Thanks again Blue. Turns out that SGI and nVidia have more formalized their relationship. I heard some rumblings about something like this happening, I'm surprised they decided to make it public. Looks like SGI wants out of the chip business, and are throwing their engineers to nVidia instead. I'll just take the same quote that Blue did:

As a major initiative to bring a dramatic price/performance discontinuity to the visualization market and accelerate product time-to-market, SGI will incorporate NVIDIA's graphics technology into new desktop graphics systems. As part of the initiative, SGI will transfer a world-class team of 3D graphics engineers to NVIDIA to work on its next generation technology.

FiringSquad plans on taking a good hard look at that whole Glaze3D deal which everyone loves to buzz about. Here is their preview article of sorts.

The 'Squad wrote up a little history lesson and preview of the BitBoysOy's recently re-announced (on August 2nd) Glaze3D with their monster specs while down at Siggraph. Okay, so at this point it is vaporware...hopefully it's not though by early 2000:

It looks like the Glaze 3D chip is finally going to make it to silicon with a little help from Infineon, the company previously known as Siemens Semiconductor Group. Bitboys has a silicon group at Infineon helping them with the layout. They expect silicon in December or January, and they plan to ship in Q1 or Q2 2000.

How fast is Glaze going to be? Well, the standard 150MHz quote doesn't sound too "next-generation" by today's standards, but it's an approach we're likely to see from everyone in the near future. With dual and quad-texturing pipelines, the need for a higher clockrate is partially alleviated. Is this the right approach to 3D? Well, we feel it's a good interim solution. In the end, MHz matters. However, today's graphics port doesn't have enough power or space to accomodate increasingly powerful processing units. Until a fundamental change in AGP is implemented, we're going to have to make do with innovation over brute force

Well, it seems that way :) Tons of companies are announcing (embargo ends, Net flooded with articles) support for the new Athlon, even the hat-wearing Blue man himself! Check it out, he tirelessly compiled a neat list of the press releases from the morning.

Woohoo! At first I thought I was going to have to link every single review from the current Athlon tidal wave, but looks like JC has done all of us a favor and has put up a page of Athlon articles giving you guys not only the ability to post comments 'Shack style, but also the freedom to rate the reviews at various angles (kind of like reviewing reviews).

btw, here's the press release regarding the 650MHz Athlon that AMD just surprised us with.

3DHardware.net reviews a laptop, the Compaq Armada 3500 P2-300. No word on how well this cooks in the back seat on a hot summer day compared to Steve's Gateway though.

Even with the Savage 4 Xtreme around the corner, Review Zone rounds up a small set from the many S4 card manufacturers and tells it like it is:

As an entire package, the Diamond Stealth III S540 wins the contest hands down, owing to the sheer brilliance of the InControl 99 toolset, its stable drivers, and the fact that you get an unbeatable option to buy games with their program. I also noticed that out of the cards that use their own drivers, the Diamond was a lot more stable with the reference drivers in comparison to the others. Diamond's support too is very good and problems that do appear can be solved quite quickly.

Looks like S3 and Diamond got off to a good start (with S3 acquiring Diamond), as the Stealth III was their first Savage based board.

BXBoards looks at one of the last BX boards, Asus' P3B-F featuring 6 PCI slots and only 1 ISA.

FiringSquad reviews the new Abit BE6 board with onboard UDMA66 controllers.

Couple of new drivers released, Quantum3D's Obsidian2 (SLI in one thing) is sporting new drivers; and ATi updated both their Rage 128 sets for Win9x and NT. Speaking of ATi, Rage3D had a little chat with the ATi folks, and saved a log of it:

(roki) Whats the status on the Rage 128 Pro's that are being used at QuakeCon 99 at this moment.. are they final boards?
(Tom_Frisinger) roke - The Rage 128 Pro aren't final , close, but the shipping ones will have even higher clocks
(Rick_Hammerstone) roki - I do not know what board rev is being used at quake con -- software (at least ogl) looks pretty much the same from rev to rev

3DHardware.net scoops up the Videologic PowerVR Neon 250 (aka PVR Second/Next Generation). It goes without saying that this card kind of missed the boat, but still offers outstanding performance and quality (as seen in the Dreamcast), and offers a peek at Series 3. Too bad they missed out on Q3Test Phase4, but they still did a fps bit anyway:

