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• Sports: Madden
  
• RPG: Final Fantasy
  
• Driving Sim: Gran Turismo
  
• Fighting: Tekken
  

And now, we are in the midst of an ultimate gaming revolution with titles like Ico, Grand Theft Auto 3, NBA Street,Devil May Cry, and SSX Tricky available. PS2 games seem to be at their peak, but according to Playstation magazine, no one has harnessed the full power of the ps2 as of yet.

It was published this month (in playstation magazine) that Sony has introduced a resource usage program thingy which gauges how much of the ps2's power is being used. It was first thought that Gran Turismo 3 maxed out the ps2's power but this new tool from Sony only showed 25% of the ps2's power was being harnessed. Say what?!!? It was written that Sony will be providing this optimization tool to third party developers.

The best is yet to come people.

The xbox acts as a cooker itself! no need to buy a microwave to warm up that pizza, just put it on the xbox!
Is the x-box big enough for this? I doubt it since this was meant as a family machine. That means you need BIG pizza's. The xbox is only atx size

Expensive heating is now cut down thanks to the myraid of heat exhauts on the Xbox
A Beowulf cluster of ... would solve this problem much faster.

Use the controller as an inexpensive door stop: big enough for even the heaviest of doors.
Or better, use your Dreamcast, it is is real cheap now.

coming soon: a hack to reverse the exhauts so the xbox doubles as a vacum!
Silly, why do you want to heat your dust?

just my 2 cents

I guess you don't know about the quack test, created when it was discovered that the ATI drivers were checking the executable's filename.

The "quackifier" seeks out and renames all references in the Quake executable to "quack." The same is done on Nvidia and ATI systems. Nvidia benchmarks remain the same; ATI benchmarks go down precipitously.

But it's important to make the distinction between an "nVidia card", and an "nVidia-based card". nVidia don't make the cards, and they don't choose the signal filtering components that go on them. Thus, there can be (and is) a VERY wide disparity between manufacturers of nVidia-based cards.

I personally own an nVidia reference Quadro DCC the card is manufactured by nVidia themselves, to their own design), and have nothing but praise for its 2D quality. I run it on a 24" monitor at 2048x1280, and it is slightly better than even the Matrox G400 it replaced (which is widely considered to be the leader in video signal quality).

So I know for a fact that it's not the chip's fault, and it's not the design's fault either. For example, the new Leadtek Winfast Ti500 has reportedly excellent video output quality (a quote: "...razor sharp images that put even Matrox cards to shame...")

If you missed the discussion in the first place.

The Register : As we say, if you like the 8500's Quake III frame-rate but aren't willing to put up with the dip in image quality, buy a different card. Or wait for ATI to change its drivers, which, we understand, it's in the process of doing.

HardOCP was the first to publish about this: The Facts As We See Them: It certainly seems to us here at [H]ardOCP that ATi has in fact included application specific instructions in their version 5.13.01.3276 Win2K drivers that make Quake 3 arena benchmarks faster by up to over 15%. Either way, the driver optimisations for Quake III are just one of the (many) factors that differentiate different vendors' products. ®

firingsquad show show some details how the quack.exe is made and concludes:
To some of us, it seems like the evidence points towards intentionally deceptive code designed not only to inflate benchmark scores, but also to keep anyone from finding out. To others, this is nothing more than an overreation to a perfectly legitimate game optimization. In our eyes, anyone who vehemently peddles either of these explanations is either naive or pushing an agenda of their own.

there later in Q&A with ati explains in 2 pages that :Our goal for the RADEON 8500 is and always has been to deliver the best possible gaming experience to our customers.

yeah right.!

If you missed the discussion in the first place.

The Register : As we say, if you like the 8500's Quake III frame-rate but aren't willing to put up with the dip in image quality, buy a different card. Or wait for ATI to change its drivers, which, we understand, it's in the process of doing.

HardOCP was the first to publish about this: The Facts As We See Them: It certainly seems to us here at [H]ardOCP that ATi has in fact included application specific instructions in their version 5.13.01.3276 Win2K drivers that make Quake 3 arena benchmarks faster by up to over 15%. Either way, the driver optimisations for Quake III are just one of the (many) factors that differentiate different vendors' products. ®

firingsquad show show some details how the quack.exe is made and concludes:
To some of us, it seems like the evidence points towards intentionally deceptive code designed not only to inflate benchmark scores, but also to keep anyone from finding out. To others, this is nothing more than an overreation to a perfectly legitimate game optimization. In our eyes, anyone who vehemently peddles either of these explanations is either naive or pushing an agenda of their own.

there later in Q&A with ati explains in 2 pages that :Our goal for the RADEON 8500 is and always has been to deliver the best possible gaming experience to our customers.

yeah right.!

