"Diamond is bundling four enhanced versions of top-selling titles with
the Edge 3D accelerator: Sega's Virtua Fighter Remix;
Interplay's Descent: Destination Saturn ;
Domark's Absolute Zero;
and Papyrus' NASCAR Racing .
Other upcoming titles include Sega's Panzer Dragoon and Interplay's
Descent II."
Wow ! Looks like Creative Labs aren't going to have it all their own
way.
Jez
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Wow, is it really coming out? I didn't believe i would come out so
soon (this October). And I didn't think Sega would port VF Remix
too. Another great thing about the card...it has one digital joystick
port, and TWO sega saturn joystick ports. <--- NOW THAT, is a good
idea. Who would want to play VF with a keyboard? Now only if
you could use the Sega Saturn joystick ports with other games besides
Sega Saturn games (VF Remix, Panzer Dragoon). Who knows...maybe
its possible. Diamond is very smart bundling VF Remix and three other
quality titles. I would say this card looks promising (of course I
would have to see the specs, and how VF holds up on a PC). And I never
thought I would see the day when VF came to the PC. Now, if Sony
would port over Tekken and Toshinden with the help of Namco and Takara.
:)!
Jared Ong
---------------------------------------
We are spinning our own fates
good or evil, and never to be undone
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves
its never so little scar...Nothing we ever do is,
in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
- William James
The 3D Blaster card will be expandable to 4 Meg, 2 Vram and 2
Dram. As for windows the user gets 2 options, because you have
your curent VGA card in the system you can either use it in
windows or you can use the 3DB's GUI drivers, what you do will
depend upon what your curent VGA card is.
Ifor Powell - Creativbe Labs UK
--
CompuServe. Ifor Powell 72662,2676
Phone +44 (0) 1734 344322
Fax +44 (0) 1734 828 260
So which card is the ONE to get? $400 is quite a lot. Which card would
game companies be writing for? If the cheaper card can do 640x480x65K at
30fsp, I'm for that (better still if just on a 486). Who needs to run
stuff at 1024x758 (eyestrain and can't afford the 17" monitor). Also, the
system ram based wavetable part is very interesting. Anyone have more
info on this? No more rom restriction or dedicated ram!
btw, which chipset is the 3dblaster using? thanks!
REPLY:
I don't have the copy of the press release with me. But I'm quite sure
all the Edge boards use the Nividia. The difference in the 2000 to 3000
is Dram to Vram.
It would be nice to know the real *** diff. between the two. We
proably won't know till all of us here start buying the boards.
BH
Nope the dram version does in fact use the stg200 chipset
Chris Harris
3Dlabs
http://www.3Dlabs.com/3Dlabs
The 3000 series is based off the Nvidia chip. This uses the Vram and
cost $400-$450.
EXCERPTS FROM THE PRESS RELEASE:
The new PCI product line is based on technology from Nvidia Corp. and
sports digital gameport for percise joystick control, as well as two
video game ports that allow specialized, multi-player versions of Sega
Saturn titles.....
Daimond's Edge 3D is believed to be the only single-board solution
offering all of these features and is expected to be initially shipped
in late October at consumer prices starting at $249-$299.
LATER IN THE RELEASE....
The DRAM version of the Daimond Edge 3D, basedon SGS Thomson's STG 2000
multimedia accelerator chip, is available for PCI bus in 1mb
upgradeable to 2mb (the Daimond Edge 3D 2120XL) or 2md standard (the
Diamond Edge 3D 3240XL). The Vram configuration is based on Nvidia
Corp's NV1 multimedia accelerator chip, is available for PCI in 2mb
upgradable to 4MB(the Diamond Edge 3D 3240XL) or 4mb standard(the
Diamond Edge 3D 3400XL). Both chips are based on Nvidia's NV1
technology...
SOOOO.....
Both the SGS Thomson chip and Nvidia chips are based on the same Nvidia
technology. Does one outperform the other? Excluding Vram & Dram
differences, I don't know.
The main thing is that all the boards mentioned above are compatible
with each other and offer the same features. Perfomance will be the
only difference.
BH
3D Graphics and Audio Solution for your Home PC
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Leadtek Research Inc. announces a new generation of powerful
Multimedia Accelerator Adapter designed for home personal computers,
with the product name of Proview GD400 and Proview GV500.
With a suggested list price for GD400 at $249 (1MB DRAM) and for GV500
at $399 (2MB VRAM); Proview offers 2D GUI Acceleration, Real-time
Photo realistic 3D Graphics, High-Fidelity Wave-table Audio Synthesis
and a High precision game port. There are over 200 DOS game titles
proven and a great number of Windows 3D game titles in development to
be released for the fall of '95. The Proview GD400 and Proview GV500
will bring the PC to a 3 Dimensional video and audio world.
