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I remember buying one and having no T&L games to play on it.

I still have one of these.

There's no way that this is meant to be used while playing games on the handheld. No sir.

Maybe the Interactor came out a few years too soon... There was no handheld with .1 audio to throw at it!

You say the 9700 isn't noiseless, but actually it can be made to be. This review shows a completely fanless 9700. The stock solution is louder then it needs to be for adequate cooling on a 9700.

The Geforce FX is a peice of crap. Even with 15% more performance from a future driver release (that's optimistic), it's still late, hot, loud, and not good enough. I'll wait for R350, thanks.

> And the industry move from 16-bit samples to 24-bit samples for sound seem equally pointless... I don't think *anyone* can distinguish 65,535 levels of amplitude for sound, much less 16.7 million.

There *IS* a reason for higher samples: to prevent banding when doing "audio blending." In plain English: playing multiple samples at the same time to reduce (audio) artifacts.

I'm a graphics guy, so I'll give a few analogys.

Lets say you have a 16-bit framebuffer (65536 colors), and want to show partially transparent smoke. With each layer of smoke you add (blend) to the screen, you will notice artifacts (banding) due to the lack of gradients. If you remember the old Voodoo's 1 (which only supported 16-bit color (well technically 21-bit :)) you could easily see the artifacts.
i.e. (Not the greatest examples, but they should help you see the difference)
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/games/oldnews/990703.ht ml (Scroll down to the bottom), and
http://www.riva3d.com/v32.html

It's the same reason commodity graphics use 32-bits per pixel -- It's good enough. However, where detail matters, even 8-bits/channel is too low, 16-bit/channel is perfect for film -- that's 2^(16*4) = 64 bpp (bits per pixel) = 1.8e19.

The reason:
16-bit graphics only has 32 gradients (5 bits/channel) available (per R,G,B)
32-bit graphics has 4 channels, each with 256 gradients (per R,G,B,A)

The greater the number of gradients you have available to you, the less you degrade the signal, when you mix in other sources.

Now true, 16-bit audio, is only one channel. But if you want to mix channels together you could naively do something like:
channelOutput = (c1 + c2 + ... + cn) / n, which effectively drops the bottom few bits. (Should be Log2(n) but I haven't double checked the math.)

Now, you do have a point, most people won't notice any difference in 16-bit samples, and that there is decreasing returns on quality (i.e. 64-bit audio samples sound exactly the same as 32-bit audio samples.) But if you're creating/mixing audio, you want the highest quality you can afford.

Cheers

screenshots

I went ahead and read the message board there. None of the posters actually had any information about Nvidia's hijinx - they were just reacting to an ideology they found distasteful. People like to react - hence, the popularity of trolls.

I sometimes wonder if I could get Slashdotted by putting up a web page about how Microsoft sued me for claiming that all MCSEs were weenies. I don't think it would be unlikely. Slashdot, like the National Enquirer, doesn't exactly do extensive checking-up on its sources.

You mean, you are hoping Apple to put a chip from a company that tries to censor its affiliate site and released obfuscated opensource drivers (what a sin )? If anyone is misbehaving here, it is NVidia.

Check this out! Nice pointing device placement.

My old Zenith NoteFlex has a trackball right below the spacebar, and the buttons are actually intelligently positioned. Also very easy to use, I point with my right thumb, click with my left, and never move my hands from home row. Try shift-click-drag-drop on a desktop, and you'll suddenly want a trackball under your thumbs, trust me.

I agree, tongues would be nice. I'm not dextrous enough with my foot to use a mouse, altho I did pretty well in Captain Skyhawk on the NES using a foot controller. I can imagine a tongue controller working really well. You could put a Breathalyzer(tm)-style interchangeable tip on the thing. The more I think about this, the less I want to use public phones. My cell phone might cook my brain, but at least it doesn't have someone else's spit on it. I wonder which is more dangerous?

Side-note on the tongue controller. Can we say misused? I thought we could. Then again, a surface covered densely with Trackpoint-style sensors could digitize a backrub. How to reproduce it tho? Throw in some vibrations and things could get positively interesting.

Posting as AC while I'm feeling perverted.

GeForce / TNT2Ultra / Voodoo3 Roundup [ Shugashack]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Ace's Hardware]
Guillemot GeFroce256 3D Prophet Review [Puissance PC]
nVidia GeForce 256: To Buy or Not to Buy [AnandTech]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [GA-Source]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [3DGPU]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva Extreme]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Preview [Thresh's FiringSquad]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Riva3D]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Review [Planet Riva]
nVidia GeForce256 DDR Benchmarks [Bjorn3D]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [CGO]
Guillemot GeForce256 3D Prophet Review [Fast Graphics]
Creative GeForce256 Annihilator Benchmarks [3DHardware]

Anandtech GeForce 256 Review
Ace's Hardware GEForce 256 Review
RivaExtreme GeForce 256 DDR Review
The FiringSquad GeForce 256 DDR Review
GA Source Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
3DGPU Geforce 256 DDR Review
Fast Graphics Guillemot 3D Prophet Review
CGO GeForce 256 Preview
Shugashack GeForce, V3 and TNT2 benchmark roundup
Riva3D Full GeForce 256 DDR Review
GeForce 256 DDR Review at Planet Riva

Riva3D ran the GeForce256 through Sense8's Indy32 benchmark. The results are here.

Far as I can gather, looks pretty promising. (with the right CPU. They used an Athlon.)

Riva3D ran the GeForce256 through Sense8's Indy32 benchmark. The results are here.

Far as I can gather, looks pretty promising. (with the right CPU. They used an Athlon.)

This will be true when nVidia releases their next chipset code named NV10, which has full hardware transform and lighting acceleration...This is really going to piss Intel off...

"Ah well, someday I may buy a new system but I haven't found ample justification to spend $700 to get something like a Celeron 433 with 128 megs of ram, Abit BX6v2 motherboard, etc."

You can upgrade your system for far less; approximately $450 now that's assuming you need a new case (AT -> ATX) plus 128 megs rams. Now you dont have to take my word it, you can go to www.computernerd.com for MBoard/CPU/Case bundle and to www.mwave.com for memory and see for your self. You can also checkout www.killerapp.com for computer hardware prices.

Now me personally I plan to purchase Abit's new dual slot 370 motherboard with two 366Mhz celerons guaranteed to overclock to 550Mhz for $412....