Here's a few links to other and may be more objective reviews

Zdnet
Gamespy
Gamespot
FiringSquad
TeamXBox
Yahoo 2 3

--
"Can I run a linux cluster of those?"

Here's some other links in case you guys want some more balanced takes on the xbox.

Firing Squad's coverage

Game Spot's coverage

ZDNet's stuff

Providing a little balance to the Michael's rantings and ravings.

These are real benchmarks that eat up alot more resources then stupid office tasks which even a pentium1 can do. Notice win98SE is the fastest here but winXP and w2k are neck to neck. A frame or 2 per second is not noticable and winXP does have some great support for firewire and digital camera's. Its great for people who pay for their os's but bad for pirates. :-)

MY only compliant is product activation of course. But on my Pentiuum III with 192 megs of ram, XP is noticably faster then w2k rc1. Its just more responsive as well.

These are real benchmarks that eat up alot more resources then stupid office tasks which even a pentium1 can do. Notice win98SE is the fastest here but winXP and w2k are neck to neck. A frame or 2 per second is not noticable and winXP does have some great support for firewire and digital camera's. Its great for people who pay for their os's but bad for pirates. :-)

MY only compliant is product activation of course. But on my Pentiuum III with 192 megs of ram, XP is noticably faster then w2k rc1. Its just more responsive as well.

So while I understand that it's lots of fun to find a site which claims that WinXP is 10% slower and doesn't do the laundry or clean the kitchen and trumpet it on Slashdot, don't let just the one site be your guide.

For example [firingsquad.com] here is a site (and a cite) that claims XP actually offers slight improvements over 2k.

Even some [zdnet.co.uk] lacking benchmarks still claim that XP is faster than 2k.

Come on now, let's do some research before we spread misinformed FUD of our own!

"Is it OK for a company to override your image quality settings in a game without your knowledge?"

See, this has nothing to do with "optimizing" for a game. They didn't optimize ... they fucked around with the image quality on the sly in order to gain performance. Firing Squad has an in-depth look that will show you how.

Optimizing = Achieving better performance WITHOUT sacrifice.

Cheating = Achieving better perfomance through undocumented overriding "features" for only specific games.

My point is this ... when someone sets a game to a specific image quality, what gives ATI the right to think they know better than you? I would gladly give up performance for image quality any day (I'm shallow that way), so why should I be saddled with lousy image quality for a few extra frames?

As you can see in this article at firingsquad, the drivers are downgrading texture quality in Q3 to decrease bandwidth and look better in the benchmarks.

I believe it's unethical at the very least.

Actually, Shenmue II for Dreamcast has been cancelled.


see?

Fortunately there is a solution. Simply wait a few months. You will be able to download patches from the internet. The built in hard drive will allow these patches to work.

Whoo hoo, this is just what I've been waiting for to make my life complete! After a long day of work fixing Windows problems, I really want to come home to a video game console that has to have service packs downloaded and applied to it!

Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my older systems that just work. I never got a GPF or segfault while playing a frantic game of Kaboom! on my 2600 or Super Mario Brothers on my NES.

From over at Firing Squad...

"The initial batch of Athlon XP chips shipped out to distribution were unlocked and this was not suppose to happen. Within a week or two, these unlocked CPUs will be phased out, or recalled. I'm not sure what will happen but AMD has confirmed that the Athlon XPs will be locked very, very soon.

Some of you are lucky, to have snagged a few Athlon XPs that were unlocked."

-Rothfuss

Thresh's Firing Squad has a review of the Tyan Tiger with dual AMD Duron MPs, which is probably of equal or more interest to us geeks. For those of you who weren't aware, AMD Durons work in multiprocessor mode as well, and they're very, very close to Athlons in terms of performance (and obviously cheaper.)

Firingsquad has an excellent review comparing dual Durons to dual Thunderbirds using both Palamino and non- versions of both chips. They conclude that the Palamino Duron is the best bang for the buck.

[...] anyone who tells you that an LCD can't match the color of a CRT hasn't seen the most recent batch.

An interesting report on Solarism's new ultra-bright LCDs didn't make Slashdot, but check out this if you're interested.

When i was twelve, i thought it would be really cool if someone would come up with a way to put fingerprint scanners inside of each key on a keyboard. They could be there for extra extra security when you were using the computer or just entering your passwords or whatever, and they could be sold to schools so that typing programs would be able to tell if you were using the right fingers on the right keys or not.

...

OK, that's a totally unfeasable idea. I was twelve. Give me a break.

