In a somewhat quiet announcement (which is my excuse for not noticing it allure) Capital Entertainment Group closed its doors in October seemingly due to lack of interest from VC's to further fund the company (to the tune of $US20-30 million). CEG was started by Mark Hood, Kevin Bachus, Seamus Blackley and Gene Mauro with the express intent of making it easier for game developers to get funded by acting as the middle man between developers and publishers by providing funding/expertise and taking a cut from the game sales. Read more about that here. The 2003 holiday season was supposed to be the delivery date for the first run of games from CEG. CEG supposedly had a deal in place with Sega for its first two games. Guess we won't be seeing anything now. Dean Takahashi (San Jose Mercury News & author of "Opening the XBox") seemed to be the only person who noticed CEG's demise in this article.

"We came to the conclusion we weren't going to close our round,'' said Eugene Mauro, chief executive officer of CEG. "Our idea for a new kind of business model was good. But the timing was off for us.''

Kevin Bachus was equally obstinate."There's no question in my mind that this business model will appear in the games industry in the next three years. The demand is there. The challenge is finding investors who share the appetite for risk."

Seamus Blackley continues to amaze me with his ability to come out of mediocre situations with interesting jobs. (I think he did an excellent job with XBox BTW, even though it's a huge money hole for Microsoft). With the announcement of CEG's shutdown was a nearly unnoticed announcement by one of Hollywood's most powerful talent brokers, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) that they had hired Seamus as a talent agent where he'll be scoping out new hires - (either titles or talent was unclear).

Wired also has an article about this in "Games, Movies Tie the Knot". Gamespot has run an interview with Seamus that you can find here. It turns out that both Seamus and Kevin were at the Spike TV Video Game Awards.

Coming up from off-screen, Creative Labs has accquired Sensura for $US6.4M, accquiring all of Sensura's 3D sound IP and existing deals. Some of Sensaura's consomers include Analog Devices, Audiotrak, Cirrus, Crystal Logic, C-Media, ESS, Guillemot-Hercules, VideoLogic, M-Audio, NVIDIA, Realtek, Terratec, Yamaha, Voyetra Turtle Beach, and VIA Technologies... in other words pretty much everyone that Creative already isn't selling to. Seansaura was an interesting compay since they didn't make chips - they basically did 3D sound research - and did a very good job with their "digital ear" technology. Basically they were really good at creating sounds for reproduction in 3D environments - especially those reproduced by headphones. This is particularly interesting since folks like NVIDIA & VIA are competing directly with Creative through Creative's 3DLabs subsidiary. I haven't heard much from 3DLabs lately, and talks with NVIDIA and ATI show they are focusing on targeting the workstation market (tradional 3DLabs territory). It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

DirectX Next - Oh Pleeeze!

The slides from Microsoft's Meltdown 2003 are available here. I've not been a fan of DirectX's piecewise distribution of shader technology - not so much for the hardware folks as for the consumers. When I'd chat with the folks who write shader code for a living (outside the Evil Empire) - I'd get hints as to the stuff "for the next release". This was particularly annoying as I was writing a book targeting this audience at the time and you'd think Microsoft, at the very least, would want to publicise this stuff. The hardware folks, the top-tier game writers, they were all in the know. They'd let me know, generally, that there was more to be had. Even when they did come out and state what was going on, I, under NDA, couldn't disclose what I knew. It was very frustrating. For all intents and purposes, Microsoft does indeed seem to want to diseminate this info. Unfortunately they don't seem to speak with a single clear voice since Phil Taylor left for the warm arms of ATI. Sigh, instead of having someone spoon-feed this out to the public, you've now got to glean this stuff yourself. Let's look at the recent Meltdown slides for example.

What's new with DX?

Microsoft officials have posted slightly better than expected figures for the company’s first quarter results. Unusually sales were boosted from outside of the company’s core business, in particular servers and MSN. For the period ended September 30 sales rose 6% from the same period last year to $8.22 billion. Excluding employee stock-based compensation, which have only been reported this quarter, the company earned 30 cents a share – one cent higher than analysts had expected. Net income also increased to $2.61 billion, up from $2.04 billion last year.

Importantly the company saw a 20% revenue growth in its home and entertainment unit, which includes the Xbox, with $581 million in revenue generated. Nevertheless shares in the company still fell once the figures were announced, due to news that fewer large corporate contracts for software had been agreed than expected. This fall in contracts is largely due to a number of high-profile security scares involving Microsoft products.

NVIDIA is now one of nine permanent board members, the other being 3Dlabs, ATI, Evans & Sutherland, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and SGI. NVIDIA had been a term member. Apple, Dell Computer, Matrox, and Sun are term members. A term member still has a vote, but is on 1-year membership. This is a bit like the UN, as the permanent members vote (in closed sessions) on whom to admit as a permanent or term member. It comes as a bit of a surprise that NVIDIA wasn't a permanent member before this. It also brings to mind "why now" questions. There was some contention between the ARB and NVIDIA over Cg and the GL Shading Language, with NVIDIA pushing an NVIDIA-centric Cg featureset and some others pushing anything but Cg.

Nonvoting participants include (as of June 2002) Alt. software, Crytek GmbH, Discreet, Empire Interactive, Ensemble Studios, Epic Games, GLSetup (which tells you this is an old list), id Software, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Intelligraphics, Micron, NEC, Obsession Development, Quantum3D, RAD Game Tools, Raven Software, S3/Diamond Multimedia, SiS, Spinor GmbH, Tungsten Graphics, University of Central Florida, Verant Interactive, and Xi Graphics. Microsoft quit the ARB to focus on DirectX issues.

