6/28/99 Monday's News

Quake II:

Quake 2 has gone gold and been sent off for duplication according to the .plan file of Nathan Trost of Logicware. This should mean that we will be seeing it on store shelves in the next couple of weeks.

Quake III Arena:

According to id Software, they have moved over to better servers before the release of the next installment of Q3. That should help deal with the traffic on their Quake 3 site. As anyone who tried to download from their site shortly after the announcement knows, it was filled up in a hurry. So this should ease the traffic some.

Also Carmack has begun posting updates to his .plan again so we can follow what he is up to. ;-)

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an update very soon since they updated their server.

Shattered Steel OpenGL:

According to MacCentral’s gaming news, Logicware will be releasing an OpenGL enhanced Shattered Steel. Logicware ported Shattered Steel to the Mac for Interplay. Bill Heineman said that they will be getting to it after Aliens vs. Predator is released.

Total Annihilation:

Westlake interactive has posted on their web site that TA should be completed and ready to ship by the end of July. MacCentral quotes Mark Adams as saying that it will be available for preorder at MacWorld.

Weekend Recap:

Falcon 4 1.06c patch was released this weekend. It should help many people who are experiencing problems with Falcon. Also, Mike has posted some screenshots from Falcon with different graphics cards (down the page a bit) [or on the Falcon4 Pix page-Mike]. Take a look at those. Still, I don’t think you can tell the real difference until you see the games in action. Randall

Q3Test 1.05 Performance - Rage128 vs 3DFx Banshee:

(The following is taken from my Railgun G3/466 ZIF review-Mike)

Thankfully OpenGL does show some headroom with the Rage128 in the Blue and White G3. Performance did scale up a bit with the Railgun running at 500MHz vs the 400MHz CPU.

Note that the Rage128 in 32-bit mode outperformed the 3Dfx banshee card (IXMicro Game Rocket) with both running in the 66MHz slot of the B&W G3/400. The sky textures did look better on the 3Dfx card, even in 32-Bit mode the sky looked dithered badly on the Rage128. Other parts of the game looked great and it was noticeably faster than the 3Dfx card. Settings were FullScreen, Lightmap lighting, texture detail high, Geometric detail high, texture detail 2nd notch down from max, texture filter set to bilinear. The Rage128 was set to 32-bit color (game and desktop), 3Dfx Banshee (IXMicro Game Rocket) ran 16-bit color (game and desktop) since it does not support 32-bit mode games.

Note the above framerates were not from a simple timerrefresh command - but a full run of a demo map playback which is a far more accurate indication of actual gameplay performance. Some say the Timedemo is 'broken' - but I'm not saying the fps are 100% accurate literally but that they are useful for comparisons - and simply watching the two run you can clearly see the Rage128 is significantly faster - noticably so. (In fact, Thresh himself uses Q3test timedemo as a video card benchmark and says 'the timedemo function is a repeatable process which gives consistent scores' in Q3test.)I was using a new 3dfx Opengl extension but framerates were the same as the previous MesaQuake b11 with the GameRocket running MesaQuake instead. I've added this info to my Quake 3 page was well for future reference.

6/27/99 Sunday's News

Mac Quake 2 Finished! Lucian Fong wrote to say that the plan file of Nathan Trost of Logicware reports that Quake 2 has gone gold:

" From the .plan file of Nathan Trost of Logicware:

Endgame.

'Quake II for Mac was officially given code release status from Activision QA and blessed by id yesterday (Friday) and is off to duplication. I don't have an exact release date, but it should start hitting store shelves within the next couple weeks.'

Lucian Fong "

Ruffing Bailey sent a link to the plan file update.

6/26/99 Saturday's News

Colin Anderson sent a note that http://systemlogic.net has a poll asking which CPU you prefer. Although the site appears primarily PC it does list the PowerPC lets get out and vote. The poll is on the left side of the main page, down a bit. That site also has benchmarks and Q3test screenshots of the Permedia3 chip (might be of interest to those considering the Permedia3 based Formac card).