However, looking at this article i remember my idea, and wonder: how difficult would it be to take this cell phone technology and adapt it to creating a full keyboard with finger sensors on each key. It could be sold to elementary schools so that, because the computer would become able to sense which fingers were being used for which keys at every moment, Mavis Beacon or whatever could notice which fingers were being used to type and pop up and say Hey, You'd be able to type faster and kill the zombies more quickly if you used these fingers in these places instead of these other places (see?) where you use them now.

Hm?

on the other hand, maybe we could just give elementary schools some Dvorak keyboards, and then finger placement wouldn't be such an issue. i think i'll wander off and sit alone in my room and ponder the wonderfully wierd things you could do if you created a synthesizer with finger-sensor tech embedded in the keys..

- super ugly ultraman
i post this as AC because i think score:0 is the correct moderation level for this post. if you disagree with me, feel free to moderate either way.

Windows XP has been designed to help the movie and music businesses by degrading the quality of the MP3 music-file format that currently fuels the world's music-sharing systems like Napster

Media Player never had full support for MP3s but MP3 tools can be written to support XP. On a review on Firingsquad.com

The bottom line here was that I was free to completely ignore Media Player 8 and use Music Match just like I could on any other Windows 95 or 98 machine.

if you're an unreal player, this tells us [gamers.com] that the AMD 1.4ghz is STILL faster than the latest P4 offering!

And it also tells you that if you're a Quake player, it isn't.

Remember, kids, read ALL the fine print...

Actually, according to Firingsquad, if you're an unreal player, this tells us that the AMD 1.4ghz is STILL faster than the latest P4 offering! Aside from Quake, the P4 2ghz is only marginally faster. The 2.24ghz (OC'd) does take a bit more of a lead. So, for only $400 extra you can get 10% speed increase on a FEW programs!

Let's see, we have a Firingsquad review...

An AnandTech review.

And let's not forget ExtremeTech's review.

And finally Kyle and the gang at [H]ardOCP did a review.

Incidentally, [H] got their p4 to over 2.2ghz, but ran into heat issues at 2.3.

My favorite game of all time is Electronic Arts's Mail Order Monsters. You bought selected a body for your monster (arachnid, brontosaurus, hominid, amoeba, lyonbear, etc), improved its attributes (strength, life, armor, speed, muscle, and brain), added traits to it (photosynthesis, hands, tenticals, poison spit, etc), outfitted it with weapons and armor, and then sent it into battle.

I spent many a day coming home from grade school, and wasting many an afternoon and evening playing as my mom put it "that mind numbing game".

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

and gaming sites just go off the deep end about how great the trees look.
Um, yeah. B&W has a good reputation. Now, I haven't actually played it, and I have friends who've been hooked by it, but most of them seem to still admit minor problems. I found FiringSquad's review (78%, blam!) refreshing. ;^)

and gaming sites just go off the deep end about how great the trees look.
Um, yeah. B&W has a good reputation. Now, I haven't actually played it, and I have friends who've been hooked by it, but most of them seem to still admit minor problems. I found FiringSquad's review (78%, blam!) refreshing. ;^)

• Gamers.com - Not too much info nowadays (they got bit too)
  
• The GIA - Fairly good coverage of major events. Very review and gameplay heavy, rather than industry news.
  
• Gamasutra - Industry news in a simple format, though more finance and 3rd party tools related
  
• FGN Online - Pretty good coverage. It's now an IGN affiliate.
  
• SegaDojo - Fairly good SEGA related coverage
  
• MS Xbox - For the people who can get past the fact that Microsoft might just have a kick ass gaming machine
  
• Final Fantasy Online - For any Final Fantasy freak. The site's down at the moment, though
  
• IGN Games - Coverage of anything and everything in gaming
  
• GameSpot - Okay, so it's GameSpot. At least they publish all their media in downloadable MPEGs
  
• Core Magazine - All the random things that other people don't cover, including interviews and stuff straight from Japan.
  
• US Famitsu - Currently down, with no plans of coming back up, but it's the US branch of the standard gaming press in Japan - Famitsu
  
• Stomped - Lots of coverage of gaming in general, with some focus on FPS.
  
• Blue's News - Blue keeps going, and it's always focused on FPS for the most part.
  
• OMM - And of course, Old Man Murray.
  

Is this right? Over at Firing Squad they did a huge slew of benchmarks and at best the P4 was equivalent to a slower clocked AMD chip. Where are you getting your info? Or are you just looking at very specialized applications?

