Wednesday, April 26, 2000

GeForce 2 GTS on Friday? -- 1:19 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The rumors are swirling that Fry's and Electronics Boutique will have Elsa's GLADIAC GeForce 2 GTS card this Friday already! This was apparently stated by a NVIDIA representative at WinHEC.

The Master comments: Oh, boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. I wish I was Crawl. I'd have one of these by Monday then 8-)

Improve Daikatana -- 11:18 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Someone sent this screenshot in to Something Awful, which shows a way to dramatically improve Daikatana by unchecking one box in the options. Now I may have to update my review!

GeForce 2 GTS Announcements -- 11:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Creative Labs and Elsa have already announced new cards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 2 GTS, the Annihilator 2 and the GLADIAC, respectively. Both will be out in May and both will have an estimated street price of $349. Thanks VoodooExtreme.

GeForce 2 GTS Preview -- 9:57 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The NDAs have expired, here comes the news! NVIDIA has officially unvieled its GeForce 2 GTS GPU. Sharky Extreme has a very nice preview posted. Here's a comparison:

	GeForce	GeForce 2	Voodoo5 V5500
Fillrate (MPix/sec)	480	800	667
Texel Rate (MTex/sec)	480	1600	667
T&L Speed (MTri/sec)	15	25	N/A

The increased texel rate is because the GeForce 2 GTS can apply two textures to a pixel in one pass whereas the Geforce can only do one. If I drool anymore I'm going to short out my keyboard. Oh, and boards based on this chip will be out in about two weeks :) Gentlemen, shine your credit cards!

History today -- 8:27 am CST, Update by The Master

Big one today

• 1607: John Smith and a band of colonists found the first English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
• 1968: The United States explodes a 1 megaton nuclear device in the underground Nevada test site.
• 1986: The #4 Chernobyl nuclear reactor melts down and explodes, sending massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and killing at least 31 people. The accident is still killing people today, with hugely inflated rates of cancer in people who lived in the fallout path.

WinZip 8.0 released -- 8:17 am CST, Update by The Master

WinZip has released the official (not beta) version 8.0 of WinZip. Go get it now, and if you HAVEN'T paid for yours yet, do so. Why? $20 for forever upgrades is worth it :-)

Tuesday, April 25, 2000

NVIDIA XFree 4.0 Drivers -- 5:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has finally released their long-promised new binary drivers. These drivers require XFree 4.0. You can get the drivers here and read the FAQ here. There are pre-built RPMs for Red Hat and also for "other" Linux distributions.

I'll install these after I dust my Linux drive and report back with the gory details. Just a note: NVIDIA's site seems to be thoroughly Slashdotted at the moment. My download is going at about .1K/sec.

UPDATE! While you are waiting for either your download to finish or the next ice age, whichever comes first, check out Linux Games' first look at these drivers. The performance seems to be quite impressive indeed--almost on par with Windows 9x! That's a Good Thing since the old drivers sucked canal water.

UPDATE! 10:15 P.M. At long last, the rpms are done downloading. I don't think I've ever waiting longer for one meg of stuff. Oh well. Not sure when I'll get around to dusting my Linux drive--hopefully early next week.

Make Something Unreal CTF Winners -- 5:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The winners in the Capture-the-Flag level design portion of the Make Something Unreal competition have been announced.

• First place: Conquest by Plutonic
• Second place: Diamond Sword by ArKile
• Third place: Palace by Shod

Congratulations to all the winners! Thanks Stomped for the heads up.

Romero Form Letter? -- 5:26 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The guys at Old Man Murray have posted a form letter from John Romero complaining about this review of the Daikatana demo on Daily Radar. Here's a snip from the letter:

http://www.dailyradar.com is the worst offender [Ed. note: in the "bash Daikatana" campaign] right now and they seem to be barely beginning their online campaign of destruction against Daikatana, myself and Ion Storm. Right there on the front page at the top is a link to the most awful article I've read about my game. It's almost unbelievable, and they're supposed to be a professional, major news site.

I read the Daily Radar review and, even though I tend to avoid their site, I have to agree with their review. I did not word things any where near as coarsely as they did in my review, but the gist is the same. In all my days as a gamer (and that's a long time, kids), I have never seen a game so universally panned as Daikatana. I hope that letter turns out to be a fake, because if it is real, delusion is running far more deeply than we would have originally imagined at ION. Thanks Evil Avatar for the link.

Webdog deborked -- 1:57 pm CST, Update by The Master

Sent some email to Richard Smith of Webdog today, and it turns out the trackers have been broken due to a technical issue over on Webdog. Everything is good now :-)

Matrox G450 -- 10:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Matrox Users has word that Matrox announced their new G450 video chip. It looks like it's basically a tweaking of the previous chips. There are no fillrate or triangle numbers mentioned, nor does there seem to be any indication of T&L capabilities. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

It looks like this is going to be the "day of the video card." Better, faster, cheaper chips are always Good Things (tMS).

ATi Radeon 256 -- 9:55 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sharky Extreme takes a look at the numbers and features of the recently announced Radeon 256 chip from ATi. It all sounds pretty impressive, let's see if they really fixed the drivers. Boards with this chipset are expected to hit stores at the end of Q2. This is the same card that IXBT referred to as the Rage6 (story) except this time the information is official.

Past Two Days' News

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