I also want to note that I cannot seem to use the ATI Universal Installer v4.0 (supplied with the Rage128 Orion review card) on a PowerCenter Pro running an ATI RagePro 3D PCI card under OS 8.1 (QD3D 1.6 installed). On boot I get a 'code fragment' error. I reverted back to the v3.3 universal installer. I did not have OpenGL 1.0 installed, perhaps that is needed or there is a requirement for a later OS. I've written ATI and will post a note on the solution/reason when I receive it.

Rage128 Update: I've added the following info to my Rage128 FAQ page and thought it might be of interest here - especially the item on Nexus 32MB cards and Quake 3. The following is a copy of what was added to the Rage128 FAQ page.

I recently received an ATI Rage 128 Orion (16MB) card from ATI, retail boxed, with $30 off coupon on the box (there are other offers like the $50 loyalty program available to existing retail ATI Card owners (ragepro/rageII)).

Here are some comments that I wanted to note that might be important to some buyers or of general interest:

• Quake3: If you want to run max texture quality in Quake3, ATI says you'll need a card with more than 16MB of RAM. That means the Nexus128 card. I think Q3Ttest looks fine at the default settings on the Rage128 (see my Screenshots page) but wanted to make this public since in the past 32MB cards offered no real advantage for existing games. ATI says some textures in Quake3 are 1024x1024, larger than the 256x256 limit of all current 3dfx cards (even the voodoo3).

• Bundle: The Orion comes with a 4-level version of Tomb Raider II, FutureCOP LAPD, and a demo of Myth II.

• The retail cards have the ATI Control panel that allows changing some 3D settings like texture compression, filtering, etc. and lets you see how much video ram is being used.

The Orion (16MB) cards should be shipping to dealers now and the Nexus128 (32MB) shortly thereafter. The Rage128 VR will not be available until end of July/first of August based on best estimates at this time.

More on 3DFx 2D Mode 565 pixel format issue: Many readers seem confused on this issue so I'm posting some clips from a 3Dfx Engineer Kenneth Dyke from my 3Dfx forum that may help. Note this is not a game issue, only a 2d/desktop thousands color mode one. However from these comments there apparently can be no windowed 3D application acceleration if I'm not mistaken.

" One other issue I forgot to mention: Voodoo3 does not have a passthrough like Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 does. I have seen games that used the passthrough control on Voodoo1/Voodoo2 to switch back to the desktop mode when the game is running. This will simply not work right now. PC game programmers had to deal with this as well, they just did it quite a while ago when Banshee came out. One reason for the V3 drivers not being released sooner is to give game developers a chance to get things updated to work right. There was also a texture alignment issue on newer hardware as well, which is another thing game programmers will have to deal with (The latest Unreal code fixes this latter problem, for example).
-Ken"

[another post in the thread in reply to a reader comment asking why 3dfx didn't change the chip]

"Well, it's not that we aren't interested in a fix, it's that it's not really feasible to rev the chip specifically for the Mac. I don't expect that we will have this 565 vs 1555 problem forever. However, that is just one of the issues.

The other issue is that the 3D engine can only render in 565, so even with the CLUT trick we do we can't efficiently use the 3D engine to do windowed 3D. (The trick is only useful for taking data in 1555 format and getting it displayed on a 2D video mode that's expecting 565). Beyond that, there are difficulties in efficiently using the 3D engine at all when not in fullscreen mode (this has to do with big vs little endian conversions, etc.) Rather than have working but poor performing windowed 3D, we have chosen (on Voodoo3) to simply punt on that. I would personally rather have something either work well, or not work at all. YMMV.
-Ken "

If you missed last night's late updates - check out the Falcon 4 3dfx vs Rave screenshots. I've also put them on a separate page for future reference.