It's "Guennadi Riguer" dammit! Sheesh. Not "Guennada". A recent article in the Inq (here) entitled "ATI programmer's name in Half Life code no mystery, firm says" says that "Guennada Riguer" is "liberally" sprinkled throughout the game code. I've gotta say that in the development of my book on shader programming Guennadi really was the best resource I had, surpassing most of the ATI folks I expected to give me better support and all of the NVIDIA folks combined. While I have a personal relationship with the ATI folks and most of the NVIDIA ones (meaning I've actually met then face to face) Guennadi I only know through emails, but he was the most consistent and friendly guy in the review of my book on shader programming, frequently turning me away from questionable statements with "real hardware folks don't implement it like that" or a "nope, the doc's wrong there" and the like. The fact that Valve source code has his name in it is a tribute to Valve in taking his advice. Guennadi was always upfront with me in discussing the "ATI" way and the way that "other" vendors did it, allowing me to make my own choices. He never, ever, steered me to the "ATI" way, just pointed out that some ways worked better on some hardware - always freely pointing out when ATI wasn't top dog in some feature. This guy was extremely knowledgeable about shader programming. If he was more than willing to assist me in reviewing 200 odd pages of shader specifications for no benefit other than a belated thanks in my book, what do you think he'd do for some company that'd show off his company's best hardware? Besides it's not unusual for video card developers to send out folks to assist in tuning games for high profile developers. It seems that ATI had more to offer in this case.

If you're an artist leaning shader programming, a programmer interesting in having a shader testbed, or just interested in shader programming, ATI has released RenderMonkey 1.0. (To find out what RenderMonkey can do, look here.) According to ATI RenderMonkey has undergone a major rewrite since the V0.9 beta. These changes have greatly improved the stability and usability of RenderMonkey and also provided a much more developer friendly framework for the introduction of the RenderMonkey SDK. Find out more at the ATI site here. You'll need the DirectX9.0b. The following features have changed or been added since the V0.9 beta:

Valve prepares to release its new gaming engine, "Steam". Essentially a platform for games of all types - as well as an integrated solution for a number of tasks. Whether it's delivering new content (new maps, mods, skins, full versions of game, etc), managing version control (no more patches) or handling anti-cheating measures (it can check your version whenever the developer wishes, preventing cheaters from hacking the code), Steam is going to be big news. Either for the technical standards it's sure to set, or, as the Spong states, the new subscription model that Valve is taking (in an attempt to maximize earnings) by offering "premium" content.

"The Steam Beta has delivered several VALVe games and popular Half-Life MODs to over 300,000 gamers, and will come to a close Tuesday evening (Pacific Daylight Time). The first full version of Steam, VALVe's broadband platform for the delivery and management of digital content, will launch at 11 am PDT on Wednesday. Set up installers for the full version, which will be free of charge to existing Half-Life and Counter-Strike players, will be available from www.steampowered.com and leading game sites. When Steam is official, a valid CD-Key will be required to play through Steam. It appears that Valve will soon be replacing the WonID system of user authentication that Half-Life has used since the very beginning with Steam. A valid CD-Key will be required to play through Steam."

This means that you will have to own a copy of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, or any other product that includes a WON CD-Key after the beta resets in order to play on the new Steam-based network.

"Set up installers for the full version, which will be free of charge to existing Half-Life and Counter-Strike players, will be available from www.steampowered.com and leading game sites. Anyone interested in hosting the installer or becoming a Steam Service Provider, please email biz@steampowered.com."

For those of you wondering what the big deal is, consider this; Since its 1998 launch, "Half-Life" and its various add-on packs (including mods such as "Counter-Strike" and and the fiendishly original "Natural Selection") have sold more than 8 million copies worldwide according to Valve. "We've learned a lot from our experiences with the mod community and with Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat," said Valve's Gabe Newell. "Half-life 2 will be a much better platform for mod authors than Half-life 1."

"Steam is a broadband business platform. With it, we can market and have direct communication with customers, sales and distribution, and have customer service and support. It uses a high-performance distributed file system for fast, scalable content delivery. You only download what you need and when you need it. It's faster and cheaper than CDs and lastly, no more patches."

NVIDIA corp. acquired privately held wireless/mobile device graphics accelerator chip manufacturer MediaQ for about $US70 million. MediaQ, was launched in 1997 with backing from National Semiconductor, Weston Presidio Capital, Summit Accelerator Fund, Infineon Technologies, El Dorado Ventures and ViVentures. MediaQ sells its semiconductors and complementary software, API's and drivers for major mobile operating systems (Microsoft PocketPC and SmartPhone, Palm, Symbian) to the main suppliers of mobile phones and PDAs including Mitsubishi, Siemens, DBTel, Dell, HP, Palm, Philips, Sharp, and Sony.

Not only has NVIDIA been using its muscle to move into the workstation market as of late, they now have the means to move into the hot mobile graphics market, apparently having something better to do than pine over letting the XBoxNext slip away. In all a very shrewd marketing move, particularly if they can sell 10's or even 100's millions of inexpensive graphics chips. Imagine if your phone or PDA had the power of a TNT2 driving its graphics - now that would be awesome! "As clever as Nvidia is, they probably couldn't develop the same type of technology that MediaQ has in a reasonable time frame," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, Tiburon, Calif. "A company like Nvidia that makes big, powerful processors with millions of transistors does have a hard time scaling it down into something that's small and doesn't consume a lot of power."

During a conference call with analysts NVIDIA's president and chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang stated "The transition from 2G to 2.5G and 3G phones will drive the growth of high-resolution color displays and high-resolution cameras, creating demand for full-featured, low-power multimedia chips." Huang estimated that of the 400 million to 500 million handsets expected to ship this year, the number with color displays could exceed 190 million, up from 54 million last year. Huang expects the acquisition to make NVIDIA a one-stop supplier of graphics and multimedia chips for the PC, consumer, and wireless-mobile markets.

