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PC Hardware
For a chronological narrative of the machines I've owned, click here.
NVIDIA TNT2 AGP 3D Accelerator (Diamond V770 Ultra)
For the PIII system I had assembled, I choose the Diamond V770 Ulta, although it was a
tough call over the newly released Matrox G400 MAX. But the Matrox board wasn't
widely available yet, so I went with the TNT2 solution. Nevertheless, this 3D board
is currently the industry's fast board, and contains 32 MB of RAM. What can I
say? The board is fast and looks great. My 17" monitor prevents me from
enjoying most of the extremely high resolutions the board is capable of, peaking out at
1280 x 964. I've come to think of this board a a twice as fast version of the
original TNT (see below). In my informal benchmark tests, this board is as fast, and
some cases even faster, in 32 bit color mode vs. 16, which is very nice. It brings
32 bit gaming mainstream with no performance penalty.
TNT nVidia 3D AGP 3D Accelerator (Diamond V550)
I've been reading 3D accelerator reviews for years now, and although the "king of
the hill" changes every 2-3 months, it looks like the TNT nVidia chipset is a winner
that will be viable for most of 1999. I purchased the Diamond V550 TNT nVidia,
although similar cards are also being offered by Creative, Canapus, and many others.
At the time this is being written, it is considered the fastest accelerator for the mass
market. It has 16 MB of 125 MHZ memory, which allows 32 bit resolutions up to 1900 x
1200. It can render in 16 or 32 bits of color, and use a 16 or 32 bit Z-buffer.
The board has a very stable OpenGL driver and Direct3D implementation. The performance
is quite remarkable for both, although Direct3D seems a little faster than the OpenGL
implementation.
Although the board will run accelerated in extremely high resolutions and color depths,
I've found that on a 17" monitor the difference between 1024 x 768 x 16 and 1280 x
1024 x 32 is very small, unnoticeable in fact when the scene is rapidly changing, as it
usually is in action packed 3D games. Yet the data set for the previous resolution
is less than half the size of the second, so I usually save the board the needless work
and gain a few FPS by using 16 bit color depth and hold the resolution in the neighborhood
of 1024 x 768.
The rendering quality seems equivalent to, perhaps even a little bit better than, the
Rendition Verite 2x00 chipset, which has enjoyed a strong reputation in the visual eye
candy areas. However, my Verite 2100 board would begin to bog down in some 800 x 600
games, and got noticeably slower at 1024 x 768. In fact, most games would drop
textures at this resolution due to the limited amount of video RAM (4 MB). This was
my main reason for purchasing the TNT- the ability to run 3D in high resolutions at high
refresh rates puts new zing in old and new games alike.
A pleasant surprise is how the board scales well with resolution increases. Moving
to higher resolutions seems to have a minimal impact on rendering performance.
My frame rates on my system are probably held back by the 300 MHZ CPU.
Reviews of this board conducted with 450 MHZ Pentium II machines are reporting Forsaken
frame rates in the low 100s. I'm getting a solid 60 FPS on my system, at both 640 x
480 and 800 x 600.
This board has a TV out jack that I have not yet tried out, and unless someone donates a
large screen TV I have little desire to use this feature. I suspect that like many
people, I don't even keep the PC and the TV in the same room.
The initial installation did not go well. Nothing in the installation instructions
mentioned that a BIOS interrupt for the VGA card was necessary. The board would not
work with the drivers until this BIOS setting was adjusted to allow the VGA board to take
an interrupt. Only sheer luck of the draw and a lot of trial and error got this
board working, although if it were not for this one glitch things should have worked
flawlessly the first time.
The board comes with a CD-ROM full of game trial versions, and a CD-ROM with obsolete
drivers. Recent ones are to be found on the web. I tried both the Diamond drivers,
and the nVidia reference drivers. I like the control panel nVidia provides- it
contains many 3D settings that can be toggled on or off. I'm using the Diamond
drivers again, and they seem stable- the InControl utility attaches itself to your task
bar and allows changing screen resolutions and color depth on the fly. There is also
a cool utility for benchmarking the board with various rotating objects- I liked the
rotating mirrored donout the best, as you could see the entire scene rendered in it's
shiny surface at a smooth 47 frames per second.
Buying this board for anything less than a 200 MHZ MMX Pentium is a waste- a slow CPU
simply cannot feed the accelerator enough triangles to keep it busy. In this case, a
cheaper 3D solution (based on the rendition chips) would probably make more sense because
the CPU would be balanced with the accelerator.
For anyone with a 300 MHZ CPU or better, putting anything but a TNT nVidia based board
in your system just doesn't make sense.
Diamond Stealth II 220 PCI 3D Accelerator
A PCI 3D Accelerator board with 4 MB RAM, Diamond's card is based on the Verite 2100
chipset by Rendition, which was recently purchased by Micron. When purchased in late
1997, this was probably the best 3D accelerator on the market. It combines fast
update rates with a rendering quality that has been surpassed by none.
