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

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (36456)	8/28/1998 8:27:00 PM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 1572102

Jim, re <CMP article> Just look at this passage: "In theory, 3-DNow! should significantly increase the K6-2's floating-point performance. The technology frees up two pipes that usually process integer instructions and uses them to process floating-point instructions. In some cases, it can pass two instructions through each pipe simultaneously. This means floating-point instructions can be processed up to four times faster than a standard K-6, depending on several variables." This is an utter BS. The CMP guys show here that they have no idea what they are dealing with and talking about. Pathetic! We all know that the 3DNow! has nothing to do with the legacy FPU whatsoever, and it is plain silly to compare uncomparables... Regards, - Ali

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (36456)	8/30/1998 1:19:00 PM
From: herb will	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572102

Jim In re: Drivers for 3DNOW! are being updated all the time. Take a look at Toms hardware page if you want to see how fast 3DNOW makes quake II run Jim, I think that you overlooking that what the article said that in order for 3D Now to do its thing is that special drivers and software patches are needed to supplement the 3D Now that is built into the K6 2 and at this juncture there is not a lot of support. Further quotes from the article follow. "But we had trouble with the 3DNow! drivers during testing, as in a previous CRW Labs K6-2 review. The 3DNow! technology is already built into the CPU, but special drivers that interface with the technology must also be present to achieve performance increases. The type and number of drivers used affect performance." `To date, drivers are available only for Nvidia's Riva128 graphics accelerator chip and the 3dfx Voodoo 2 3-D accelerator. Additional drivers from Matrox, S3 and others are expected later this year. Some games also will have 3-DNow! patches, but Quake II is the only game to date with an available patch." CRW Labs encountered difficulties when installing the Riva drivers and went to great lengths to get them to work properly. We started with beta drivers, then downloaded a final driver version from the Nvidia Web site. It's best to say that it isn't a good idea to ask the average customer to install his or her own 3DNow! drivers. The drivers and patches available from Nvidia, AMD and 3dfx Web sites aren't developer-supported. Therefore, little, if any, technical support is available. Just trying to keep informed. Herb