No one ever said that the consumer video graphics market was banal. Extreme Graphics Inovation (XGI) is, according to president Chris Lin, moving quickly to establish itself in the graphics chip market. The company aims to break even in the shortest possible time and become a very competitive, highly profitable graphics chip designer within three years. Saying that its strengths are in R&D and cost structure, XGI hopes to use a "high-profit, strong-competitive-strength strategy" and not engage in a price war. XGI was spun off from SiS in June, and acquired the notebook graphics unit of established player Trident - allowing XGI to enjoy a $US3 million revenue in July. The Trident acquisition also gave XGI a boost in attracting talent for its research and sales and marketing teams. XGI plans to maintain Trident’s product lines and customer base and will release a series of low-end, medium-range and high-end graphics chips by year-end, including a new generation of chips in September (rumored to be the DX9 capable Xabre2 series). XGI has signed distribution agreements with World Peace Industrial (WPI), Fullerton Technologies and Siltrontech Electronics, which are among the largest IT supply side distributors in Asia.

Well, that explains the $US18 million listed as a "deferred revenue associated with an unannounced contract" that showed up on ATI's books last quarter. This apparently was a prepayment for R&D associated with developing the graphics chips for the next-gen Xbox. The deal was announced Thursday (Aug. 14th) and wraps up a year of negotiation. It seems that ATI has learned from NVIDIA's bitter experience dealing with an 800 pound gorilla (read about that here). ATI's agreement is royalty based, where ATI gets a slice of every Xbox2 sold, as opposed to NVIDIA's deal as a subcontractor to Microsoft. Microsoft will also subsidize ATI's research costs. This seemed NVIDIA's deal to lose, and even with the happy happy sound bites from Microsoft's Robbie Bach - "We selected ATI after reviewing the top graphics technologies in development and determining that ATI's technical vision fits perfectly with the future direction of Xbox", NVIDIA apparently wasn't willing to be too flexible to make a deal with Microsoft - even though it accounted for up to 20% of NVIDIA's sales over the last two years. Guess they really didn't like having to do that arbitration thing. ATI should still be wary, NVIDIA also got an advance - $US200 million - and put 200+ engineers on the Xbox team (and then missed the initial deadline).

"After the way the first Xbox went, I would view NVIDIA's involvement with the next Xbox as a negative,'' said Joe Osha, a senior analyst at Merrill Lynch. Osha also stated that ATI could get $US35 million in Xbox revenues in 2005. Osha expects ATI will reap $25 million to $35 million in royalty revenues (about 5 to 8 cents additional earnings per share) in 2005, assuming a Christmas 2005 roll out for the Xbox2.

ATI already is supplying chips for the next Nintendo console - codenamed N5. The ATI press release can be found here. According to Microsoft's Steve Balmer, the Xbox2 will ship in 2006.

 

XBitlabs reports some Mercury Research results for Q2 graphics market share from Q1. The big winner is Intel (even before they release the fricken Grantsdale chipset) increasing share from 27% to 32% - due to the integrated P4 chipsets. ATI increased from 20% to 21%, and NVIDIA fell from 31% to 27%. The report also said that NVIDIA had 60% of the DirectX 9 market share. Not bad for a company that botched its first DirectX 9 product release, although it seem that most of these were entry level (GeForceFX 5200) components. Still, it goes a long way to verify NVIDIA's strategy of shipping only DirectX 9 capable products in its latest lineup. That leaves ATI with 40% of the DirectX market, though those are where most of the high end cards went. This roughly means 45% of the Q2 graphics market share was DirectX 9 capable cards.

The remaining 20% of the graphics market went mostly to SiS/XGI. Matrox Graphics, Trident Microsystems (now sold to XGI), S3 Graphics/VIA, Silicon Motion and 3Dlabs now occupy very small market shares.

I got an eMail from Scott Bean of Mad Software with some updated info on ShaderWorks in which he addresses some of the comments of my earlier article and I thought I'd share his comments here. While a price hasn't been set, Scott indicated that it'd most likely be free. Scott indicated that it's geared towards experienced and non-experienced programmers as well as artists, students, etc., and that the visual graph approach makes it really easy to use.

While some folks thought that this year's Siggraph was smaller yet that last year's at San Antonio (which I personally liked) - I'd say they felt about the same - smaller, less busy than usual. I haven't been to San Diego in a while. How can it have such crappy Mexican food when the border is so close? And what's up with the conference busses only running in the morning and evening? And jeez, there were no good fighting between ATI and NVIDIA. Notable absences were SGI, Sun, and Microsoft. Lots and lots of smaller companies, book publishers, and colleges. There was lots of interesting papers, and lots of folks doing interesting things with shaders. Anyway, Barry's a bit more upbeat than I am, so read Barry's Siggraph 2003 Trek Report.

By the deadline, Microsoft, Turbine Entertainment Software, Crave Entertainment (all US), Eidos (Britain), Ubi Soft (France), JoWooD Productions Software (Germany), and Namco Hometek (Japan) have all filed to bid in the Aug. 14 auction. According to the court order bidders were required to place deposits of anywhere from $US10,000 to $US100,000 to bid on the various asset groups, which include the in-progress games Street Racing Syndicate and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Bidders interested in all of the assets ponyed up $US250,000.

Update - Ubisoft got "Might & Magic" et. al. for $US1.3 million, Namco got "Street Racing Syndicate" for $US1.5 million, JoWood got "Jacked" for $US90 thousand, Crave got "Army Men" for $US750 thousand, Microsoft got "High Heat Baseball" for $US450 thousand, Patent Purchase Manager LLC bought some various IP and tools for $US75 thousand, and Trip himself bought some unfinished games and IP for about $US400 thousand. In all they got US$4.6 million, lower than expected. Looks like everyone got a good deal except for 3DO shareholders.

Are the days of benchmark apps numbered?
In an interesting review of testing systems, Ace's Hardware ran 3DMark03 on systems from a 350Mhz PII to an 2.8Ghz P4. It turns out that while games show significant sensitivity to the CPU, 3DMark03 seems pretty much only sensitive to the video card. In fact the 350Mhz Pentium system was either even or better than a 2.8Ghz Pentium when the former had a RADEON 9700 Pro vs. a RADEON 9600 when running vertex and pixel shader tests. Since these tests were designed to stress the video cards it's not that surprising, but it does bring into question if tests like 3DMark03 have any place in benchmarking over "real" games and applications.

