transparency)
• Mip mapping
• Adjustable visibility and haze
• Faster frame rate
• Translucent clouds

POP UP OPERATOR'S HANDBOOK

Q: Is there any assistance available while I am flying?
A: The Pop Up Operator's Handbook was developed in conjunction with the National Association of Flight Instructors (NAFI). It is a menu system that allows a pilot instant access to crucial information during flight so that the simulation is not interrupted. The P.O.H. is accessible in 3D acceleration mode. This online handbook provides the following assistance:

• Performance Data & Checklist for each aircraft
• Text based tutorials (48) on flight maneuvers which have been validated by NAFI
• Ability to share and reference Virtual Flight Tours with other owners of Pro Pilot
• Ability to view Personal Notes (text and graphics) of your choice
• The POH is extremely flexible and open to user modification

GEOGRAPHY

Q: How were the United States, Western Europe and Canada recreated?
A: Over 38 million elevation points from the U.S. geological survey data were used to insure precise elevations of mountain ranges and terrain. This creates a three-dimensional real world quality, and true-to-life viewing of your favorite mountains and terrain while flying. You can actually fly into the Grand Canyon and though valleys. Microsoft is based on a flat terrain model with objects placed on top of that terrain. Almost like setting polygon objects on a table top.

Q: How many metropolitan areas are included?
A: Thirty-five major metropolitan areas so accurately detailed, it's like looking out the window of a real aircraft! Each city is reproduced in photographic detail. The surrounding areas cover an additional 20 square miles. That's over 14,000 square miles of photo realistic terrain.

13:16 Avault has previewed CFS (this one's a must-read):

The strengths of this title go on and on. The thing that impresses me the most about MS Combat Sim is its implementation of real world terrain. This game is unbelievably beautiful. The development team is using a completely redesigned MS Flight Sim 98 engine, and the game will be one of the first titles to support DirectX 6.0, all in 16-bit color. This truly is what you would expect from a next generation flight simulator engine. In most sims the ground is something that gets in the way during bombing missions and dog fights. In MS Combat Sim the ground houses some of the most interesting terrain ever seen in a game. The development team has accurately modeled the terrain in 3D from Berlin to London and most of Western Europe. Using no instruments, only actual roadways, rivers, and landmarks, players can fly from one destination to another. Visit historical landmarks such as the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower, and even bomb Parliament if you desire, all in beautiful 3D. The real world environment will include hundreds of accurately modeled objects, such as moving locomotives and vehicles. All objects will react appropriately to their design as well; have enough firepower and you can blow up Big Ben.

• Massive, historically accurate 3D world
• Hundreds of 3D modeled landmarks, buildings, and vehicles
• Total realism, realistic flight and damage modeling
• Adaptive campaign playable from both the German and Allied forces
• Direct 3D support using Microsoft's DirectX 6.0
• Incorporate 3rd party add-on scenery and planes
• Over 20 accurately modeled aircraft
• 16 player multiplayer support over LAN, 8 over modem
• Completely configurable controls and views

Dynamix has PR blurb about Red Baron 3D (scheduled for October 1998 release):

Dynamix, part of the Sierra family of brands, today announced at the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh the upcoming release of Red Baron 3D, featuring 3D accelerated graphics and massive multiplayer combat.

This new software title allows players to enter the cockpit of an authentic World War I aircraft in a 3D experience more detailed and realistic than anything previously seen or imagined in a flight simulation program.   

Part of Sierra's award winning ACES(R) series of historical wartime simulation products, Red Baron 3D creates a dynamic virtual world with an awe-inspiring sky in which gamers will encounter realistic smoke, fog, sun-glare, explosions, anti-aircraft gunfire, buildings and planes. Bullets will riddle the side of their planes, shattering wood and shredding canvas. Distant sirens and church bells will echo through the air, warning the enemy of the planes' approach.

For gamers of all skill levels and interest, Red Baron 3D is an epic recreation of the men, machines and war that marked the birth of aerial combat. Players are convincingly swept back into World War I as a pilot for France, Britain, America or Germany. Players select a wartime enlistment date, country of preference, squadron and plan. As a pilot fighting for their country, the player can rise through the ranks to become a top ace of the war by completing challenging missions. To achieve this goal, pilots must survive anti-aircraft gun fire and enemy squadrons while completing consecutive missions. Players continued progression through the campaign mode may change the outcome of the war.

Fly! has a Preview at GameSpot:

Well, TRI's Fly! promises such technical superiority over MS Flight Simulator in almost every area that it will put Flight Sim's success to the test. Because if technical merit really does influence a product's success in this market, Fly! should steal a big chunk of Flight Simulator's audience.

What will Fly! have that Flight Sim doesn't? How about detailed terrain, full-fledged air traffic control, a flight planner, state-of-the-art engine with 3D support, and a more authentic instrument cluster. TRI is going full-bore to load impressive features into Fly!, because MS Flight Simulator, with its massive support for third-party planes, scenery, and add-ons, is going to be a tough king to knock off the hill.

In addition, Fly! will have five primary scenery areas modeled in great detail, using satellite imagery. These will include San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, and one other city. Here you'll find detail approaching that in Looking Glass's Flight Unlimited II. In order to include more cities than that product, some sparse areas are modeled using fairly low-resolution imagery of 100m/pixel. However, downtown areas and areas close to airports will be modeled with 25m/pixel or better accuracy. TRI is collecting extensive databases of the world's airports, so you'll find virtually all nonprivate airports in the US and thousands of others around the world in this sim. Your hometown might not be there, but its airport will be. The scenery formats are being made available to developers, so look for many other areas to become available in add-on packages, shareware, and freeware. A third-party European scenery CD is already planned for launch.

Look for a detailed weather environment as well. You'll see cloud layers, variable winds, rain, snow, and ice. In addition, a real-time weather mode will download current weather info for the continental US from the Internet and let you fly in current weather conditions. The detail of sky modeling extends all the way to the 400 brightest stars, which will be in the proper positions to allow you to actually navigate by dead reckoning should your instruments fail. Phases and position of the moon are accurately modeled as well.

Almost like they've never heard of any other flight sim, eh?

29Jul98 20:43 I have the 30Jul98 Audio News done early so I can play with NT Server.

14:37 Creative announced that they will be selling a Rive TNT card called the Creative Blaster RIVA TNT.

