Creative Labs has released some new drivers for their Banshee cards which should help the old Quake3 framerates. Improved the 3DNow! support and includes a nifty new bios.

The guys at Forbes have just finally noticed that NVidia plans on releasing the NV10 chipset in the *very* near future. The initial word was this chip was going to be 3x faster than the current TNT2Ultra chips that are out on the market. However I've heard backlash since then claiming that the chip was closer to to just barely 2x as fast. At any rate as long as it can lock Quake3 at 100fps, who the hell cares eh? Thanks VE

NV10.net has opened for business which I hadn't mentioned yet. The page is a great resource for those of you trying to keep up to date on the latest happenings with NVidia's golden 3D chip. Check out their interview with Elsa on their upcoming NV10 product.

PowerGamerz interviewz Viet-Tam Luu, a software engineer at nVidia. They chat about various topics, such as next gen 3D features coming from 3dfx (their T-buffer), BitBoysOy (embedded RAM), and even some game stuff.

PG: Do you think that hardware is increasing too fast for software developers to cope with?

Viet-Tam: No. In many cases, however, software developers aren't forward-looking enough. As I said about Quake2, software should, or should be able to, push beyond the limits of current hardware. In a way, software will always lag behind hardware, because it's hard to develop for hardware that doesn't yet exist, so there will always be new features that won't be initially used in software.

Rumors abound again with the mystery of why Hercules hasn't been answering the phone, or fufilling orders as well as they should. RivaExtreme has the gossip:

Information from a Hercules executive indicates that the company will officially close it doors within the week. There are not indications as to whether current orders will be shipped. Pending orders for their high demand Dynamite TNT2 Ultra are note expected to be fulfilled.

The executive, who has requested anonymity cites embezzlement and mismanagement as causes for the collapse of this industry pioneer.

PowerGamerz interviews Nick Triantos of nVidia (who's got his own .plan file with a buncha neat TNT tips too). Here's a bit on how NV10's (or whatever) T&L would affect id's games, and their famous use of lightmaps ever since Quake:

There's a lot of people who've been talking about how a good xform and lighting engine can off-load the CPU. To give some rough guesstimates, a game like Quake2 or Quake3 probably spends something between 15% and 20% of its time transforming vertices. That's time that the CPU really should be spending doing things like better A.I., or nicer particle systems, model physics, etc. There's no games out there that use lighting now. One of the big reasons is that in order to make lighting look good, you need a lot more geometry in a scene (since lighting is applied at each vertex). But, if you add more vertices, then your CPU needs to get bogged down lighting all those extra vertices. So instead, many 3D games chose to follow the likes of Quake2 and use lightmaps.

Amer over at GameSpot has a bit more info on the upcoming NV10 chipset from NVidia and their cooperation with Guillemot. Apparently there wont be any "bin sorting" over at NVidia to sort through all the chips created for higher yield chips. (NVidia did this for the TNT2/TNT2Ultra chips, similar to what Intel does for their CPUs) Here's da quote:

It seems that nVidia might not be bin sorting (testing and releasing chips at different MHz speeds) the NV10 as it did with the TNT2 chipset, because Guillemot will only be manufacturing one NV10 board instead of two. In fact, while we were in their offices, top Guillemot execs had just finalized that board's retail name and box art.

Speaking of TNT stuff, HardOCP has cracked one open if you wanna see the guts.

Thanks again Blue. Turns out that SGI and nVidia have more formalized their relationship. I heard some rumblings about something like this happening, I'm surprised they decided to make it public. Looks like SGI wants out of the chip business, and are throwing their engineers to nVidia instead. I'll just take the same quote that Blue did:

As a major initiative to bring a dramatic price/performance discontinuity to the visualization market and accelerate product time-to-market, SGI will incorporate NVIDIA's graphics technology into new desktop graphics systems. As part of the initiative, SGI will transfer a world-class team of 3D graphics engineers to NVIDIA to work on its next generation technology.

The Hercules page has slapped up some new drivers for their TNT and TNT2 cards for you guys to mess around. Don't hurt yourself!