Microsoft's Beta Place has posted the DX9 Beta 2 SDK. This update is 9.0b. If you're a beta member then you can get the beta from the Beta Place. This will become a public release in "the very near term."

We're a bit dubious of non-free strictly shader development tools given the plethora of freely available tools from graphics card vendors anxious to build up a market. Into this void steps Mad Software with ShaderWorks, a shader development tool. It seems to have a nice function-block oriented nature and FX file support, artist mode, HLSL 2.0 support and comes with an integration kit, so it seems to cover most of our desires for a tool kit. The only thing we see lacking is shader assembly support. Find out more here.

3Dlabs has released the front-end OpenGL Shading Language compiler as an open source project (here). This is for 3Dlabs' Wildcat VP line of cards (which will also require the OpenGL 2.0 drivers). This is just the front-end compiler - it reduces the shader to an intermediate representation. A target specific back-end compiler is required to generate machine code for a specific graphics card. It's interesting to note that despite the ATI-3Dlabs OpenGL lovefest at last year's Siggraph, we see no RenderMonkey stuff from 3Dlabs, nor any OpenGL 2.0 stuff from ATI.

Long before there was a Game Developers Conference, E3, Meltdown, Mojo Days, etc. there was Siggraph. You could expect to see the coolest, latest, and most memorable eye-poping stuff there. Siggraph was where academia, engineering, art, and implementation met in a week long frenzy of tutorials and lectures during the day, and partying, banquets, schmoozing and being schmoozed at night. It was (and remains) a bachanalian graphics geek lovefest where you can't help but be impressed by some of the stuff folks are doing. My only complaint is that about 10 years ago Hollywood discovered that they could do really cool things with computer graphics and since then there's been a very noticable increase in the Hollywood-centric orbit of Siggraph, most notably plunking the thing in LA every other year. This year is slightly different - they managed to slide it down the coast to San Diego so at least there'll be different things to do in those off-hours. If you're in the area and you missed GDC, then sign-up for Siggraph this year! The courses are great, the Siggraph steering comittee has been very interested in getting some input from and classes for game developers. Siggraph is still the big arena where graphics hardware and software announcements are made. It's not as loud as E3, it's less game-centric than GDC, and it's got the coolest collection of art, demos, software, hardware, geeks and academics. It's got day-care for the kids and an even ratio of white-haired professors to tatooed/pierced developers/artitst to sharks in suits. At $US800 for the full conference pass it's a relative bargain. Just attending the exhibition is much cheaper if you just want to see the latest from ATI, NVIDIA, 3DLabs, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Softimage, etc. etc.. Siggraph 2003 - San Diego - July 27-31.

If you attend Siggraph, don't miss the Game Developers BOF (Bird's of a Feather) meeting, Monday, 28 July, 2 pm - 3 pm, Coronado Room @ San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina.

One of the more technical DirectX conferences is Microsoft's own Meltdown ( July 16, 17 in Seattle or July 29, 30 in London) and is a premier chance to learn from the DirectX team directly. If you don't get a chance to attend any of the other conferences and are interested in learning some hard-core DirectX programming then you really can't beat Meltdown. Learn more about it here. Meltdown covers all aspects, from shader programming to QA'ing DirectX apps, including the test suites, where you can bring your code and run it on the latest GPUs and CPUs and talk to the engineers about how to optimize your software. If you're just interested in graphics, however, you might want to wait till ATI & NVIDIA hold their own mini-conferences (typically in California and England). The European Meltdown is inconveniently concurrent with Siggraph this year. There's a discount for early registration, so don't dawdle.

Yesterday Trident Microsystems, Inc. announced that it has pulled out of the graphics chips market after less than a year and will focus on its digital TV & set-top-box business. The graphics division was sold to SIS and will be merged with SIS's graphics subsidiary XGI (Xabre Graphics, Inc.). The details haven't been released, but SiS said the move was to help it in notebook graphics.

This story get keeps getting more interesting. On June 2nd FutureMark retreated a bit from earlier claims, stating that they'd run across some optimizations and not cheats when testing the latest drivers from NVIDIA..

The latest twist involves further evidence of something fishy. Both Tech-Report and ExtremeTech report that by renaming the 3DMark03 executable, NVIDIA's scores dropped when using the latest DetonatorFX drivers. Running the test with the origianl name produced one set of scores and pixel-perfect images from run to run, Remaming the executable produced lower scores and generated slightly different images. Hmmmm.

In a sad conclusion to one of the more interesting companies in the game business, 3DO files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, and will try to sell off the company and/or its assets. CEO Trip Hawkins said the company is expected to continue to operate as it works through the bankruptcy process. "This filing gives us more time to complete transactions in the interest of our stockholders," Hawkins said. "While we hope that this news will generate additional new opportunities, at this point we are focused on pursuing either the sale of the entire company or the sale of its assets."

This must have been a particularly difficult statement for Hawkins, who left EA to found 3DO in 1993 and has repeatedly bolstered the company's coffers with personal loans when funds ran low - to a total of about $US 12 million. You can read about 3DO's early hardware history here. But it's never really been smooth sailing for 3DO, a company originally founded to create its own game console and eventually forced by a harsh market (and a $US 700 price tag) to write software for other's consoles. The company was recently in danger of getting delisted from NASDAQ but issued a 1 for 8 reverse stock split earlier this year and secured a $US 10 million credit line, but poor sales left it unable to fully use the credit and apparently even Hawkins own steadfast fidelity to 3DO reached its Rubicon. On May 8 the company warned employees that there would be a mass layoff in July. (Large companies are required by law to give at least 60 days notice when mass layoffs are impending.) May 13 3DO announced that it was exploring its options, including a merger or selling publishing rights to its games in progress, but to no avail and 3DO filed for Chapter 11 on May 29th.