PGR has a list of features in DX6 that the Permedia3 will support:

Direct3D 6 Support
- Single-pass, full-speed, dual texturing: 250MTexels/Sec
- 3 TextureStage operations in a single pass
- Single-pass, full-speed, bump mapping with surface texture
- Single-pass, full-speed, tri-linear filtering
- Single-pass 8-tap anisotropic filtering
- Sort-independent full-scene anti-aliasing
- Flexible Vertex Format supported natively
- Driver-Free Vertex Buffer processing
- Virtual Textures: hardware texture paging
- Permedia3's Non-Linear Z-Buffer supported transparently
- W-Buffering emulated using Permedia3's Non-Linear Z-Buffer
- Stencil planes (up to 8 bits)
- Hardware Guard-Band Clipping

OpenGL 1.2 & Extensions
- OpenGL 1.2 compliant ICD - Includes 3D Textures
- Multiple Textures Extension - SGIS multiple textures extension supported "out of fab"
- All OpenGL blend modes in hardware
- Softimage compliant

07:57 There is a web site that deals with the new 2D/3D accelerators. It's called the 5th Dimension, and it's kinda new and rough around the edges.

07:48 There is a bit posted about KNI, Kitami New Instructions, the Intel version of 3DNow!. Looks like KNI will have more than double the number of instructions, and some will execute faster than the equivilant instruction in 3DNow!.  But will those 70 intructions be useful?  There are a bunch of MMX instructions that are never used.  Did Intel add insturctions just to say they had more?  We'll know when the programmers start using them.

00:00 <--click here for The Audio News.

28Jul98 21:02 Another G200 review, this one at 3D Hardware (one of the remnants of Operation3Dfx). They liked it.  A lot!

AGN3D put up a whopping big review of the Banshee.

For performance testing I used my P2 300 computer running Windows 98 and Direct X 6.0. I did not do extensive testing on the card since this is Alpha silicon, but I think I did do enough testing for you to get an overall picture of what to expect.

	640x480	800x600	1024x768
Quake	59.9	39	24.4
Quake 2	53.9	37.2	23.6
Incoming	65.49	57.39
Forsaken	100.76
Turok	104.4
Speedy	560.92

In the end I think the TNT and maybe even the Savage3D may come up with better performance numbers, but I do not think it will matter. The Banshee has what is most important in the gaming market, software support. With the full library of existing Glide supporting games at it's disposal the Banshee will be coming out with the largest installed base of 3D supporting games for a 2D/3D device. This in the end will be what I consider the reason for the Banshee's upcoming success.

And here is part of an interview done with Wayne Do, Product Marketing Manager for Banshee. 

Do you think that the Dual-TMUs of the TNT are going to offer it a big performance advantage over the Banshee?

They claim 2 pixels per clock, but the 2 pixels per clock is not enabled when they do multi-texturing there is a huge performance overhead.

Does the Banshee have any advantages over the Voodoo2 as far as through hardware support?

There is one feature that the Banshee has that the Voodoo2 does not have, and that is dynamic environment mapping. And the reason why Banshee has it is because we have a unified memory architecture, which allows us to do this. What the feature simulates is the rendering of an image behind your field of view, and the ability to mirror it in front of you. We have two camera perspectives, the camera in front of you and the camera in back. The camera behind you will generate the image in front of you, and the image in back of you can be rendered into memory and textured into the image in front of you. So this would allow for true hardware mirroring.

16:24 A very nice article on Strips and Fans is up at one of the PowerVR sites. I've revised my Strips and Fans entry in the Glossary because of it.

13:07 Cheap 12 MB Voodoo2 cards (the Flash 3D 2, $170) at Hightech Suppliers.

From the latest Computer Games, flight sims coming out soon (they are all 3D-accelerated):

Fighter Squadron: The Screaming Demons Over Europe (Activision).  WWII fight flight sim, physics-based flight models.  Fall 1998.

Aces of the Pacific II (Dynamics).  WWII Pacific fight flight sim, updating of the first one.  1999.

Isreal Air Combat (Jane's Combat Simulations).   Recent-history fight flight sim.  When you fight a campaign, you jump from plane to plane, battle to battle, to win the war, not a career medal.  August 1998.

WWII Fighters (Jane's Combat Simulations). Fight the Battle of the Bulge above ground.  Of course they had to include a way to model real clouds. September 1998.

Apache Havoc (Empire Interactive). Modern helicopter sim, specializing in realistic cockpits.  Fall 1998.

Camanche Hokum (Empire Interactive). Small recon/light attack copters to compliment Apache Havoc during multiplayer. 1999.

Fly! (Terminal Reality).  Civilian General Aviation.   All Pro Pilots functionality with 3D graphics and multiplayer.  Winter 1998.

F-22 Total Air War (Infogrammes). Very modern (it's an F22, isn't it?) flight fight sim, in the same vein as F-22 ADF and Harpoon II.  Fall 1998.

Fighter Dual 2.0 (SPGS). WWII, lots of aircraft, realistic physics, multiplayer dogfighting.  Winter 1998.

IF/A-18 Carrier Strike Fighter (Interactive Magic).   Modern carier fighter, F-22 on water. Summer 1998.

Dawn of Aces (Interactive Magic).  Online fight flight sim, WWI, like Warbirds but done with canvas wings. Falll 1998.

Ultrafighters (Interactive Magic). Futuristic fighting, with some action. Fall 1998.

Flight Unlimiter III (Looking Glass Studios).   General Aviation sim, I don't know what's different. 1999.

European Air War (Microprose). WWII fighter sim, good models, demo available.  Fall 1998.

Falcon 4.0 (Microprose). F16 sim under development for a decade. Available in the future.

Gunship III (Microprose). Apache, Cobra or Comanche battlefield flight sim.  Multiplayer with M1 Tank Platoon II. Summer 1999.

Top Gun: Hornets Nest (Microprose).  F/A-18 fighter sim, lightweight.  Wintrer 1998.

Combat Flight Simulator (Microsoft). WWII figher flight sim, FS98 with guns. Fall 1998.

F-16 Viper (Novalogic).  F-16 fighter.  Play online against MiG-29 Fulcrum and F-22 Raptor, both by Novalogic. Fall 1998.

MiG-29 Fulcrum (Novalogic).  Same as F-16, but the other side. Fall 1998.

Nations: Fighter Command (Psygnosis).  WWII fighter, can to arcade action or accurate detail.  Spielbergian.  Spring 1999.

Luftwaffe Commander (SSI). Career of a German fighter pilot form Spanish Civil War through WWII. 1999.

SU-27 Flanker 2.0 (SSI). The Russian version of Falcon 4.0. Winter 1998/1999.

F-16 Agressor (Virgin Interactive). Be a mercenary with an F-16 in Africa. WInter 1998.

