Q3test version 1.07 is out.

[Kruzin]

Hey, Fr. Joel-
You been sleepin the past few days?
That came out last week, less than 2 days after 1.06

[Joel]

Actually I have been a little under the weather the past few days. Some kind of virus.

Joel

[Jake]

Joel,

Watch out, Buuri might flame you for posting game related info here. (Looking really scared).

Jake

[Joel]

Oops I forgot about that.

Joel

[tylau]

Oh Joel,
That's great. Q3 v1.07 look even better than before, even on my humble V3-400, with its new improved look drived 1.02.11 though.

Believe it or not, it looks at least as great as my good old G200, I guess the output quality is somewhat similar to a 24bit average display card.

[Steve C]

While talking about V3 and quality (or lack of) I found this earlier on 3dfx' site:

Q: Why doesn''t Voodoo3 support 32b rendering, or large textures, or 32b textures?

A: There are two reasons: frame rate and image quality. Frame rate is the single most important feature that a gaming platform can provide, and not just average frame rate but sustained frame rate. How many times have you been wiped out in a death match when your frame rate suddenly drops as a number of characters and weapons enter the scene? 32bpp rendering with full 32bpp frame buffer accesses requires twice the memory bandwidth of 16bpp frame buffer accesses regardless of the graphics engine: higher banchwidth requirement means lower frame rate. As for image quality, we’ve gone to great lengths to make games look great in 16bpp mode. We actually do the rendering calculations internally at 32 bits to have full precision with the 16-bit operands. Then, instead of simply truncating the results to 16 bits for saving in the frame buffer we use a proprietary filtering algorithm that retains nearly the full precision of the color value. The result is something that rivals ANY full 32-bit rendering, only it goes a lot faster. We think that’s what gamers really want.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but, have they just said that 32bit isn't needed and it slows everything down, but they did it anyway, but they're still fast, but end up at 16bit? Um, talk about contradictions!

Cheers,

Steve

------------------
Yeah, you know the score...
(ICQ: 29468849)

[Joel]

Q3test version 1.07 is out.


www.quake3arena.com/q3test/win32.html

Joel

[Buuri]

Hmmph..

Clever girl.

B

[tylau]

U right Steve,
Talk and talk, 3dfx is in somekind of wolfcrying situation when it comes to 32bit quality, they had some big limitation in the very primitve design of voovoo chips date back when they had zero rival with their groundbreaking voodoo I three years ago. It is understanable that they are not able to put in 32bit rendering and large texture size support than 256square.

Their marketing went on for a good job(and bad proved later) to persuade the users to sacrifice 32bit for sheer speed in 16bit in low resolution game plays. Thats right with what they have got in hand, and their bills to pay also!

When nvidia and matrox kick its butt with 32bit render at almost the same speed level with that of the V3, it makes them really intensed to get quality improvement, at lease in short term before that V4(or whatsoever) comes close. That is the girl's play, all out of some untold reasons and product strategies they have, and at least they can still make it with 1st place sales quantity (in absolute terms) for graphic cards market, even after they have dumped most of their OEM add-in card sales(beside mobo OEMs).

IT'S CHILD'S PLAY ANYWAY.