No doubt you've all seen the fantastic NVIDIA Dawn demo - each year at GDC, E3, Siggraph, etc. we see better and better graphics card demos. If you noticed in the last few years we've gone from cool looking 3D things to human demos - either full bodies or facial animation. As anyone who's attempted it will tell you, recreating a digital human is the toughest task you can attempt. Actually there's two tough tasks - one is getting it to sound right (which we still can't do believably) - the other is getting it to look right, which is barely possible. NVIDIA's latest entry is Dawn (and her darker sister, Dusk). NVIDIA has a really outstanding demo in Dawn and it shows that we're close to getting photorealistic human representations on PC's - first probably in games, but eventually they'll be pretty ubiquitous.

How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm (after they've seen Paree)? When I worked on photorealistic human faces we had some research on human bodies and, yes, there was some focus on the bouncy bits (unfortunately by the art department, not development) - not only was it good clean fun, but it was our company's goal of leading the way in eventually creating a photorealistic avatar or non-player character - and don't think if the bit's didn't bounce correctly folks wouldn't notice. ATI used our Rachel head for a demo (not rendered to our liking, see a screen capture from our demo here - much better!). As we've seen that pretty much any female character released into the world can go - well - less than wholesome. From a naked Lara Croft (patch here) to Final Fantasy's Aki posing for a men's magazine (pix).

So it was no surprise that eventually there was a Dawn patch (Dawn nekkid patch). Well, that's no surprise except that the patch seems to be just that, apparently hacking the code to put in the nekkid bits. But more seriously Dawn's apparently be cheating on NVIDIA with, *gasp* ATI! Yes, since most video card demos are written in OpenGL, it's pretty easy to hack OpenGL and intercept the calls that get made. Well, a little bit twiddling had allowed Dawn's NVIDIA extensions to get mapped to work on an ATI RADEON 9800 (find out about it here). According to the results (unconfirmed by me), Dawn may be a fast girl (er, faiery) , but she's faster on a RADEON 9800 (by about 15%).

It's come to my attention that not only did NVIDIA have the band Smashmouth at their E3 party, they had porn star "Catalina" there as well. (view the party pix here...) which has apparently upset some shareholders on the Yahoo NVDA board. Jeez, whom do they think the target audience is anyway? Alcohol fueled nerds being wooed at a party by a video card company is no big news, it's expected!. Besides ATI supposedly had Smashmouth at their E3 party in 2001, so NVIDIA is just playing catch-up. Hell, ATI was expensing lapdances for some select game developers at E3 in Atlanta a few years ago, so having a porn star bounce around is certainly going to be cheaper in the long run. Whatever it takes to get game developers favoring your cards is the name of the game, and selling sex to nerds is certainly fun and easy. Though - looking at the pictures is a bit pathetic - like Siggraph at New Orleans, when the girls flip their tops up for beads and all the nerds bring their digital cameras came out, I was genuinely ashamed to be associated with those pathetic guys. But I'm not complaining, the nudity certainly livened things up.

When fetching a graphics device from DirectX, it's possible to request a software renderer, though until recently no such thing existed. If you didn't know, graphics god Mike Abrash left Microsoft and had been quietly working on a software renderer - called Pixomatic - at RAD GameTools, which has been included in UT2003 for those folks who are running on older or unstable hardware. Apparently a 1GHz CPU will run the game, though with some things like shadows and some dynamic lighting turned off. Still, it's nice for those of us who have to support older hardware (typically done via an OpenGL layer) but would like to use all the latest DirectX API. Find out more info here at the Unreal web site.

Yeah, it's starting to look a little funkier. Without getting into too much detail (which you can read here, here, and here), it's looking less like a bug and more like an "optimization". Futuremark put out a report titled "Alleged NVIDIA Driver Cheating on 3DMark03". Apparently when they redid some of their shader code, NVIDIA performance decreased by as much as about 25% for some tests. Beyond3D also found similar "optimizations" from ATI, but to a lesser extent. ATI apparently jiggered the ordering of the shader instructions (not a bad thing itself) to get better performance for a visually identical shader. Which is what you'd want the driver compiler to do. However they did admit to doing this just for two shaders in the 3DMark03 tests, which is a bad thing - optimizing for a test. They realized this is bad and said they'd take these optimizations out of the next driver revision. You'd think that after ATI had gotten caught cheating (again) with Quake 3, they wouldn't pull this stuff again. I'm really surprised than any video card companys not only thinks they can get away with this (seemingly repeatedly), but that they feel it's necessary. Sure ATI and NVIDIA are fighting for supremacy, but do they really feel their cards suck so much they need to inflate benchmark results?

You can get the HalfLife and Doom trailers you saw at E3 at FilePlanet

The HalfLife2 download - at 500MB it's a monster

Doom III download - the E3 trailer is 61MB.

There's some performance tweaks, support for antialiased render targets, some DirectPlay fixes, and a Managed DirectX security fix. For developers there's some new D3DX functionality, otherwise it looks pretty much the same. If you're not a developer and you already have DirectX 9 installed, you probably don't need to worry about this update unless you're told you need it by a hardware vendor. You can get it here.

It's the time for GeForceFX 5900 vs. RADEON 9800 trials. Few places are reporting Doom III benchmarks, but that seems disingenuous since these sessions were arranged by NVIDIA. Not too surprising the 5900 generally comes out ahead, but as the resolution cranks up or the games are DirectX 7 compliant, ATI starts to look better. NVIDIA also dumped the dustbuster cooling method (there were many amusing questions as to if these cards "sucked" or "blew"), and NVIDIA folks have even been quoted as the NV35 being poorly executed. Both ATI and NVIDIA look like they have roughly equivalent hardware with plenty of wiggle room in the drivers for performance improvements. ATI seems to be hopping on the branding bandwagon, following NVIDIA's lead (With DOOM III) by getting Valve to brand Halflife-2 (which looked stunning at E3). Read'em yourself AnandTech, HardOCP, DigiTimes, ExtremeTech, Tom's Hardware, NVIDIA says that the highend NV35 chips will start shipping in June and the lowend in July. The NV30 shortage took ATI by surprise, since it raised demand for ATI products to the point where demand outstripped supply, causing shortages to effect many system builders.

