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To: UCLAlumnus who wrote (5312)	7/14/1998 12:43:00 PM
From: view	Respond to of 16960

Does anyone knows if company provides a conference call play back option? If yes, what is the number and the password. thanks in advance

To: UCLAlumnus who wrote (5312)	7/14/1998 3:56:00 PM
From: Dragon1212	Respond to of 16960

here is a response from nividia on tnt bashing. I found it at www.rivazone.com. there is an intresting link about vodoo2/tnt as well found at cpumadness: cpumadness.com NVIDIA's Official Response 07.13.98 11:04 p.m. CDT Felby While the TNT has been taking heat for its early performance numbers, information is becoming available that explains the lower than expected speeds of the TNT. Adding to this, NVIDIA has made an official response to the benchmark scores available. Lew Paceley (my old war buddy) has written up a very informative and excellent response to the TNT criticism. Friends- We've gotten a lot of e-mails saying "hey, I thought TNT was a V2 beater, but it looks like it can't even beat a Savage!". There are many numbers being thrown around from many sources and it's pretty difficult to tell the players without a scorecard. I'm sending this mail to give everyone a status update so you understand where we are with RIVA TNT and what to expect regarding performance and availability. What's Going On With RIVA TNT? TNT is very much on track for production ramp starting end of July. The wafers are in the cookie factory. Just like we said. Remember that the add-in board companies will need to productize our software release and actually assemble and ship the boards to retailers. By Labor Day, you should see pretty good board availability with a few lucky folks seeing them before then. The software is still in an alpha, pre WHQL state but has come along very nicely over the course of the last couple weeks. We're not ready to share any numbers yet but I can say that we have a name brand, honest-to-goodness game that already runs faster on TNT than V2 SLI. I'm not expecting anyone to blindly believe it - we'll show you when we release the first production build. We have also gotten questions about clock speed and process technology. To ensure a fast production ramp NVIDIA decided to stick with .35u technology. Yes, this means that the clock speed may be less than some of our competitors using .25u. The difference is that we will be in volume production. And yes, despite using .35u we expect the RIVA TNT will be the fastest 2D/3D chip on the planet when it ships. See for yourself in a little more than 30 days. Things To Keep In Mind When Benchmarking RIVA TNT I'm sending this along to remind people of the key stuff to remember when performing and evaluating benchmarks. Some of the benchmarks numbers on the Web right now were taken from improperly configured systems or poorly controlled environments. I realize many people had to rush out an evaluation based on a quick look but folks, this is science, and the details matter - a lot. Here's some items that must be "right" to get the best performance from TNT: 1) Drivers NVIDIA is moving towards our first "real" release of drivers. These drivers are optimized for DX6. We don't do a lot of full driver builds while we are cranking toward the goal. I don't know what drivers the board companies are taking out on the road and even when they were built. I can guarantee that they are already out of date and far slower than the drivers we have internally. 2) DX6 When you evaluate RIVA TNT benchmarks, make sure to see that DX6 is installed. The RIVA TNT is virtually a hardware implementation of DX6. The hardware seems to run on DX5 but that's not what it's optimized for. You won't get best performance running on DX5. At least one site has made this mistake and reported numbers taken on DX5. 3) Board implementation While NVIDIA always creates an add-in board reference design, we give a lot of latitude to the board vendors to make price/performance tradeoffs. There are different memory speeds for SDRAM and SGRAM. SGRAM is slightly faster. I didn't see a single number from an SGRAM board in any of the tests. We've seen non-trivial performance differences on some game-based benchmarks as a result of changes in memory speed and/or type. 4) Registry Settings If you want to run NO_VSYNC then you must set the registry correctly. Seems obvious but at least one site reported NO_VSYNC numbers but in fact, the numbers were taken with VSYNC on. There's a big performance difference! If you don't know what to expect, it's easy to make a simple mistake and not catch it. NVIDIA will add a tweak setting on our soon-to-be-released control panel implementation to make this easier to get right. 5) Benchmark Testing and Consistency While this is less about RIVA TNT performance than the benchmarking process, we have seen inconsistencies in versions of games and levels used in performing benchmarks by different web sites. When you are looking for performance data, make sure you see the software version, for example Turok v1.03 (or v1.01) and level (demo1.dm2 vs massive1.dm2) documented. The SW driver version should also be documented as this can make a dramatic difference. If you don't see it documented then don't try to compare results from different sites or with data accumulated at different points in time. In short, when you are looking at data from multiple sites, make sure you are comparing apples and apples. NVIDIA has seen non-trivial performance differences between software versions of some game benchmarks. Finally, above all else, we really appreciate your interest and enthusiasm for RIVA TNT. RIVA TNT rocks! Best regards, Lew Lew Paceley VP Corporate Marketing NVIDIA