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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (33388)	6/19/1998 6:05:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1572510

3D Now!? AMD Chip Should Be 3D Soon! -- Forthcoming Titles, Drivers Will Optimize CPU By Kristen Kenedy San Mateo, Calif. - AMD's new 3D Now! technology might be more accurately called 3D Soon! Although systems based on the instruction sets-which are designed to speed up 3-D processing in AMD's K6-2 and other non-Intel processors-showed frame-rate increases, more obvious improvements in graphics are months away. CRW Labs tested a CTX system using a K6-2 300MHz CPU with 3D Now! technology. Using beta drivers, the instruction sets made frame rates faster in some games, but we were unable to detect any significant enhancements in graphics quality. According to AMD, several companies, including id, Digital Anvil and Dreamworks Interactive, are developing titles that exploit the 3D Now! instruction sets. In the upcoming Trespasser from Dreamworks, for example, K6-2 users will be able to see water ripples and other effects that would be difficult to reproduce with other processors. In addition, Microsoft's DirectX 6.0 will offer native support for 3D Now!, but it is not slated to be available before July. When DirectX 6.0 ships, any game that supports the new version of these multimedia APIs will show some performance increases from the 3D Now! technology. Games currently on the market that support DirectX 6.0 include the recently released Unreal. AMD sent CRW Labs a beta version of Microsoft Baseball 3D for the K6-2 as an example of a title enhanced for the instruction sets. Game action moved quickly, but players often appeared fuzzy or pixelated. CRW Labs was much more impressed by Quake II for 3D Now! using a 3dfx Voodoo 2 3-D graphics accelerator. In our tests of Quake II, for example, we generated 28.7 frames per second with the standard 3dfx Voodoo 2 driver for Quake II. That number increased to 42.8 fps when we used AMD's beta 3D Now! driver-a healthy jump in frame rate, even though the look of the game remained similar. A driver to support other Voodoo 2 games is expected from AMD later this year. As with the Voodoo 2, all graphics boards need customized drivers to reap the extra benefits of 3D Now! technology. We used Diamond's Stealth, based on Nvidia's Riva 128 graphics chip. (AMD preloaded the drivers before we received the system.) AMD said ATI, Matrox and others will support the technology, but drivers for these cards aren't yet available. An AMD spokeswoman said the company will put all drivers on their Web site when they are released. At press time, K6-2 systems were shipping without customized graphics drivers or DirectX 6.0, she said.

To: Tony Viola who wrote (33388)	6/19/1998 6:07:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1572510

Despite these delays, CRW Labs believes the 3D Now! instructions go a long way toward rectifying some of the lack of floating-point horsepower in the older K6 CPUs. Floating-point calculations are used in graphics processing, so a good floating-point unit in the CPU is essential for multimedia performance. Unlike Intel's Pentium II chip, the K6 wasn't processing the graphics setup calculations quickly, slowing down the rendering process. With the K6-2 with 3D Now!, AMD said floating-point calculations can be made two to four times faster than with its previous processor, as demonstrated in our Quake II tests. The K6-2 has some other benefits, as well. The chip works with the new Super Socket 7 motherboard, essentially a Pentium motherboard retrofitted to support AGP graphics and a 100MHz system bus. These new features mean that consumers don't have to purchase a Pentium II-based system to get the benefits of AGP. It also allows consumers to jump to the faster 100MHz bus without stepping up to a high-end PII. (Intel's chip set supports the 100MHz bus only with 350MHz CPUs and above.) Furthermore, AMD has enhanced the CPU's MMX capabilities, effectively processing two MMX instructions simultaneously for better multimedia performance. Noting industry warnings that the Super Socket 7 implementation of AGP might not be as robust as on a Slot-1 motherboard, CRW Labs tested the AGP titles G-Police, Incoming and Forsaken, as well as Monster Truck Madness and the new Unreal, to gauge compatibility. The only problem we encountered was running Forsaken with the Voodoo 2. All other games worked without a hitch. Methodology CRW looked at a CTX AMD K6-2 system with 512KB of cache, 64MB of RAM, a 6.4MB Fujitsu hard drive and a Diamond Stealth graphics card based on Nvidia's Riva 128 graphics accelerator with 4MB of RAM. We ran the demo1.dm2 Quake II frame counter at 640x480 resolution. We tested Forsaken's Nuke demo with frame counter at 800x600 resolution.