Big list, eh?  Did you notice that FS2000 and ProPilot II (or whatever they are called) are absent?

12:46 I updated the Glossary with entries for Level of Detail and Tessellation.

08:41 Sorry about the Audio News not being there.  I had it in the wrong directory.   It's fixed.

Gamepower has a review of TeamApache. They liked it.  Said that the multiplayer aspect of the game was very immersive, graphics ran well on Pentium systems, but that the scenery is bland and the network timing needs a little tweaking.  You can grab a 24 MB demo here.

The helicopter behaves pretty much the way you'd expect it to, with ground effect buffeting, reduced tail rotor effectiveness at high speed, and altitude loss during pitch maneuvers. The sense of realism is reinforced if you use a force-feedback joystick. On the other hand, it was awfully easy to land the airframe even after losing part of the undercarriage in combat.

The most complex part of the game really comes from your interaction with your team. You can control up to six AI or human-operated Apaches, and you can order them to perform more than a dozen different commands in support of the mission goals. Mindscape even gives you control over the formation -- invent your own patterns and create a library of them for future use.

00:00 Audio News is up. More Banshee reviews, at Boot.

Here is Brian Hooks presentation it SIGGRAPH.  Cool but technical stuff on what 3D holds for the future. It's a PDF document, so have an acrobat reader handy.

27Jul98 18:25 More on the Banshee, this time from GameSpot.

17:03 DirectX 6 isn't coming today.  MS posted that the rumors of DX6 release today are false, and said we'd get it when it's done, which means a week to 3 months, usually.

14:07 3DfxWorld has an article on why 3Dfx releases Reference Drivers.

11:47 HardGame.com has an article on 3D soundcards, the point of which is that 3D sound cards sound great, and that some do it with far less overhead (that is, do it with higher video framerates) than others.

No DirectX6 yet.  I tested a beta copy of it (with no video drivers), but found FS98 performance identical to DX5.  So I have to wait for the release version to test it for real.

Tom's Hardware compared the top-end (and I mean the very top end!) CPU's: the Merced and the Alpha.

Jeremy at AGN3D got a Banshee card to play with:

The following benchmark numbers were from a run on pre-release silicon with Alph 2.3a drivers on a Pentium 2 400 CPU running DirectX 6. Final silicon and drivers results should be much higher.

3D Winbench 98 (Note: Run with VSync Enabled)
640x480 = 1360
800x600 = 1160
1024x768 = 855

Business Graphics Win98
1024x768x16 = 203
1024x768x32 = 190

High End Graphics Win 98
1024x768x16 = 224
1024x768x32 = 237

Game Gauge Total = 555.19 (Note: Run With VySync Disabled)
Forsaken = 192 fps
Incoming = 82 fps
Turok = 87.5 fps
F22 = 49 fps
Quake 2 = 63 fps
Quake = 82.3 fps

I plan on doing extensive testing of the banshee on my Pentium 2 300 today, so stay tuned for a full preview. If the numbers that I get are anywhere as good as what 3Dfx is reporting above, 3Dfx will once again remain at the top of the 3D market.

Click Here for a full-size image of the card

09:03 There is another site for 3D hardware, ViperWorld. They have a news page and an image comparison page (head on over and help out!), also.  Looks like the entire site concentrates on nVidia produces, kinda like a RivaRave for FS.

There is a hang glider and a paraglider sim here. Both are 3D-accelerated.   I haven't tried them yet. Uses Direct3D.

00:00 Not much news today, and a not very inspired Audio News is up despite it.

The big-time 3D first-person shooter, Sin, has a 33 MB demo out.  Go to GameCenter.com for a list of download sites, or to VE, Op3Dfx, or AGN3D for more info.

26Jul98 14:00 Cyrellis has a review of the #9 Revolution IV (16 MB, AGP, $170), based on the Ticket to Ride 4 (T2R4). Tested at 70% of it's intended clock speed, it seems a little slower than the G200 in all respects. And it's image quality, like the other 32-bit cards, is superb.

I'm pleased to see so many new Reports being made in the Report System.   All of them are FS98, and many are with newer hardware.  Thank You All!   I'll try to add them to the Results Summary Tables in groups of 10, or when I get the time.  Until then, you can look through the Reports yourself

25Jul98 14:56 <---- I got the 26Jul98 Audio News done early.  Turned out to be pretty huge, 15 min long.  I'll post it now, and might do a second Audio News for 26Jul98 if needed.

14:24 There is a demo out of Jet Fighter: Full Burn. I haven't installed it.  45 MB.

13:48 If you want to know the difference between a Voodoo and a Voodoo2, try here. Questions the descriminating Voodoo2 shopper should ask.

Tom's Hardware has an article on running maximum 2D performance with a Voodoo/Voodoo2 card in your system. The trick: use a two-input monitor.

10:44 Got Questions? Confused? Need help on your 3D card? Visit the 3D Forum, sponsored by AVSIM.

09:25 Bryn, over at the FS News page, summarizes the news from the different FS sites that post news.  He's added this site.  And by the way, here's a new graphic you can use to link to this site.

A reminder, do you have the Lucida Handwriting and the Trebuchet fonts installed (in c:\windows\fonts)? This site looks best if you have these fonts on your computer. It also helps to set your default background to white instead of gray (as it defaults in some older browsers).

Well, about 30 people have voted, and I'll keep the Daily Audio News.  It's fun to do, a lot easier than typing, and makes updating a lot faster. The numbers are: 70% listen always or sometimes, 30% never or can't.

Microprose released a 15 MB demo of European Air War, a D3D WWII sim, a decendent of the 1942: Pacific Air War:

Take to the skies over Europe during the most dangerous days of World War II. Pilot 20 authentic fighter aircraft from Great Britain, Germany and the United States. Defend the skies of southern England from waves of German bombers, fight off harrying Messerschmitts while escorting B-17s deep into the heart of the Third Reich, or engage in savage dogfights over France. Unsurpassed graphics and a dynamic game world will captivate you in this sequel to the critically acclaimed and award-winning 1942: Pacific Air War ®.