6/25/99 Friday's News

Falcon 4: RAVE/Rage128 vs 3DFX Images: To better show the differences in Glide vs Rave in Falcon 4, below are samples of an exterior shot of the plane that better illustrates the different appearance between 3dfx/Glide mode (Voodoo2/Game Rocket/MP850 card) and RAVE mode (Rage128 card). Note the different appearance of the plane texture mapping. Gamma is different on the two modes, but Glide has a slightly more realistic appearance. RAVE still looked better than I expected from the comments I had heard. Fog/smoke trails from rockets looked good in both RAVE and Glide, as did explosions, etc. The two images below represent examples of the most dramatic differences I've seen so far. -Mike

New Falcon 4 Patch!: Randall just a note that Westlake Interactive released Falcon 4 1.06c patch to their website. Here are the details:

Numerous fixes include the ability to select your monitor and display frequency, better joystick button handling and keyboard assignments, the ability to play on non-PCI PowerMacs, the unsupported RAVE patch to allow play with older ATI drivers, and interface tweaks. The readme inside the updater contains a complete list of changes. This update also includes previous fixes from earlier updates.

The 1.06c download is 1.5MB.

After some shipping problem (over a week late, lost perhaps in transit), ATI fed-ex'd a Rage128 Orion full retail box version that arrived today. The software bundle includes FutureCOP, TombRaiderII (4 levels) and MythII (demo).

Randall Markarian's news update:

Railroad Tycoon:

Westlake Interactive has released an update to Railroad Tycoon. According to Westlake:

Bugdom:

Yesterday, Pangea Software released Bugdom for Mac. They have a demo version (limited to 30 minutes of play) available for download at their web site. I tried it out last night, and while it wouldn’t keep me interested for a long time, kids will get a kick out of it. The graphics are excellent and the characters are cute and look like they are out of A Bug’s Life. Get the demo and give it a try. While you are getting it don’t forget Nanosaur, their charity ware game, and Weekend Warrior, which is now freeware.

Falcon 4:

We are still eagerly waiting for another update to Falcon 4 that should take care of some of the bugs that people have been reporting over the last couple of weeks. Since that has not been released, I decide to go ahead a post some screenshots of Falcon taken using RAVE, Glide, and software rendering to compare the image quality. Glide is the winner, IMHO. But the screenshots don’t really show how much better Glide is in Falcon.

Miscellaneous:

What a great week for Mac gaming. With the announcement that 3Dfx will give us Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 drivers, I think that we will be set for 3D cards for the Mac. It was interesting to note that the announcement made mention that the "bug" that prevented SLI on Macs was "very minor." Too bad Microconversions did not catch that early on; it might have won them much needed support with gamers. When you buy a Voodoo 3 or a Voodoo 2 card in the coming weeks, let’s be sure to let 3Dfx know that it is for the Mac. They need to know how popular their decision was among the Mac community otherwise we might not see future support from them. In other words, register your purchases and make sure they know it is for a Mac.

Keep the tips and e-mail coming! -Randall

$49.99 VOODOO2 12MB Cards! A reader sent a note that Creative Labs is selling refurbished 12MB Voodoo2 cards (white box) for $49.99 while supplies last. (Thanks to Paul Sian for the sale tip!) Go to http://www.soundblaster.com/specials/voodoo2/ or direct to the Order Page, as supplies are limited I suspect. With the recent news of generic Voodoo2 drives (and SLI mode support) for the Mac I suspect these will be gone fast. This card works fine with other PC reference designs in SLI Mode in my tests (but may not work with some special V2 cards like those from Canopus, etc.). I suspect it would work fine with a Game Wizard 12MB, but can't say until the drivers are released. Note: SLI mode requires that both cards have the same amount of RAM (you can't mix a 8MB Voodoo2 and 12MB voodoo2 card for instance).

My FAQ has a 3dfx section for more info on adapters, etc. for Voodoo2 cards (needed to connect to a Mac monitor port - as these cards have VGA connectors on them).

More news later in the day. (I was so burned out yesterday that I listed thursday's news as wednesday again...)-Mike