The inexpensive GeForceFX 5200 has be hammered for giving poor performance, see this review at VR-Zone. But I think the fact that you get DirectX 9 features on a ~$US100 video card is the real point of interest. If you're a gamer who really wants to play some DX9 featured games but can't cough up $US400 or $US500 for a new video card, this card can pave the way. If it's a choice for you hundred bucks between playing slowly (the FX5200), or not at all (ATI's RADEON 9200 - DX8.1 only), guess which one the gamer will pick? It'll be interesting to see if ATI reacts by lowering prices.

NVIDIA launches an new "Enthusiast" site here, that is mostly functional at this point, though a bit light on content. I'm sure the cool 3D UI will pale quickly, I know the sound effects lasted about a minute before I had to turn down my speakers.

In an interesting side issue, the testers at ExtremeTech seem to think they have discovered some benchmark "optimizations" in the 44.03 DetonatorFX drivers - such that some 3DMark2003 benchmarks show anomalies when the camera values are changed slightly. The images show some parts of the scene aren't getting rendered or cleared when the camera is moved slightly - errors that didn't show up when performed on a RADEON 9800 Pro. Quite a few graphics card companies have been caught over the years "baking-in" cheats when the driver discovers it's running certain programs. I really don't think that anyone would still do this kind of stuff as it's a near certainty that you will get caught. Since NVIDIA doesn't have access to the test in question (after their falling out with Futuremark) they are investigating the ExtremeTech anomalies. Some folks have also seen similar artifacts in other games (Serious Sam) that weren't there in the previous driver drop, so it does look like some kind of bug to me.

I have to admit that that I wasn't particularly enthralled when NVIDIA announced Cg. It's bad enough that we've got DirectX 9's HLSL and OpenGL 2.0's GSLang. As someone who got to program DirectX, OpenGL, Glide and CIF (ATI's proprietary 3D language, RIP), I really hate competing graphics languages. I feel it's a waste of time to reinvent the wheel in a different flavor, and I really would rather be creating something new than porting code. On the other hand, I ran across this article by Colin Stoner that hits on some of the more recent uneasiness. While Colin does raise some interesting points, like even though Cg is open source and theoretically could output for ATI chips, ATI doesn't give a shit as they are on the HLSL/GSLang wagon, and how NVIDIA is getting games to brand themselves with the NVIDIA logo, he really is complaining about something that I don't think is a bad direction for the PC graphics world in general, at least I think so...

I got a fair amount of (good-natured but strident) flack from NVIDIA for my "short sighted" viewpoint. Yeah, well sorry. Cg is so close to HLSL that I understood the need to get something out there while HLSL shaped up. But hey - HLSLs here now, so why hasn't Cg been merged into HLSL?. The recent Cg book by Fernando Kilgard (a really nice book by the way, see the Gamasutra article) is being followed by another one. Which seems strange to me. The Cg book is selling well, but it just came out - it's a bit soon to be following up with another one. This seems to point to Cg being around for a while, and NVIDIA pushing some not insignificant resources at it. Let's face it, NVIDIA ain't stupid, they've got some of the smartest engineers in the business even though I don't care much for some of their marketing practices. What other reason could Cg exist when HLSL/GSLang could easily fill the role? It's got to be because NVIDIA owns Cg. It owns a high level rendering language. What can you do with that? It's only an advantage if you can do something with it. NVIDIA quietly picked up some IP last year that really could make CineFX engine a real cinematic experience. This is all sheer speculation on my part, but it's what I'd do if I had those resources. NVIDIA's market share is still twice as big as ATI's, a nice end run could cut ATI off at the knees if executed correctly and put to rest any doubt about who'll supply the chips for Xbox2.

So how can this be a good thing? DX9 is going to be here for a while. ATI is settling down to a slower R&D cycle. Ho hum. Nothing new on the horizon for a while, it looks like smooth, straight sailing for a while. Unless someone decides to rock the boat. Comments?

SEATTLE/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. aiming to raise the stakes in the $30 billion global video game industry and strengthen its foothold in living rooms with major changes to its Xbox Live online gaming service, industry sources said on Monday. As game makers prepare for the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the year's largest video game show, Microsoft is readying a new version of Xbox Live with advanced community features such as voice chat and locater services that operate independently of games in progress, said sources with knowledge of the software company's plans.

While a Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the upcoming upgrade, he did say the company was planning "groundbreaking announcements" at E3. "Microsoft is continually innovating the Xbox platform. It is the only console which allows for continual upgrades and game play experience enhancements," the spokesman said. While Xbox Live subscribers can chat with each other using an Xbox Communicator headset and broadband links, communicating requires players to be inside a game. After the upgrades, the sources said, players will be able to turn on their Xboxes, see who among their friends is online, and engage them in voice chats in community settings that do not even require a game to be inside the console. Other add-ons coming soon to the console include the ability to use the Xbox as a sort of media center, to listen to digital music and watch videos in their living rooms.

"What Microsoft is doing with Xbox is trying to extend the shelf life of the console," said Matt Rostoff, an analyst at independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. "The traditional shelf life is 18 months -- the way to extend that is to actually change and add functionality through additional software that can be delivered over the wire." The Xbox, first released in the United States in November 2001, has established itself firmly in the No. 2 spot in the American and European markets but is still dwarfed by Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2, which came out a year earlier.