GameSpot has a new look at the latest and fastest TNT2 Ultra card you'll possibly be able to get your hands on. How fast is fast? Well check this out:

...Guillemot and Falcon Northwest are guaranteeing 195/235 (core/memory speeds). <snip> On the Pentium III/500, the card generated the highest-ever GameGauge score on our test bed, at 51.51. The score on the Pentium III/600 was a stunning 57.38.

Canopus has released some new drivers for the Spectra 2500. Thanks P3D

CreativeLabs has released a new version of that nifty Glide wrapper utility that lets you play 3dfx games on their TNT based products. (Which 3dfx is giving them legal hassle about of course) Thanks VE

In addition to the NV10 release date, and NV10 specs that have surfaced, the Riva3D guys have posted the 2nd part of their big NV10 special article.It's a pretty good read and contains a fair amount of pertinent info

As a new part, NVIDIA has broken away from the inherent restraints of the TNT2, designing the NV10 from scratch. As a result, it's going to reshape our thinking, but more importantly, game designer's thinking as to the future of 3D gaming. As a graphics processor, the CPU will be freed up of much of the graphic calculations under Direct X 7, leaving much more power for designers to concentrate on AI, etc

Also while in the big NVidia kick, the guys at RivaStation are sending word of a possible TNT2-A/Ultra or TNT2-Pro. Supposedly the TNT2-A is made in a new TSMC Fab and can run at higher clockspeeds.

[From Yesterday]The CRUS guys are the latest folks to preview the NVidia NV10 chipset. The biggest news, released in September, Wow. Make sure and check out the NV10 specs while you're at it. Here's the clip:

Now it’s confirmed. The NV10 chipset from Nvidia will be released in a month and we will also see a graphic card in early September using the NV10 Chipset. I have been talking with a press spokesman at Guillemot and he confirmed that Guillemot will show the graphic card at ECTS and that’s probably the first time that we will see some image quality and speed specs of the chipset.

The topic of the recent has been the speculation on Nvidia's next-gen part, code-named "NV10". Speedy3D follows through with another piece on the NV10.

While this stuff usually should be under the tech section, I came across something rather unique in the reviews today. Mike over at AnandTech reviewed this Gigabyte TNT2 that has an "overclocking jumper" on it. Another thing is that this is the first video card that employs the "sandwich" style of cooling with a heatsink/fan combo on the top of the chip, and a heatsink on the back of the PCB. Here's another sharp bit:

They decided to follow NVIDIA's recommendation and ship the card at 125/150, but has included a turbo jumper on board. What's this jumper do? It cranks the speed up to 156/156 by loading a slightly different BIOS. With careful cooling of the TNT2 processor, they feel that all their boards should all be able to hit this higher speed. You could even attach that virtually useless turbo switch some cases still have to the jumper header and have a quick little way to overclock your TNT2 without the use of any software utilities. Unfortunately, a reboot is required to effect a change with the jumper since the card BIOS must be reinitialized to recognize the new setting, so you won't be able to just hit the button when it's time to game.

Hey, I'm easily amused at this hour- so sue me.

Riva Extreme spotted some info on the "NV10" in the recent CGW. Of course at this point in time it's nothing specific, just rough "abouts" and "estimates":

NV10 Details:

• Transformation & Lighting acceleration with DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL estimated 15-25 million triangles/second
• 350 MHz RAMDAC
• about twice the fill rate of current generation 3D chips
• HDTV support
• motion compensation for full 1080i/480p HDTV displays
• x-y video scaling acceleration
• colorspace conversion
• AGP 4X
• 32 meg and 64 meg versions

Update: What does all that mean in English? Well we've got some pretty good discussion going on in the comments. And don't miss this article (reprinting of a piece in the September CGW) on Gamespot about the very same thing.

SGI recent sent out this press release over the biz wire stating that they have kissed and made up with the NVidia guys and that whole law suit thing they had going. In fact the two companies are even doing one of those "strategic alliance" deals since they like each other so much. Anyone else think a cash settlement was made on the lawsuit and they are just doing this whole thing on top of that? Thanks Rick

TechZone has an interesting article giving some advice for those of you debating a 16meg or 32meg TNT2 card.

Redwood has posted his own benchmarks of the newly released NVidia Detonator drivers. Looks like they are a tad slower in Quake3 as mentioned earlier. More stable though, honest!