The OpenGL drivers accelerate Quake based games beautifully. It's easy to see that
the Rendition engineers fine-tuned their OpenGL ICD for this game. Using this card
with a 200 MHZ MMX Pentium made for a awesome gaming platform for all of 1998.
A strong Direct3D implementation makes this board a winner for DirectX games as well.
The rendering quality is remarkable. Games such as Jedi Knight and Forsaken
look wonderful and play fast. The board has no problem running these games (and many
others) in 800 x 600. Acceleration in 1024 x 768 is possible if the scene contains
small or repeated textures. A double buffered game running at this resolution has
little memory left over for texture maps.
The rendering engine can render in 16 or 24 bits of color, and uses a 16 bit Z-buffer.
The best thing about this board is it's price- $80 if you shop around. The great 2D
performance of this card is worth the price alone. Others report similar
satisfactions with this product.
Other manufactures are making Verite 2100 and Verite 2200 boards, but for the most part
they are all quite similar and have nearly identical performance curves. The Verite
2200 RISC chip adds a triangle set-up engine, making it a slightly superior product,
although the cost is a little higher.
Rendition (now owned by Micron) should be releasing the Verite 3300 soon. Little is
known about this offering, beyond the "fact of the week" posted to their web
site. Timing will be critical for the release, because history has shown that 3D
cards released behind the performance curve get swallowed up quickly by the rapidly
changing market.
Industry pundits report that Micron plans to support the new chipset with a large amount
of high-speed RAM, accessed via a proprietary interface. Rendition has a loyal following,
and if they can deliver a product before spring 1999 they will survive. If they
can't get their next generation boards in the hands of the public by spring, they will be
doomed as most Rendition loyalists will have upgraded their cards by then to a
non-rendition offering (as I have, for instance).
There are a few AGP versions of this chipset available also- although I've never seen
benchmark numbers that compare FPS on two of the same manufacture's board, one board
AGP and one PCI. Certainly, AGP is a superior connection to RAM than the PCI bus,
but due to the Verite architecture I doubt if AGP performance is noticeably different for
the 1998 crop of games. This situation is sure to change as the 1999 games based
upon the Unreal engine start pushing extremely large and detailed textures through the
renderer. In this situation the dedicated channel to system memory plays a larger
role in swapping in needed textures. Id Software is reportedly using 24 bit texture
maps in it's upcoming shooter, Quake Arena. Industry pundits report that even the
AGP 4.0 spec will not contain the bandwidth that will be required for tomorrow's games, so
it looks like video boards with large dedicated RAM banks are here to stay.
Sierra Screamin' 3D PCI 3D Accelerator
In 1996 Sierra, a game developer of 3D based games, grew frustrated that so many video
cards were offering 3D that either did not work or worked so slowly that software
rendering was faster. They knew the rendition Verite 1000 chipset had the muscle
necessary to do true 3D. They committed to developing their own video board around
this chip, and the Sierra Screamin' 3D was born.
I think of it as the first "real" 3D board that also served as a flawless 2D PCI
video card. Performance wise, it was ahead of the competition by about 8 months to
one year. It came with 4 MB of video RAM, and for the most part required rendition
specific versions to run accelerated games. Descent, and vquake are both great games
that become absolutely gorgeous and smooth as silk when played on this board. This
board was driven by a Pentium 90, and looked great.
It set the standard to which some modern boards are still trying to meet. However,
the 2200 based boards are down to $80 so it's hard to justify buying this board now unless
it is being given away, and you have an early Pentium you would like to jazz up a little.
The 2200 and 2100 series replaced the original V1000.
Microsoft Force Feedback Joystick
The most expensive joystick on the market had better be good, and fortunately it is.
The quality piece of hardware has a very rugged and durable feel to it. It is
a man's joystick. Adding force feedback to a game that makes good use of it (such as
motocross madness, flight sims) adds a lot to the gameplay experience. The joystick
comes with a few bundled games. My only complaint is that the forces can interfere
with precision control of the stick, something needed in flight simulator games,
especially when landing. It is also a tad noisy, as it contains a fan and two
spinning motors.
AMD K6-2 300 MHZ
I didn't plan on replacing my 200 MHZ AMD K6, but when I saw the price ($120 in Sept.
1998) I thought, why not? My motherboard allowed me to reset the frontside bus to 75
MHZ and with a clock multiplier of four, the CPU runs at 300 MHZ. I tried
overclocking, but the system would not boot. Nor could I take the system bus to 83,
or 100 MHZ. I suspect that my RAM, which has been following me from system to
system, just is not up to snuff.
AWE 64 Sound Card
I purchased on of these when the price hit $100. It's old news by today's
standards, but one short year ago this was still considered the board to have. It
has served me well and has performed flawlessly.
AMD K6-3 400 MHZ
I am now using the same system as above, except I now have 128 MB of 100 MHZ RAM and a
AMD K6-3 running at 400 MHZ.
For more information on the various computers I have owned over the years,
click here.
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