TARGET SONY

All Xbox consoles come with a hard drive and a high-speed Web access port, which unlike the PlayStation, allows Microsoft to deliver software upgrades to the Xbox without having to launch a new console. Both players are the same price. However, Sony's strong games lineup and a large installed base are attractive to game developers, making it difficult for Xbox to compete. "They can't compete with Sony in terms of some of the exclusives they're getting, and they can't compete with the installed base out there," Dan "Shoe" Hsu, the editor of gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, told Reuters recently.

While the software upgrade would help extend the life of the console, Microsoft also made it clear recently that it will bring out a next-generation console in the future. "At the appropriate time -- which I will not identify today -- we're going to bring out a second-generation of the console. We're going to continue to work hard to take market share," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told Reuters in an interview on April 24.

Microsoft has long tried to extend its software beyond the office and desktops to the living room, investing billions in the cable industry until it adopted the Xbox as its best bet to put its software at the center of home entertainment. The upcoming upgrade will have a new feature tentatively dubbed "Xbox Music Mixer." It allows users to pull the music files off their computers and onto the Xbox's 8-gigabyte hard drive, then use the Xbox as a media center with on-screen displays and auto-identification of songs, sources said. With the new upgrade, Xbox users would also be able to transfer properly encoded video from their personal computers to the Xbox and view that video on a television screen. Still, many see the console's biggest problem as a lack of strong first-party games, the type of "must-have" titles that sell hardware and generate significant profits.

Well, it's official. NVIDIA will launch the NV35 at E3, which is in Los Angeles on May 14-16. According to an article in the Digitimes, the NV35 is the same core as the NV30 (GeForce FX 5800) but with improved performance, and will use DDR memory rather than the DDRII.

Been wondering where ATI got the chutzpah to beat NVIDIA? This article on the EETimes talks about the acquisition of ArtX by ATI and how it's worked in ATI's favor. Not just in technology, but in getting key people in to ATI's management in time to make changes in things like the R300 (RADEON 9700) graphics core. The article discusses how the R300 core was designed to beat NVIDIA's offering instead of just providing "good enough" graphics, and how this effort will bring out ATI's first DX8.1 integrated chipset

ATI is lengthening their product cycle from 18 months to 24 months, citing stagnant PC sales over the last few years. In spite of gaining market share (along with NVIDIA) at the expense of other video chip manufacturers, ATI wants to rein in R&D costs of video chips that are now more complex that the CPU's on most PC systems. Given the lead ATI has over NVIDIA and that DirectX 9.1/OpenGL 2.0 are likely to be the standard for a while (perhaps till 2005), taking a breather might be a good idea. ATI lost $8.3 million in its last quarter, even though sales were up over the same quarter in 2002. ATI really needs to ramp up chip production since it's been unable to keep up with demand for it's high-end cards (as has NVIDIA).

ATI expects to increase its order to TSMC and its secondary foundry partner, UMC, later this year. TSMC currently churns out all of ATI's 0.13 micron parts like the RADEON 9600. TSMC has said it will begin volume production of 90nm (0.09 micron) parts in July but ATI's CEO Ho said the company was not considering a move to 90nm until 2004 at the earliest. .

 

We've started to see rumors of an impending NV35 launch at E3. The only things that we can confirm are that from the vendor listings at the E3 website, NVIDIA's going to announce a product. They do have other things going on, from a deal with IBM for IBM to manufacture NVIDIA's chips (leaving TSMC to ATI) to a deal to produce a core-logic FSB chipsets for AMD.

In a recent PC magazine article quoting stats from a research firm, about 9% of the 2002 Internet traffic was due to online gaming, and online subscriptions will bring in an estimated $US 650 million annually in five years. The report states that while free online services will grow, it'll be the pay-for-play services that will really take off. The report states that by 2005 most consoles will be playing subscription based games. Microsoft's Xbox Live currently has 350,000 subscribers, up 100,000 from Jan. 1st. each paying an estimated $10/month (though everyone is still running on the $US 50, 1 year introductory fee). And this on a paltry 10 titles with only cable or DSL subscribers. It'll be interesting to see when PS2 and GameCube start to get bigger numbers. Still, it looks like there's real money on the table.

It was brought to our attention that on March 21 Microsoft announced their withdrawal from the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C examines how to best standardize how the web works, and how best to make sure that Internet contact points cooperate in the future. While Microsoft was only participating since March 13th, it's interesting to note that Microsoft decided to discontinue participation after discovering that its research into contract language (the language of establishing communication between endpoint on the web) didn't mesh with the W3C's efforts. You can read more about in the InfoWorld article.

In a follow-up the Enquirer puts a rather negative spin on the whole issue in Microsoft DirectX killing innovation in which they.. umm...well... "whine" is a good term I guess, about the Microsoft domination of the direction of 3D graphics features (true) and about the homogenization of the 3D graphics card market (also true, but it's generally a good thing), and about how homogenization will take away all innovation (Just look at NVIDIA's NVRotate and NVKeystone). I don't think standardizing on a programmable API is at all bad - programmers will take this to the next level. The trend has been towards higher and higher levels of API's. Nobody really want's to program at the register level anymore.

Way back at the July 2002 OpenGL ARB meeting Microsoft made an amazing statement - that it has "possible claims" on IP related to vertex and pixel shader programming. Essentially Microsoft claimed they have patent rights relating to the ARB_vertex_program and possible pixel ("fragment" in OpenGL) shader programming. There was some mention of Microsoft offering "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" terms for the license. The exact nature of these claims is unclear, and Microsoft hasn't cleared them up. They've acquired intellectual property from SGI, NVIDIA, ATI Technologies, Intel and others, according to industry observers. "They've just been picking it up everywhere," said Jon Peddie, head of consulting firm Jon Peddie Research. "They have a huge library of intellectual property."