Proview GD400 is based on SGS-THOMSON's STG2000 Multimedia
Accelerator, with 1MB DRAM and socket-upgradeable to 2MB with PCI 2.0
bus plug and play supported, display resolution from 640x480 at
256/32K/16.7M colors up to 1280x1024 256 colors are provided.
Proview GV500 is based on NVIDIA NV1 Multimedia Accelerator, with 2MB
VRAM and upgradeable to 4MB with PCI 2.0 bus plug and play supported,
a display resolution from 640x480 at 256/32K/16.7M colors up to
1024x768 256/32K/16.7M colors, 1152x864 256/32K/16.7M colors and
1600x1280 256/32K colors.
?Real-time Photo realistic 3D Graphics including Fast Polygon
rendering, Perspective corrected Texture-mapping, lighting effects,
Alpha blending, Anti aliased sprite animation and Double buffering for
smooth animation. With 75million pixels per second rendering, 3D
Graphics performance will allow interactive entertainment software to
produce photo realistic environments rendered at 800x600 resolution in
?GUI Acceleration and Full-Motion Video Acceleration
Accelerated primitives including BLT, Point, Lines, Polylines,
Polygons, Fills, Patterns, Test and Arbitrary rectangular clipping,
execution of all 256 Raster operations at 8, 15, 24 and 30-bit color
depths. Hardware video acceleration provides image enhancement and
scaling of video streams to full-screen display with 30 frames per
second of true-color digital video.
?Concurrent High-fidelity Audio Synthesis
On chip 350 MIPS audio engine and bus-mastering DMA accelerates
synthesis and mixing of high-fidelity audio with little CPU overhead.
Supports up to 32 channels of 16-bit wavetable-sythesized sound.
Backwards compatible to existing DOS standards.
?Enhanced Digital Game port
8-Channel game port with analog/digital sampler with 13-bit resolution
and programmable sample rate up to 92 Hz.
?Support for Standards:
MS-DOS, Windows 3.1,
Windows 95 and OS/2,
VGA & SVGA,
Major 3D interface (API); Microsoft's 3D-DDI Renderware,
IBM Game port,
VESA, DPMS power management
- how does 2D performance compare with S3 Vision 968 chip? DOS? Win95?
- Will the card support Win95's 3D-DDI? DirectDraw? BRender? What 3D
standards does the card support? OpenGL?
- A Diamond SDK??? Does this mean that software needs to be
specifically developed for the Diamond Edge card for it to take
advantage of 3D hardware acceleration? How about software developed
using Microsoft's Game SDK?
- Does the game need to be specially written to take advantage of the
card's quadratic texture mapping and bilinear texture mapping? or will
a generic 3D API (Win95's 3D-DDI) handle this?
- What would be the street price for the 2MB VRAM version?
- Is Z-buffering supported?
- Is MPEG support implemented in software?
- What is the memory footprint of the MIDI samples that are stored in
memory? Can the MIDI portion of the card disabled? Sounblaster
compatible?
>> The biggest problem with the CL board is that it doesn't seem
>to mention
>> if you can add more RAM to the card. If not, then you are
>stuck with
>> a 1MB video card (or 2MB if they figured out how to use VRAM
>and DRAM
>> at the same time). The base card has 1MB VRAM for video and
>1MB DRAM
>> for textures, but in terms of using Windows I wonder what they
>are supposed
>> to do.
>The 3D Blaster card will be expandable to 4 Meg, 2 Vram and 2
>Dram. As for windows the user gets 2 options, because you have
>your curent VGA card in the system you can either use it in
>windows or you can use the 3DB's GUI drivers, what you do will
>depend upon what your curent VGA card is.
>Ifor Powell - Creativbe Labs UK
Thanx!
I believe 3D-DDI, DirectDraw, BRender not sure about OpenGL. Note:
it will support them when they are out, obviously hard to support
something not existing yet
The API's will work, but best performance is obtained using the SDK due
to the additional capabilities of the card. This is the why I think
the API's are good, but when a different paradigm is introduced you will
probably have to support it directly since it offers innovative features.
I don't necessarily see this as a big problem now since there currently
is not any kind of market leader in a yet non-existant market.
Not sure, but probably directly. Quadratic TM is a superset of polygon
TM.
I would guess about $350 maybe a bit more.
Don't know.
Yes, at least from what I remember.
1MB or 6MB or custom depending on application. I would assume SEGA will
use custom sounds. Use of custom sounds is beginning to show up, but the
existing "standards" make it difficult to implement efficiently.
Probably, though better than about 80-90% of existing
MIDI. Yes, but probably not 100% as with any "SB-compatible."
--
http://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~fmah
--
http://widget.ecn.purdue.edu/~fmah
I was just wondering if the 3D EDGE will work with my Stealth 64 video
VRAM.
If I was to buy the 3D EDGE, do I still need my old Stealth 64 video VRAM?
thanx
Quang
