3DHardware.net got a hold of that 'Tree demo' that the GeForce256 has been showing and ran it on some G400 and TNT2U cards. Check out their results.

The guys at NVNews have collected up all the links for those GeForce256 articles for you to check out.

The CGO guys are just running a bit late on this one. Here is one of the latest NVidia GeForce256 previews for you guys to read. Ever heard of it?

As reported yesterday about the GeForce256s on sale, Ebay is in the current lead for the high bidding, ringing in at $9 999 999! (I feel a Dr Evil moment coming on) Compared to that, Yahoo and Excite are bargains at just over a grand. It's unfortunate to see what was supposed to be a charity turn into this.

FiringSquad has a follow-up GeForce256 article with the first ever Quake3 benchmark on the new card. in 1600x1200 GeForce 256 gets 33.1 frames per second while the TNT2 Ultra is about half as fast at 17.5 frames per second. That is the only Q3 benchmark they have but at least it's a taste eh?

For those of us who don't have $20,000 laying around to buy that GeForce card on EBay, NVidia has this form you can fill out which will give you a chance at winning a card for free.

I didnt mention the GeForce cards up for auction on eBay, Excite, and Yahoo yesterday assuming that they were fake. Apparently this is not the case. If you got some spare cash, which will be donated to charity, feel free to put up some money and try and get yourself an early GeForce256 card autographed by NVidia. Tweak3D confirmed it with NVidia.

While on the subject, Check out this chat log from the NVidia chat that went down last night.

A few more articles taking a look at the new GeForce256 card from NVidia for you guys this morning. Check out SharkyExtreme, FiringSquad, GA-Source, and this Experience Developer Diary. That's all I got for round2 of the GeForce256 media blitz.

Some more GeForce256 articles for you guys to check out. First off check out RivaExtreme, then he guys at PCRave do the thing, PlanetRiva has at it, CTNews busts one out, and Bjorn3D gets jiggy. Also word from GA-Source is that ELSA has announced their GF256 based card.

update: I forgot to mention that Creative Labs has announced their new GF256 based card as well.

It's 9:00am CST, that means it is time to reveal all that info on the new NVidia chip right? Well here you go. The most important thing for you guys is the specs, and when is it coming out. Well they are shooting for a release in just a few weeks, (You never know, my guess is 4-5) and here are the specs:

- 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate.
- 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines)
- 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
- 8 hardware lights
- 350 MHz RAMDAC
-Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Tranform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
- Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes , which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
- 256 bit rendering engine
- Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback

The official name for the new 3D card is the GeForce 256. I'm guessing they were doing one of those "our card is so damn fast we can give it a horrible name and people will still buy it" tactic. Hope it works. I'll add to this story as more articles come out on the card. The Riva3D.com guys were the first to send word and they have quite a bit on it. Check out geforce.riva3d.com, then head over to the Tweak3D preview. Lastly you can check out the 3DGpu.com page which has quite a bit of info on the card.

Update from Marcus: Here's the Press Release if you're really itching for more. Though I don't know about you but all I'm itching for at the moment is a GF256.

Having problems with your TNT2? This troubleshooting guide just might be what you need.

Well now, it seems that Mark Rein over at Epic Games made a post to the GTGames messageboard with quite a bit of detail on his experience with the new NVidia stuff that should be announced later this morning. Here is a bit of his post, or you can check out the whole thing. Thanks Ricki Ricardo for the word.

Nvidia is going to announce the GeForce256 which is the product name for the NV10 their new "GPU" chip which supports hardware accelerated transform and lighting. Tim Sweeney and I saw it running behind closed doors at Siggraph and we were totally blown away. We saw some incredible demos with previously unimaginable numbers of polygons in real time, fully-lit, game-quality framerates and resolutions.

Nvidia is going to ship it this September and from a practical standpoint it's approaching the power of Sony's next generation Playstation's graphics hardware.

An interesting update to this story. It looks like the NVidia guys have registered nvidiasuck.com as well as geforcesucks.com. Guess we can count on that GeForce name being it eh?

A friend of mine dug up this press release from NVidia that went out early this morning announcing that they will be unveiling a new graphics processor unit tomorrow. Well, as I mentioned earlier this morning it looks like NVidia is making a pretty big announcement soon. The nvidia.com website has a big old banner saying "In 18 hours, the world will change..." which I can pretty much agree with.

update: OH MY GOODNESS, IT SAYS 15 HOURS NOW. I'M POOPING MY PANTS.
update2: OH HECK, I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO IT IS LIKE ALMOST 6 HOURS NOW.

In an interesting Fingershack .plan update from NVidia's Chief Scientist, David Kirk, regarding the inclusion of anti-aliasing in the TNT/2 drivers.

The first solution performs sophisticated scene analysis (on the entire scene buffer), which identifies silhouette edges that require antialiasing, and that rejects interior edges which do not require antialiasing. The antialiasing is performed as a second pass, blending the edges after all polygons have been rendered. Not all edges are anti-aliased, but we attempt to make a good choice and smooth the most jagged edges without too much cost in performance. Higher quality antialiasing can be achieved through enabling a hardware contrast reduction post-filter. This advanced level of antialiasing is available through a control panel setting. The second pass edge anti-aliasing is available by default if the application requests anti-aliasing - we report this capability in D3D.

According to TheRegister (Which actually finally found it's way into my very small bookmark list) it looks like NVidia is planning on making an announcement finally regarding the NV10 chipset. Perhaps it is a coincidence that S3 announced their Savage2000 just today? Contrary to a what of people have been saying in the comments around here, NVidia has not made any sort of public claims about the performance of the NV10. Although NVidia is notorious for announcing specs they cant keep, they havent made that folly with the NV10 just yet :)

Update from Marcus: nVidia's site has a banner on their front page counting down to tomorrow, saying that "The world will change"...hmm.

I've gotten a hold of some details on that TNT2 "Pro" card which was rumored a while back. Check out this email that RivaStation sent in: "The TNT2/Pro is manufactured in 0.22 Micron. This allows less voltage and results in less heat and higher clockrates. The clockspeed of TNT2/Pro cards is 143MHz Core- and 166MHz Memclock."

Haven't had one of these in a while. Check out the latest TNT2 overclocking guide courtesy of XBT Hardware.

Well, this came as a bit of a surprise, especially to my f***ing stock portfolio. News.com has a good report on the earnings reports of nVidia and 3dfx. Here's the numbers.

[nVidia] Revenue came to $78 million, a 543 percent increase over $12.1 million for the same period the year before, while earnings came to $6.7 million, contrasting with a net loss of $9.7 million.
[snip]
... 3dfx has seen revenues nearly double from $58.9 million to $104.8 million but income decline from $9 million to losses of $11.6 million. Even if one-time charges for STB are excluded, the losses come to $4.3 million for the fiscal quarter that ended July 31.

sigh. You can share my pain right here. Have at it on the comments board.

PowerGamerz has moved their NVidia interview with Viet-Tam Luu, software developer at the aforementioned company.

Creative Labs has released some new drivers for their Banshee cards which should help the old Quake3 framerates. Improved the 3DNow! support and includes a nifty new bios.