From VE: Your Voodoo2 not fast enough for you?  Wanna risk burning up your board for 2 fps more performance?  Well, here's an Overclocker (by Gary Peterson, v1.4.00, adds a Display Properties tab) that's built just for you:

Several people have asked if I would make the Upper and Lower Voodoo2 Graphics Clock limits user programmable. Okay I want everyone to be able to use this utility to their best advantage so I've added the ability to the Installer (V2OCINST.EXE) to tell it what you want the Upper and Lower limits to be. Of course I do want this thing to stay within reason (who defines that?) so I check the Upper and Lower limits you pass to the Installer and force them to stay within a reasonable (very wide) range. Okay so what are these ranges? Well I've been asked for a very wide range so I gave it to you, PLEASE DON'T DESTROY YOUR BOARD JUST TO SEE HOW FAST IT CAN RUN. The Lower Limit range is (60-90), the Upper Limit range is (95-120). This allows you to adjust your graphics clock 30 mhz either side of the factory default 90 mhz setting. If you can't destroy your board with these settings I don't know why not ???

00:12 Anand has an updated 3D card review up.

Intel's new technologies are announced.

Default video settings not good enough for you?   Feel a need to max out your visual performance?  Get TweakIt.

00:00 I still can't get either the Win98 'speedup' nor v4.11 of X-Plane to work.

23Jul98 11:00 To those who cannot hear the Daily Audio News, if you want to hear it you'll need to click on the Real Audio link above and download the RealPlayer (either v.5 or G2 beta).   I'll try to keep all the essentials of the news here in print, but some details will only be found in the Audio News, along with my take on some of the news items.   The links will all be here, but rarely (as has been in the past) my interpretation of the content of those links.

10:03 I've posted a Special Edition of the Daily Audio News. Well, I have the requirements for X-Plane, but I have some trouble getting the program to actually run. I'll keep at it.

In the mailing list someone suggested that with Win98, uninstalling and reinstalling FS98 gave a 20% perfomance increase.  I tried it, and got exactly the same numbers as before.  I did learn something about busmastering IDE drivers acting funny under Win98, though.  Listen to the Daily Audio News later today for the details of both my Win98 and X-Plane experience.

00:00 Audio news us posted.  I'll try to do the news at 10pm Mountain, midnite Eastern.

Big news for the Voodoo owners: X-Plane 4.11 is out with 3Dfx support!  Goody goody!  I can work on Benchmarks for them, finally! Listen to the audio news tomorrow for a report on how 4.11 rund on a Voodoo2, as well as the news on the FS98-Win98 speed-up proceedure.

CPUMadness has a in-depth report on the AMD K6-2.  It's looking like Intel is going to lose some P2 market share to these little baby's, because they keep up with the P2 similarly clocked in business apps, and equal it in games then the API's use 3DNow!

Speaking of Intel, they've announced some new processors and stuff.

The lads at VE say the 27th is the DX6 birthday, not the 24th. I don't have an official proclamation.

Riva3D has been investigating Dx5 v. DX6.

Not only is there a 25% increase in speed (which you should see on your RIVA cards as well), but the drivers are also more robust. With DX5, I had the option of either 640x480 or 800x600 in fullscreen. With DX6, I now have 320x200, 320x240, 400x300, 640x480, and 800x600 in fullscreen. Next up is Final Reality 3D Fillrate:

As you can see, the fillrate was significantly increased under DX6. The other rates were slightly faster, but not significantly so. And finally, we look at Forsaken:

Again, a nice increase of 24% over DX5. It looks as if DX6 is going to live up to the hype, and if the easier programming is a reality, DX6 will make a significant impact on your gaming this year.

22Jul98 15:34 Whew!  Finally got the upload going again.  Here's a bit from 3DNews that i just plain ripped off:

After reading what Gary McTaggart posted in his .plan file yesterday talking about bump mapping and what the PowerVR guys are up to, Jean Salvati of 3DLabs dropped me some email with information about the Permedia3 that is pretty interesting:

...So here is some information on the Direct3D bump mapping modes  implemented in PERMEDIA 3.

The "preferred" bump mapping method with PERMEDIA 3 in Direct3D 6 is  the bump map embossing method mentioned by Gary McTaggart. From what I  understand, 3Dfx and NVIDIA are also pushing this method.

In addition to the fact that it gives very nice results, the embossing  method has two advantages. First, it can be emulated on almost any  chip (using several passes in most cases). Second, the basic algorithm  has been known for a while, and it's well documented: for example,  there is an OpenGL tutorial with some sample code on SGI's web site.  For these reasons, we expect bump map embossing to be very popular   with developers.

PERMEDIA 3 includes dedicated hardware to perform bump map embossing.  This allows it to perform bump map embossing AND texturing in a single  pass. In other words, in Direct3D 6, PERMEDIA 3 will be able to render a scene with a bump map and a separate surface texture in a single  pass.

Even though we expect embossing to be the most popular bump mapping  method with developers, PERMEDIA 3 has also been designed to support  the two other Direct3D 6 bump mapping modes: "dot product" bump  mapping, and bump environment mapping. In particular, the "dot  product" mode can also be used to perform bump mapping and texturing  in a single pass with PERMEDIA 3.

If you hear a rumor that the TNT has one of the texels crippled, it's false.

I'll do another news update later today, and I'll call it the news for the 23rd.  I'll  just skip the news for the 22nd.

09:43 I still can't upload my pages, but by the time you see this I will be able to.

VoodooNation has a 3D Video Terms guide, much like my Glossary, but different.

Looking for an i740 card?  Proceed yonder.

21Jul98 20:52 Matrox released a whole new set of drivers for about every card they sell.

Anand has a preview of the Savage3D up now.

The Revision 'A' Savage3D reference board that S3 graciously supplied AnandTech with for testing ran with 8MB of SGRAM at 125MHz which is its rated clock speed, meaning the board itself was physically running at its full speed. The chipset, once released, will be available on boards offering configurations of 4MB or 8MB of local RAM at an unbeatable price of around $100 for a 4MB card and no more than $150 for an 8MB card. Compared to the Riva TNT's estimated street price of $250 the Savage3D has a nice little niche shared currently only by Matrox. Matrox's availability advantage is obviously the Achilles' heel of the Savage3D, hopefully, for S3's sake, this weakness won't be present for long as the market's watering mouths are beginning to shift to other alternatives.

17:42 <--Audio news is updated.  I'm having trouble uploading, so this is late.  There are some G200 screenshots in the Image Quality comparison.  Very good looking, even at 16-bit color.  I did not include any 32-bit color, because it would be just too good looking and cream the other cards.

There is another 3D accelerator in the distance:

Compaq's PowerStorm solutions accelerate technical 3D applications for professionals with demanding graphics rendering requirements. There are high performance graphics options that will be available in the PowerStorm line this year. A new midrange graphics solution provides best in class performance for Digital Content Creation (DCC) and CAD applications at an affordable price. This solution is based on the Evans & Sutherland REALimage 2100 SD chip technology, which delivers up to 4 million primitives per second and renders filtered, MIP-mapped and textured polygons at sustained rates of up to 90 million pixels per second.