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/pentium4170 0/default.asp

Sigma is a game being developed by Relic, the studio that created Homeworld (Game of the Year by some accounts, etc, etc.) Anyway if you dig B&W, you might also dig Sigma (when it's out, late this year?) It involves crazy creatures, a B-movie plot, genetic wackiness, a pretty impressive rendering engine, etc. I'm sure the dev team of Sigma has watched B&W closely (it's been in development for about as long), though the gameplay and objectives seem to be different enough. Homeworld cameras and gameplay were great, so I have high hopes for Sigma!

In the words of Relic's CEO, Alex Garden, (who has brushed shoulders with Peter Molyneaux)... "We prefer to think of Sigma as what happens when a geneticist smokes far too much crack."

Some links for more info...
http://forums.relicnews.com
http://pc.ign.com/previews/14840.html
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/gamestock01 /page2.asp
http://www.gameweek.com/features/gamestock01/pc/in dex3.shtml
http://gamepen.ugo.com/gamepen/Features.asp?itemid =92&pageid=5
http://www.gamesmania.com/articles/PC/sigma/previe ws1.asp

How does Relic afford to fund a game that has also been something like 3 years in the making? Microsoft dollars. Sierra funded Homeworld. Not sure why MS is backing this one, and say what you want about the evil empire... but they've got money to risk on crazy games like Sigma. And I think that's pretty goddamn cool...

I don't know what kind of field you're in, but I'd tend to agree with the idea that you find someone in your field who happens to have the skills you're looking for.

Most techies are inquisitive by nature, and would jump at the chance to get involved in a position like you describe. You've got a whole lot of good things that you're offering: flexible and everchanging job requirements, a sense of ownership, 'status' by being someone who's needed - as opposed to just another coder. Most importantly, you're offering the chance to do something different, by applying coding skills as a tool - it gets really, really old spending your days making the newest widget that no one is ever going to use.

However, the 'code as a tool' concept is defining characteristic of your ideal person - most Computer Science graduates enjoy code for code's sake, not code for your experiment's sake. You need to get outside the CS mindset and find other scientists and engineers who enjoy the research itself, and not just the code. There was an interview with John Carmack (highly respected coder) where he made a great point: most coders are all about instant gratification - code, compile and run. If it doesn't work, tweak, compile and run. Repeat until it does work. The folks you find with a pure programming background might not like the longer lead time that's associated with whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Random thoughts,
J.J.

... specially MS, is more fun than doing their marketing work for them.

Also, many gaming sites found this newsworthy, so I don't know why you're complaining :

planetgamecube.com
computerandvideogames.com
fgnonline.com
gamers.com
xbox.ign.com

Why hasn't anyone else picked up on this? The thumbnail versions of the diagrams explaining anti-aliasing were created using subsampling, and as a result look absolutely horrible. This is really bad design under any circumstances, and absolutely inexcusable in this context!

In case you missed it, the bad-looking thumbnail images are here and here.

I have put properly anti-aliased versions of the same images here and here. (Isn't that much, much better?) These were created with 'pnmscale', a free (speech, beer, and everything else) tool that has been around for a decade now.

Why hasn't anyone else picked up on this? The thumbnail versions of the diagrams explaining anti-aliasing were created using subsampling, and as a result look absolutely horrible. This is really bad design under any circumstances, and absolutely inexcusable in this context!

In case you missed it, the bad-looking thumbnail images are here and here.

I have put properly anti-aliased versions of the same images here and here. (Isn't that much, much better?) These were created with 'pnmscale', a free (speech, beer, and everything else) tool that has been around for a decade now.

here."over is article the. Polygons than rather (NURBS of derivative a) maps texture quadratic using was it. Dreamcast the for originally developed was which chip NV2 the about bit little a include they that is interesting this makes what. NVIDIA of history the article an posted just"SquadFiring writes Alan

Hmm... i think THX has already been on the desktop for ~1 1/2 years in the form of the 4.1 Klipsh Pro Media speakers. I'm not an audiophile, but u don't have to be one to know that these speakers sound very good for what you would pay for them ($400 CAN).

I may not be hardcore into sound, but i know that 400 watts RMS on the sub and 60 watts on each satellite is pretty decent.

Anyway i think that Dell is playing catchup and they do not in fact have anything THAT new.

Ceres

Firingsquad has an interview with Brian Burke of nVidia's PR department regarding the buy out at http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/nvidia1215/ .

They talk about driver support, 3dfx's current and future hardware.

http://firingsquad.gamer s.c om/hardware/amdddr/default.asp

Phil Harrison VP of R&D at SCE Explains all of the memory issues on Gamers.com.
http://www.gamers.com/s/feature/000717-philharriso n/index There are also video explanations in ASF & MOV format concerning the memory. A good read.