We all know that the Timedemo is broken and does not give an accurate FPS, but still it does give an indication of where the performance is headed. The Neon 250 was run on the very first version of Q3Test due to the fact that there were still some issues concerning the compatibility with the newer Q3Test versions. All tests were run in 1024x768 with the highest possible detail level, tri-linear filtering and 32bpp source and rendering. Using cg_drawfps 1, the average FPS after running around the entire Test Level 1 a few times seemed around 40FPS. Minimum being around 25FPS and maximum weighing in around the 60FPS area. Not bad at all and very splendid considering the fact that the Neon 250 only runs at a clockspeed of 125MHz for both the core and memory. 32bpp doesn’t seem to be a big problem for the Neon 250, much due to the fact that there is no need for a Z-buffer. This also saves up memory meaning that the 16MBs of onboard memory can be used much more effectively for textures.

GamersDepot has scored an interview with ATI talking about their Rage128 Pro which will debut at QuakeCon99 in just a couple of days. The card sounds hot. (Oooh! a pun! Someone gimme a dollar)

Aureal has released some new Win95/Win98 drives for their Vortex 2 cards. Whats new?

Added support for WinDVD Software DVD Player

Added S/PDIF autodetect feature.

Fixed an issue that caused a number of DirectSound3D and A3D games to crash

Fixed some distortion on output

Fixed some issues relating to Wavetracing Reflections

Fixed some issues relating to Flatland Rover

Fixed a Graphic EQ issue

Fixed an issue with the A3D control panel

Fixed a memory leak in the direct sound driver

Normalized the volume between front and rear speakers

Beyond3D has an interview with those now famous BitBoys from Glaze3D.

SharkyExteme and FiringSquad both take a look at the latest S3 products.

Microsoft has a webserver up that they actually want you guys to hack. They are trying to make a Windows2000 webserver secure and stable. Can't say I have any plans to move Shack to a microsoft webserver any time soon. Thanks ArsTechnica

Microsoft has a webserver up that they actually want you guys to hack. They are trying to make a Windows2000 webserver secure and stable. Can't say I have any plans to move Shack to a microsoft webserver any time soon. Thanks ArsTechnica

CGO is taking a look at that Glaze3D announcement that went out a few days ago. NV10 and Voodoo4 look out?

Since sTeve and Jack were holding me over the toilet and taunting me because of my rather.... unsteady update habits, I went ahead and knocked it out early. Anyway, dig the new Shackware! Here's the Balls Out, Boxers and Briefs for those of you who already know what they want. Jack: you owe me a bugless copy of Gamespy now.

The new 3d card wars are heating up! 3dfx hit the public with a media barrage on their T-Buffer, Glaze3D tries to crash the party, and nVidia lets rumors trickle out onto the 'net...looks like we're approaching the 'technology refresh'. Tiger Invester's forum is the home to a post regarding some next generation 3d card info.

*3dfx does NOT have silicon at this time. Furthermore it would appear that NVIDIA's NV10 does have silicon even if it appears to be but a pale shadow of the hyped version. Jim referred to it as "ragged". Also, S3's GX4 doesn't look like it will see the light of day this year. Looks like 2000 for them. So where does 3dfx stand right now. 3dfx is shooting for an October release and any delays will put them outside of October.

...

NVIDIA is doing really well. They have out-engineered 3dfx with this latest project and are gaining momentum with the OEMs. NVIDIA's achilles heal will be what has made them great: performance and features. If NV10 is the dog Jim says it is then buying public will quickly turn their backs. Their recent partnership with SGI seems to indicate that they wish to enter the high-performance workstation (ie high cost) market. This happens at the same time 3dfx has decided to broaden their base into the low-end PC market. The future's of these two companies appears to be forking away from each other. NVIDIA will go after 3dLab's established marketshare while 3dfx goes after ATI.

* When I was at 3dfx last week for the T-Buffer thing (umm...article still needs some spit-shining), the question of silicon came up, and Scott Sellers indicated the the silicon is very close to "exisiting" if not already or something.