09:38 And just a reminder for you Excel 97 owners:

(1) In Excel 97, open a new blank work sheet.
(2) Press F5 and type X97:L97 in the "Reference" box, then click OK.
(3) Now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97).
(4) press "Ctrl" and "Shift" while clicking once on the "chart
     wizard" icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart).

Welcome aboard ! After a few moments you should be flying. Steer with
the mouse, accel and decel with the left and right mouse buttons
respectively, and look for the monoliths with the programmer credits.
You can exit the screen by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc.

09:18 Another post from a 3D news site I just plain ol' ripped off, this one from VoodooExtreme, on the aspects of multitexturing:

Yesterday I posted a link to the basics of Multitexturing...now that you are up to speed, here's a big Nell Carter sized booty of an article entitled Hardware Implementations of Multitexturing, over at PVR Gen (don't let the name of the site turn ya off).  Here's a big portion of the intro, including links to the articles (and others): 

In this article I plan to go into some specifics on how mulitexturing is supported in various 3D hardware - both current and near future. Almost every 3D card in the market supports multitexturing in some form. This article will describe how this hardware performs these operations, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method. I wanted to do this to clear up some common misconceptions that people have about the TNT, Voodoo2 and PVRSG when compared as multitexturing platforms.

It will help in this article if you understand a few things first. You should have an idea about what dithering is, what tiled rendering is and what multitexturing is. If you don't understand any of these things, then here are some links to try reading:

An Introduction to Multitexturing by Jeremy Krieg
Dithering or full 24 bit ? by Kristof Beets of PowerVR Power
How the PowerVR Works by Sam Hatoum (explains tile-based rendering)
Tile Based Rendering by Kristof Beets

This article will by necessity be slightly more technical than the last one, but should still be fairly easy to understand.

This article has turned out to be pretty big, so I have divided it up into sections so that you can download them one at a time without having to wait too long in between. Click on a heading below to go to that section.

Hardware Requirements for Multitexturing
Multitexture Support on a Single Core Traditional Architecture
Multitexture Support on a Multiple Core Traditional Architecture
Multitexture Support on a Tiled Architecture
Comparison of Various Implementations

08:00 Avault has a review of the G200, more of the same.

20 Jul 98 17:37 Audio news is posted.  Here's some info on the new 3Dfx Reference drivers for the Voodoo2:

• Voodoo2 Release 2.1 (WHQL Compliant) v1.03.01
  Run-time drivers for Voodoo2 on Win95/98. They include: Glide 2.53, Glide 3, Direct3D, DirectX and the Voodoo2 Control Panel. This is the minimum set of drivers that you'll need to run your Voodoo2 board.
  
• Voodoo2 Control Panel (Non-WHQL Compliant)
  A non-WHQL compliant Control Panel for Voodoo2 (it does not include any of the components included in File #1). This file will allow you to use the enable/disable VSync feature, but will overwrite the WHQL certified Control Panel in the process.

14:24 ATI has a new 3D chip under development, but they aren't saying much.  Read a little about it a JPA.  Also, another editorial about the next generation of 3D chips.

I'll do the Daily Audio News later today. I'm still trying to get my new hard drive up to specs.

Here's a post I ripped straight from Op3Dfx (well, 3DNews), 'cause they reported it well, with all the relevent links:

Tom's Hardware page has gotten a big update with a preview of the cards that he mentioned having gotten a hold of last week. The 3dfx Bansheed 2D/3D card, the Matrox G200 2D/3D card, the nVidia RIVA TNT 2D/3D card, the next-gen PowerVR stuff, and finally the S3 Savage3D 2D/3D Card. Here is a quote from the article:

First of all I would like to remind you that this is a PREview, not a review of final products. TNT is at very early stage, but all the other chips will certainly go through several improvements as well.

What we can say now though is that Savage3D did certainly NOT live up to the claims of 'Voodoo2 performance at S3 prices'. As a matter of fact Savage3D is not by far as fast as Voodoo2, it's not as fast as Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo Banshee is selling for almost the same price as Savage3D. Savage3D will be an interesting competitor to Matrox' G200, since those two seem pretty close to each other, also in terms of 3D quality. G200 has an edge with its larger local memory support of 16 MB though.

08:34 Another new card reviews, the G200 @ CombatSim.

DirectX6 is reported to give a 60% boost to D3D games.  I don't know if it will be that much for everybody, though.  Should be cool.

There is a nice article on multitexturing on the PVRSG at Dimension3D.

19 Jul 98 21:46 Another G200 review at HardwareCentral.

Maybe another CPU brand on the market, the Rise.   Read here.

19:47 Here's a vote for you.  Use the back button to return.

17:04 You'll be hearing about infinite planes when the PVRSG comes out, so here's somthing you can read up on before time to understand them.

16:44 I've been watching the Aerofly demo (watch is about all you can do), and the 3D is so-so, all the text is in German, and it's a remote-controlled aircraft sim!  Imagine that, a computer sim of a model sim.

15:47 There is a new demo out of a sim called AeroFly. Get it here. (4MB)

This is a self running Demo. Once you load a model it will fly along a recorded path. It is highly recommended that you have a 3D graphic card with OpenGL support. This demo is currently only in german. We will have an english version soon. In order for this Demo to run, you also need to install DirectX Version 5. Make sure your display setting is at 16-bit color depth

Using AeroFly you have the chance to fly through the real 3D-scenery. You can land and takeoff at any position in the scenery and you can also place the viewer anywhere you want to. You can be in a fixed viewing position or follow the airplane while you are flying around the scenery. Practice your Indoor-flying skills with the BleriotII slowflyer and try to land on a table. Afterwards you can simply fly out of the building and chase your airplane through narrow valleys.

AeroFly offers you the following features:

• many different aircrafts like helicopters, hanggliders, slowflyers and acrobatic airplanes
• very accurate formulas to achieve a realistic flight behaviour
• different sceneries with collision detection
• flight parameters can be changed using a graphical environment
• you can use your own radio-control
• beginner-mode for learning how to fly helicopter
• adjustable wind and turbulence
• automatic calculation of thermals in any scenery
• adjustable field of view (automatic zooming)
• different viewing modes, like followmode or fixed viewing position
• Autorotation
• sound support

00:00 There is another 'episode' of Audio News.  A big one this time. Talking is a lot easier than typing.

18 Jul 98 21:28 Jeremy (over at the AGN3D site) has another excellent review of the Matrox Mystique G200 (same card that Anand looked at).

