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Streaming SIMD Extensions Perhaps the most touted improvement the Pentium III has over it's older brother the Pentium II is the addition of Streaming SIMD Extensions, or SSE for short. As described in Anandtech's Pentium III review, SIMD is: SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data (in this case SIMD-FP as it applies to FPU instructions, whereas MMX offered SIMD-Int for Integer instructions)… → Read More
Introduction Traditionally a high end provider, ELSA is steadily making their way into gamers boxes. The ELSA Erazor II is perhaps the most promising move by ELSA, as far as gamers are concerned. Powered by nVidia's hot (also literally) RIVA TNT chipset, the Erazor II is sure to be a top choice. The question remaining is: how does the Erazor II stack up to the rest of the TNT boards... PRELUDE… → Read More
INTRODUCTION "All TNT boards are the same." You have probably heard someone say that about nVidia RIVA TNT based solutions. Of course, for those of you who require TV-out capabilities, this statement obviously does not hold true; however, there are many TV-out capable boards which are many times classified as "identical". As for the non-TV-out capable boards, they are too, classified as… → Read More
A Brief History In a frantic effort to make a come back after a series of dismal attempts at over hyping the ViRGE chipset, S3 decided it was time for a change. Shortly after the former Operation 3Dfx's April fools announcement of a killer 3 inch S3 chipset capable of 1600x1200 Quake2 rendering at well over 100fps, S3 announced their real next generation product, the S3 Savage 3D. Whether or not… → Read More
Introduction If you have ever unzipped a download, viewed a GIF or JPEG file, watched an MPEG video or played an MP3 audio file, you have experienced data compression. Data compression is arguably one of the most important aspect of the internet/multimedia. Without data compression, 5 minute MPEG clips would take up tens of even hundreds of megabytes, 1 minute CD-quality audio files would take… → Read More
Introduction The Elsa Victory II board is based on 3Dfx's first true 2D/3D single chip solution, the Voodoo Banshee. The Banshee is, in essence, a bastardization of the Voodoo2 chipset, boasting a higher (100Mhz vs 90Mhz) clock speed, unified memory architecture, Glide support, no single pass multitexturing, and of course, blazing fast 2D (as if we need faster 2D). The Elsa board adds… → Read More
Gouraud Shading Gouraud Shading is used in virtually all single pass rendering engines. Its simplicity, speed, and flexibility make it perhaps the only type of lighting directly appliable by hardware 3D accelerators. The only problem with Gouraud shading is that it's, well, very fake. As you can see from the shot above, Gouraud Shading (which can be used as lighting) isn't very pretty. Since the… → Read More
Hi-Val? Well, I was shopping for a CD-RW drive for myself, and since I wanted it quickly, I had no choice but to visit Comp USA. Browsing the product line, the only CD-RW drives under $300 were the Hi-Val ones. Being the cheap guy that I am, I purchased the 2x24x2 drive, since it was only $200 after a $70 rebate. How does this el-cheapo drive measure up? Find out... Important Specs > 2x CD-R… → Read More
It is brought to our attention that some games have different fill-rate requirements than others. The Quake2 engine, for example, does two pass rendering (multitexturing), and this lowers the FPS of games using the Quake2 engine. A major aspect of fill-rate that is somewhat neglected; however, is overdraw. Overdraw is largely dependant on the algorithm the 3D engine uses to do something called… → Read More
Digital brought us the first 64bit processor around 1992, the 21064. Sun Microsystems followed, and IBM came soon thereafter. The largest CPU manufacturer in the world (Intel); however, is waiting until early 2000 to introduce its first 64bit processor, Merced. This 64bit processor is not only new to Intel, but new to the world. Based on Intel's "EPIC" architecture (actually very similar to VLIW… → Read More
The latest 3D accelerators support "Anisotrophic filtering", "Trilinear filtering", "Single pass Multitexturing", etc. What do all these names really mean? How do they affect image quality. How come people say trilinear filtering is so much better than bilinear filtering when screen shots look virtually identical? All of this and more will be answered in this article. NOTE: For the image quality… → Read More
Demo1.dm2, Demo2.dm2, Crusher.dm2, Massive1.dm2, Unreal timedemo, Forsaken Nuke.dem, Forsaken Biodome.dem, Mon2.dm2, etc. What is the difference between all of these benchmarks? What limitations do these benchmarks expose? Why are Crusher results always lower than demo1.dm2? How come Mon2.dm2 runs faster than a Voodoo2 on just about any AGP board? All of these questions will be answered, in… → Read More
Savage3D, A Premature Baby? We all heard the horror stories regarding the Savage3D. First, Tom, of Tom's Hardware rants about the loss of image quality with texture compression, and the ridiculous "meaningless" register settings needed to be set (more on these later). Other's (even our own Anand) rant about the prematurity of the drivers. Is it true? Is the Savage3D premature? Let's see... The… → Read More
Specifications Drivers (per satellite): Two 3 inch full range drivers Driver (subwoofer): One 6 inch dual voice coil Frequency Response: 20 Hz - 20 kHz Satellite Power: 20 Watts (5 watts per driver) at <0.8% THD Subwoofer Power: 20 Watts at <0.8% THD Input Impedance: >10K ohms S/N Ratio: >70 dB Single Port USB Node USB 1.0 Specification Compliant UL/CUL/CE Approved As you can see,… → Read More