They're going crazy for this stuff. http://www.gamers.com/news/359382
Is it worth it?

...is this stuff done using BlueTooth. It feels like Yet Another Wireless Solution, but specialized for mice and keyboards and (I'm guessing) proprietary to Intel, isn't a very cool thing. On the other hand, my knowledge of BlueTooth isn't (yet) in-depth enough to know if it would be suitable to handle real-time stuff like mouse movements. You don't want to get the guys over at FiringSquad to b*tch over latency in your mouse tech. ;^)

Well, the beef with the Pentium II is that it seems to suffer from BSE (bovine spongiform encephelephy a.k.a. Mad Cow Disease), although I doubt that any British cattle was involved. Although BSE infected products shouldn't be imported, I'm pretty sure we'll also see the Pentium II here in Europe soon after the 3rd of May when it is finally released. However, since I wouldn't eat BSE infected beef, I wouldn't be interested in risking an infection of my computer with this CPU either.

...For former Pentium users there's hardly any attractiveness in the Pentium II either. The Windows 95 performance is hardly any better and in some cases even worse than the cheaper Pentium Pro or Pentium MMX. Windows NT users would be the last ones to be interested in the Pentium II, there is just no reason at all to swap the Pentium Pro for a Pentium II.

The AnandTech article implied that there were. I could have sworn I'd read elsewhere that there were, but maybe it was another AnandTech article. I did find a cameo interview with Carmack at FiringSquad that paraphrases to what you said:

Most of the Katmai optimizations [for Quake 3] are in the OpenGL drivers. We may have some loops in the main code Katmai optimized, but it is a low priority. Because up to 75% of the execution time of the game is in the graphics driver, most of the burden of optimization is theirs.

By the way, you keep comparing 3DNow to MMX. Are you including SSE in MMX?

How about this? Single-player Quake is a game. Multi-player Quake is a sport. Single-player Quake III is a sport the way NBA Live is a sport.

There is such a thing as Quake skill or ability. It's how Thresh got the money to buy himself not one, but two dweeby web sites and I'm just posting on Slashdot. I think it's different from getting to the end of Pac Man or Dragon's Lair. Same thing for driving games. The spread of lap times at GPLRank convinces me that there's such a thing as sim racing talent.

If you want to see a BAD console game, go check out Warcraft for the PSX. The controls are terrible. That type of game (RTS) is WAY better on PC's. Which leads me to my point:

Didn't ANYONE read the strengths and weakness of PC's and Consoles?

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardw are/dcvspc2/

PC's aren't just going to go away and die. Sure game budgets may be getting out of hand (5 - 10 million) but the movie industry went through the same thing after they realized all those special effects can't turn a bad movie into a good one, only make a good one better. (i.e. Waterworld, and Blair Witch)

Consoles excel at where time is limited. You just jump right and you're playing. But they can't match the depth of customization that PC's have had for years. Look what kept Doom and Quake around ALL these years: user-mods.

So the next time, someone spouts off "consoles will own pc's", or "console games blow" tell them to THINK about what the PC's and Consoles are BOTH _good_ and _bad_ at.

But what do I know, I'm just a 3d game programmer...

have u played Deus X ? Was wondering about that game ? someone give me a review so I can decide if I should spend my hard earned $$$'s :)

Deus Ex review index

Summary? About half the reviews contain the words "game of the year" somewhere in their text...

Tommy claims that the Pentium-3 1.13GHz is unstable, and he can't get benchmarks to run. Why?
Because the Pentium-3 demolishes Athlon, and costs less. So he made up this little story. Ach!

As you can see, some other Hardware sites had NO problem running the 1.13GHz Pentium-3.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html? i=1290

http://www.shar kyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/cpu/pentium3_1x13gh z/

http://firingsquad.gamer s.com/hardware/p3-1133/default.asp

They even ran it on 440BX and VIA boards! Firing Squad OVERCLOCKED it. But Tommy's was broken, really, and it must be a SCANDAL for Intel.

Here's a scandal for you--AMD's stock price is going to cross Intel's this week, heading the wrong direction! No wonder Dr. Tommy is having problems!

I'm surprised there was just Sharky's review. All of the sites normally come up with reviews when the NDA's expire:

AnandTech
Fast Graphics
FiringSquad
GamersDepot
GameSpot
GA-Hardware
HotHardware
PlanetHardware
Tom's Hardware

For my money, Anand's is the best place to go for these things, although Tom usually has better discussions of the details behind the hardware and features itself.

Also, 20 questions with ATI, mostly about Radeon.