18:56 Anand has a great review of the G200 up now. A couple days ago he did a Stealth II G460 (i740) review.

13:52 If you have wondered how to tweak your system memory for the best game performance, Kim Thompson has a little article just for you. Very enlightening.  Some of the tweaks helped my system a great deal.

<-------Did you notice the new link?  Get the latest Audio news with just a click!  Great for bookmarking!  Guaranteed to break the ice at parties!

13:18 Well, I've switched over to Real Audio for the audio content (here's a test).  I figured out that a normal HTTP server can do the job with a little MIME configuration.  So that's how it will be in the future.  RA sounds better with a slightly lower bandwidth, and is easier to encode. So, today's update is as a WAV file (click on the date) or a Real Audio file (click on the time, 10:08).  Sorry about the switch, but if you already have Media Player and don't have Real Audio, you're still good-to-go, because MP does RA.

10:08 (Hint: If the date or time is blue, there's an audio link there.) Looks like Intel will put their i740 chip inside the Whitney motherboard chip set, used to run the new fast Celeron CPU's.  Never heard of Whitney or Celeron?   Head over to Tom's Hardware for all the details.

09:54 There is a 3D accelerated sim, Hang Time, which simulates hang gliding. I haven't tried it, in fact I couldn't even download it.

09:07 Diamond has re-run some of the benchmarks on their new TNT-based Viper card (if you recall, they loked pretty weak against the Voodoo2) (I grabbed this from AGN3D).  If you are counting, the Voodoo2 still beats it or ties it, but it's better than before.

We ran some benchmarks with the latest hardware and software for the next-generation Viper. Performance is really ramping up as we continue to work with the drivers. Take a look...

	Old Score	New Score
Turok @ 640x480	81 fps	114 fps
Forsaken @ 640x480	146 fps	177.58 fps
Windbench3D 98	1280	1430

The tests above were run on a 400MHz PII with 64 MB RAM running Win98 and DX6.

There's a new version of the DirectX Media run time, we call it 5.2b. The DirectX Media 5.2b run time supports PAL DVD disks and features improved interactive responsiveness. Better than ever, DirectX Media 5.2b capture capabilities have been enhanced to support a wider range of the WDM streaming class capture hardware that runs under Windows 98 or Windows NT 5.0. Find the new run time bits on our DirectX Media run time download page. For the updated DirectX Media 5.2b SDK, see the DirectX Media SDK download page

From Op3Dfx: Hardware Central has put up an interview with AMD's Lance Smith on their K6-2 and 3Dnow technology. You can check out the interview here. What makes the K6-2 such a good choice for 3D gamers? Read the review and find out!

Hardware Central: Why will 3D Now succeed where MMX failed?

Lance: It has to do with the possible applications of the instruction set. The Intel MMX technology dealt with integer calculations, which were already dealt with adequately by the existing hardware. If you look at 2D or 3D performance, and look at the rendering pipeline, the MMX instruction set was particularly useful at the end of the pipeline, which is where the graphic cards come in. As graphic cards got faster, the MMX became less and less of a useful addition. The 3dnow instruction set advantage is that it opens up the bottleneck, allowing more floating point operations per clock to be passed to the end of this pipeline. We can actually execute on 4 floating point numbers in a single clock cycle. If you are lucky, on current processors, and your code is efficient, you might be able to operate on ONE floating point number per clock cycle.

 

Billy at VE put together some info on the Banshee: "I took a couple of minutes and compiled the articles that are currently out -- which you can check out here"

From Op3Dfx: There was some interesting info in today's edition of the Wave Report. Scott Sellars, VP of R&D at 3DFX has the following comming to make on some of the PowerVRSG's features.

Some common misconceptions about the PVR architecture and PVRSG in particular: --- Region-based architectures are the "wave of the future."

Baloney --they can't even keep up with the current generation "standard" rendering architectures. Rendering architectures are great in scenarios where memory storage and/or memory bandwidth is expensive, neither of which is true today or in the foreseeable future. The major Achilles heel of a region-based architecture, however, is that it places so much of the burden back on the CPU. As others have reported, many users of even a "lowly" single board Voodoo2 have found many apps which are completely CPU limited. Over the next year and beyond, the graphics board which exhibits the best performance for real- world apps is going to be the one which uses the CPU most efficiently -- clearly this is not going to be a region based solution.

--- Deferred texturing is technically superior to "standard" rendering techniques.

I have to give Videologic credit in that deferred texturing is a nice attribute of their architecture, but unfortunately it only > works well on "yesterday's" applications. The advantage of deferred texturing is that it allows high depth complexity apps to be rendered with significantly less memory bandwidth and potentially higher performance. However, current and even more so in future apps have high depth complexity due to many layers of *translucent* polygons. Smoke, fire, explosions, lens flare, and other sophisticated multi-pass rendering techniques cause the deferred texturing architecture in the Videologic solution to resort back to standard rendering techniques, where each pixel and texel must be looked up and rendered to. Unfortunately for Videologic, apps are moving more and more towards multi-pass and translucency-based rendering algorithms which make the deferred texturing approach less-and-less powerful.

--- PVRSG performs full-scene anti-aliasing in real-time.

Again baloney. PVRSG claims 120 MPixels/sec fill-rate (and again this is a marketing number and one which certainly doesn't hold once translucent polys are added to the scene as explained above, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of this argument...). PVRSG performs a very brute-force approach to anti-aliasing, where they render a scene into a 1600x1200 resolution, then "down filter" to the desired display resolution. The problem with their approach with PVRSG is that they have nowhere near the fill-rate to be able to sustain this in real-time. A depth-complexity 4.0 app rendering at 1600x1200 resolution with a 120 MPixels/sec fill-rate only sustains 15 fps! This is certainly not real-time, and as I mentioned above, they're not going to be getting anywhere near 120 MPixels/sec once they start rendering current generation algorithms which rely heavily on multi-pass techniques. Another problem they have rendering into a 1600x1200 frame buffer is that the number of tiles they have to process increases by a factor of 4-8x, which only further increases the CPU requirements for rendering. I'm sure they'll concoct some demos to show AA at decent frame rates, but try it in a real-world game and I just don't see it happening.

--- PVRSG performs trilinear, multi-texturing, and anisotropic filtering in real-time.

It's a stretch. Trilinear is performance as two clocks per pixel (50 MPixels/sec peak, without translucency). Same for multi- texturing. This is, at minimum, less than 1/2 the performance of Voodoo2, and I'll bet in actual gameplay will be less than 1/2 the fill-rate performance of V2. Anisotropic filtering takes them 4 clocks per pixel, or 25 MPixels/sec, which is certainly not real-time (about the same performance as the original Rendition V1000...).

The Intense 3D (a 3Dfx Rush card, probably the best Rush card) is now $99.

DirectX v5.2:

There's a new version of the DirectX Media run time, we call it 5.2b. The DirectX Media 5.2b run time supports PAL DVD disks and features improved interactive responsiveness. Better than ever, DirectX Media 5.2b capture capabilities have been enhanced to support a wider range of the WDM streaming class capture hardware that runs under Windows 98 or Windows NT 5.0. Find the new run time bits on our DirectX Media run time download page. For the updated DirectX Media 5.2b SDK, see the DirectX Media SDK download page.

 

From Jeremy at Op3Dfx:

One of my favorite Flying games on the SNES was Top Gun. Soon we will be getting a new installment of the game for the PC with full 3D card support! Here is a bit of info and a few screenshots from the game:

As Maverick, the young Navy pilot from the Paramount Pictures film TOP GUN^®, the player comes face-to-face with the toughest of military opponents in a fully loaded F/A-18 fighter jet. Top Gun^®: Hornet’s Nest^™ features more than 30 dynamic missions in three campaign environments, a feverish pace, eye popping 3-D special effects and a dynamic audio track. Top Gun: Hornet’s Nest is being developed by Zipper Interactive.

Key Features:

• Fast-Paced Action: Top Gun: Hornet’s Nest takes the pilot to a new level of intense flight and fight action against threatening aerial forces and dangerous ground targets.

• Multiple Missions: With over 30 fast-paced missions, players engage in air-to-air and air-to-ground assignments that combine high-resolution 3-D graphics and realistic flying sequences with one of the most popular action/adventure movies in history.

• Multiplayer Capabilities: Top Gun: Hornet’s Nest features specialized multiplayer maps that support up to eight players on modem, LAN or the Internet.

 

Another one from Jeremy at the nifty new 3Dnews:

Banshee FAQ
by: Jeremy Allford
June 5th Revision

This FAQ is a collection of info on the Banshee that has been released by either 3DFX or other websites. Info for this FAQ has been gathered from Next Generation, BOOT and Gamecenter. If you have anything that you want added to this FAQ, you can email the info to germs@op3dfx.com.

• What is the Banshee?
• How soon can the consumer expect to see the Banshee?
• What are the specifications for the Banshee?
• Will the Banshee be a AGP or PCI part?
• What are the 2D Specifications for the Banshee?
• What kind of 3D performance can we expect from the Banshee?
• When will we know more about the Banshee?

Q: What is the Banshee?

The Banshee is the next generation chip on it's way from 3DFX which will incorporate 2D and 3D on the same card. The Banshee is also going to be 3DFX's first single chip solution, (Yes that means 1 chip, no chipsets this time around) offering the 2D and 3D processing right on the same chip. 3DFX has also said the the frame buffer for the Banshee will be optimized for both 2d and 3d, allowing for the best possible performance in both 2d and 3d. The Banshee is fully compatible with the Voodoo platform and is compatible with any game that worked with the Voodoo or Voodoo2. What this means is that Banshee owners will not suffer from the incompatibility problems that plagued the Voodoo Rush.

Q: How soon can the consumer expect to see the Banshee?

Banshee has completed its first sampling round which began in March. 3Dfx is currently readying its second sampling round. If everything goes right in the next sampling, companies start shipping Banshee based cards late in the 3rd quarter of 1998. (September)

Q: What are the specifications for the Banshee?

The Banshee will offer 128 bit 2D as well as 3D on the same card. The Banshee will be optimized for DirectX6, Glide and OpenGL.

Q: Will the Banshee be an AGP or PCI part?

The Banshee will support both 1X and 2X AGP as well as PCI.

Q: What are the 2D Specifications of the Banshee?

3Dfx expects Banshee to have the highest 2D performance in the world, based on some unique features that it has implemented in hardware. Banshee provides direct hardware polygon support, for instance, which enables it to immediately draw polygons based on vertices data rather than relying on a middle step of software rasterization or drawing each line in the polygon. This feature should enable the Banshee to draw a polygon in tens of cycles rather than the thousands required for conventional devices. Matrox should find this claim particularly interesting considering it's G200 is/was slated to be the fastest 2D board around. Another feature which boosts 2D performance is support for 256 raster operations (ROPS). Banshee will perform 99 percent of the ROPS/Blit combination in hardware rather than relying on software for these frequently used calls.

Q: What kind of 3D performance can we expect from the Banshee?

3DFX is not talking much about other features, but they have promised that it will be right on par with what people have come to expect from 3DFX. I am sure that there will be enough features on the Banshee to turn more then a few heads.

Q: When will we know more info about the Banshee?

3DFX will be releasing more info on the Banshee on June 22nd, 1998.

3D Madness has an article entitled 3D explained.

3Dfx has released the OpenGL beta 2.1 drivers here. Note: these will not let Voodoo/Voodoo2 owners run X-Plane.

Well, isn't this interesting: Now they are making what might be called a 3D pre-processor, to do more of the geometry setup before the data goes to the 3D accelerator.  This chip, teamed with the Rendition V2200, comprise the Hercules Conspiracy card.

Fujitsu Microelectronics, Inc. today announced volume production of its new 3D geometry accelerator chip, a key element of a new 3D graphics add-in card architecture jointly developed by FMI with Rendition and IBM Microelectronics. The FGX-1 (Fujitsu's part number is MB86242) is a general purpose PCI geometry and lighting accelerator. It was developed to increase the overall throughput of a PC-based 3D graphics subsystem by inserting a DSP based floating point processor between the CPU and the graphics rendering chip. The result is a better balanced system implementation and reduction of the bottleneck effect which can result when a CPU can't keep up with the demand capacity of the rendering chip. The FGX-1 enables the average PC to display interactive 3D graphics that match the most sophisticated video game machines. When added to a 3D PCI add-in card design, the MB86242 boosts PCI based 3D graphics speed to as much as 750,000 polygons per second. The outstanding price/performance of Rendition's V2200, coupled with Fujitsu's geometry engine and IBM's x86 processor based systems, combine to offer users outstanding, high-performance 3D graphics and exceptional value.

More from Jeremy at Op3Dfx:

I had a chance to interview Mack Awaga of Fujitso recently at the E3, concerning the Hercules Conspiracy Rendition V220 based board. Basically the Rendition Conspiracy is a board targeted to people using the lower end Cyrix and AMD based processors, so that they can get performance of a higher clock speed Pentium. The board has a Pinolite geometry processor onboard to aid with triangle setup, something that the CPU’s floating point usually handles. Since Cyrix and the older AMD processors have weak floating points, you can get a considerable frame rate increase while using the Hercules Conspiracy.

They had the board running Quake 2 at 27fps using a Cyrix P166, which is about 12-14 fps faster then a standard Voodoo card. They did not have the board running on any high end Pentium 2 systems, so my guess is that the board offers nothing performance wise to those systems. The board does seem to offer a big performance increase to low speed Cyrix and AMD processors, but for the price you might be better off buying a new processor. Considering a Pentium 233 costs like $120 these days, you could just take the Cyrix out and put in the new Pentium and get the same performance increase if not more.

Mack told me that Fujitso has been speaking to 3DFX about the possibility of putting one of their geometry setup engines onboard the Banshee. This would allow the people with lower end Pentium 2 computers to get the same performance of someone with a 350 P2 or so. This sounds great, but whether it happens remains to be seen. Since the Banshee is aimed at the lower price PC market, I am sure 3DFX will be doing everything they can to keep the price down.

The Matrox G100 8 MB is now $88.  Not bad for a budget card.  AGP only, though.

Voodoo2 12MB are cheap over at shopping.com.

From RivaZone: an article on their thoughts of the TNT:

It (image quality) was just not comparable to anything else we saw on the display floor, beyond words... nothing, not Matrox, not S3, not PVRSG, not Voodoo2 SLI nothing truly compared.. It was so much richer, smoother and just insanely life-like ... one demo showed a duck swiming on a pond with bubbles floating above the pond. The bubbles, duck and even the ripples themselves were reflected in the water, the colors were very rich, vibrant and all the reflection, ripples when the bubbles would break on the surface of the water... wow ripples radiated from the impact.. but the best was the NVIDIA logo, multitexture rendered in huge res, with reflection mapping and some light sourcing applied to it.. it was... we were left speechless... un-freaking-believeable.. the TNT kicks so much ass it is far, FAR beyond anything else that's out there, and it was only at 50% speed... an underclocked TNT was cooking the pants off of the so-called competition... if you want the ultimate in quality and speed, the TNT will make you VERY VERY happy.... Some of the demos weren't yet optimized for the TNT... the chip just burned right through it all anyway!.. no probs! But more than twice what we saw.. I can't imagine it!!!

From Op3Dfx: Hardgame has posted an interview with S3 concerning their new Savage3D chip. Here is some info from the interview:

HARDgame: What does S3 think of some of the new technologies coming into the 3D market? Matrox has the G200, the PowerVR Highlander, and of course the current Voodoo2. Which do you feel represents the greatest challenge for the Savage3D?

Schuster: On paper, Nvidia's Riva TNT is the only part that we expect to be competitive, and it doesn't seem to have key features like texture compression and good trilinear performance.

AMD K6-2 stuff: Massacre from over at the HIVE sent news about a full review of the K6-2.

Over at the HPC(http://hardware.pairnet.com/) they have slapped up a huge review of the AMD k6-2. They put it to the tests against the pII in Quake, Quake2, Forsaken and more. The url for the review is: http://hardware.pairnet.com/amdk62/review/

From Op3Dfx:

I fired off a few questions to Keith over at AMD about their new K6-2 processor and 3D games. I should get my hands on one of chips and a Super7 MB for some formal testing in a week or so, for posting on our site. I was wondering though, since it relies on software support in games to work properly 1. Yes and no. The 3DNow! technology requires software support. Games can be hardcoded to take advantage of 3DNow! (Unreal for example) or they can also benefit from the API layer optimizations (See Quake2 for OpenGL/Glide and 3DBench98 for DirectX6). In addition to 3DNow! benefits however, all applications can take advantage of the enhanced MMX core and 100MHz bus support added to the K6-2. how many titles will support it? 2. LOTS! Software developers are wonderful to work with. Show them a cool piece of technology that allows them to hack on it, do cool things, and make their games run better and they jump on it. At launch, we posted the following URL: http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/k623d/optimized.html which is a list of "confirmed" released/soon-to-be released titles. Also, http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/k623d/endorse.html is a list of endorsements from developers which should give you a clue on the companies that like the technology. Expect a constant flurry of announcements, updates, etc. throughout the year. We're only giving a glimpse at this time... Are you working with 3DFX at all to add support to glide, SGI for OPenGL, Or Microsoft to add the support to D3D ? 3. Yes, Yes, and Yes. Also, I believe NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox will be some of the first gfx guys to support the K6-2 with optimized OpenGL and Direct3D drivers. Just wondering, since I know the numbers for non-3Dnow games were good, but nowhere as high as the titles that supported it.. 4. Games that use floating point a lot will gain significantly from 3DNow! technology. With the growing popularity of 3D games, 3DNow! seems to be showing up at just the right time (unlike MMX which was pretty much ignored). Advanced game physics, lighting, and polygon complexity will be enabled in upcoming games like never before. I say never before because you couldn't have really cool (not fake) lighting without crushing your framerate.

Bootnet has a special E3 hardware report.

More on 3D pre-processors, from Op3Dfx:

3DXTC has posted an article on 3D Geometry Processors and boosting your 3D speed. Here is some info from the article:

Remember back in summer 1997, when Fujitsu announced their Pinolite 3D geometry processor? It claimed performance increase on your old system, when paired up with your existing 2D/3D card.

Theoretically, with the Pinolite, you’d get performance equal to a P2-266 running the same graphics card. Sounds nice? Of course it does, I wanted one immediately but haven’t seen it until now, included in the Conspiracy…. What is a geometry processor then? Well basically it is a processor that delivers polygons to your 3D card.

Normally it is the CPU that does this work, as the CPU has other things to calculate, this slows down the performance. Also slower CPU’s can’t deliver enough polygons/sec and that will result in your 3D card not running at it’s full speed. When a geometry processor is fitted on a 3D board, all calculations will be made on the board, reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed.

Notes (26May98): First, some personal news: This Saturday I'm moving back to my beloved Utah! after 11 years in Texas. I'll only be there for the Summer (unless BYU or Utah State hire me to teach Chemistry, hope hope hope!) but it'll sure be a nice break from the heat and mosquitoes. So this weekend I'll be out-of-touch, and there will be no news updates. So to hold you, here's a bunch:

PVRNet has stuck a snazzy tech. article up on NEC/PowerVR's next-generation PowerVR Second Generation chip.  Quite a bit of info on one of many upcoming 2D/3D combos. (from VoodooExtreme).