At that ARB meeting Microsoft's Dave Aronson hinted that it would prefer an alternative licensing arrangement, and suggested that "other bodies have licensing terms that are more effective in a corporate sense, and we should look at adopting some of those terms." Hmmm. Now Microsoft has gone and resigned from the ARB. Could this be a precursor to some sort of legal action? If so against whom? Certainly not against the 3D video card manufacturers. (Not if they're smart). Microsoft has made nice with the chip companies and the result has been stupendous (at least from a programmer's standpoint). If this stuff makes it out to the consumer level we'll really see some spectacular effects in the next few years. DirectX 9 and 10 show that Microsoft is learning to talk, listen, and work with the chip and gaming companies. It could possibly be a way for Microsoft to get some cash from those pesky "other" game consoles. A little slice of $US10.3 billion (US interactive entertainment sales in 2002) goes a long way. Time will tell.

We do note that Microsoft does have an open req. for an OpenGL kernel engineer, so it seems that they are interested in some development with OpenGL.

SANTA CLARA, CA – SONICblue™ Incorporated (Nasdaq: SBLU) announced today that it and three of its subsidiaries will file voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 in the United States Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

SONICblue also announced that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with D&M Holdings Inc. (TSE II: 6735), the Japanese parent company of audio equipment subsidiaries Denon Ltd. and Marantz Japan, Inc., pursuant to which SONICblue proposes to sell the assets comprising SONICblue’s ReplayTV and Rio business units for $40 million, less up to $5 million of certain assumed liabilities and subject to adjustment. In addition, SONICblue has entered into a definitive agreement with Opta Systems, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Carmco Investments, LLC, which is expected to acquire substantially all of the assets of SONICblue’s GoVideo business unit for approximately $12.5 million. The terms of the sale of these business units will require the approval of the Bankruptcy Court.

“GoVideo is a proven and respected brand in the consumer electronics industry, known for innovative, high-quality video products,” said Carmine Adimando, Chairman, Opta Systems. “We believe that Opta Systems can unlock GoVideo’s true potential and take full advantage of the unprecedented growth in the digital video marketplace.“

“As the former vice president of worldwide sales for SONICblue and having served for 10 years as the Chief Executive Officer of Sensory Science, the original developers of the GoVideo product line, I understand this business better than anyone,” said Roger Hackett, Vice Chairman, Opta Systems. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work closely with the management team again to take GoVideo to the heights we know it can achieve.“

“We have great confidence in our business units, and worked to develop a plan that would permit SONICblue to continue operating within the significant constraints imposed by our debt and legacy liabilities,” said Gregory Ballard, Chief Executive Officer, SONICblue. “In the end, we and our financial advisors have concluded that the best outcome for our creditors and our employees is to sell our businesses to better heeled owners.“

“We believe the proposed sale transactions will offer SONICblue's current product lines a stable and financially strong base that will enable product development and current services to carry on, continued Ballard. The Chapter 11 filing will allow SONICblue to continue its business operations while moving to complete these sales, and will provide the basis for a seamless transition of its businesses. The continued support of our manufacturers and retailers will play an integral role in our ongoing efforts to make the changes that will enable the continued growth and success of our products,“ he said.

Well, in an about face from previous years, there was lots going on at this year's GDC. Here are some highlights.

NVIDIA Announces new cards - The GeForceFX 5200 and 5600. Both are DirectX 9 cards. The 5200 is expected to sell starting at $79 MSRP. NVIDIA becomes the first card company with DirectX 9 capable cards in its entire front line.

ATI Announces new cards - They announced the 9200 (DirectX 8.1) , 9600, and 9800 (DirectX 9) cards. Also under-the-radar was incorporation of F-Buffer (fragement-stream-buffer) in SmartShader 2.1, which is supposed to allow shaders of any length without resorting to multipass rendering. These cards compliment the 9700.

3DLabs - not to be left behind - announced the WildCat VP990 Pro.

ATI and 3DLabs announced they are working jointly on our fav shader tool - RenderMonkey! In a not so subtle swipe at Cg, ATI and 3DLabs have teamed up to work on RenderMonkey. ATI will continue to work on the framework and both will work on plug-ins for HLSL and OpenGL's shader language GLSL. In addition they say they'll work closely with 3D party vendors to incorporate RenderMonkey functionality into tools - so expect to see RM plug-ins for Maya, 3DSMax, etc. in the near future. Press announcement.

Microsoft withdraws from OpenGL ARB - citing failure for OpenGL to keep pace with graphics features, Microsoft says that it'll focus on DirectX.

DirectX 9.1 is it - for now. According to Microsoft's Dean Lester, the next major release of DirectX isn't scheduled until the release of the next OS (codenamed Longhorn), which is now due out sometime in (survey says) 2005.

The OpenGL Shading Language draft is up for comments. You can review it here.

LA QUINTA, Calif., Feb 25 (Reuters) - ATI Technologies Inc (Toronto:ATY.TO), locked in a battle with rival NVIDIA Corp (NasdaqNM:NVDA) over bragging rights to the fastest graphic chip, plans to release its most-advanced PC chip yet within the next month or so, a company executive said on Tuesday.

Dave Rolston, ATI's vice president of engineering, said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference here that the company's R350 chip would be "coming out, say, within the next 30 days." The R350 chip will be the high-end successor to ATI's RADEON 9700 chip. A new version of that chip geared toward the mainstream market is also coming in the next 30 days, he said. That RADEON 9700 variant will be built using 130 nanometer technology, or 0.13 micron, which is a reference to the size of the feature sets on the chips. The 0.13 micron technology promises better speeds and lower costs than past standards, like 0.15 micron.

ATI's chief competitor, NVIDIA Corp. is in the process of releasing its high-end chip, the GeForceFX, which is built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd on the 0.13 micron process. TSMC will also build ATI's chip on that process. Though the GeForceFX has surpassed the RADEON 9700 on some benchmarks, Rolston claimed that with R350, ATI would have the best-performing chip through at least the end of the calendar year. Such claims of higher performance are key for the graphics chip industry since the games and video applications that they drive require intense processing power. While declining to discuss specific prices for the R350 or the new Radeon chip, the executive noted that pricing pressures were weighing on the industry. "There's a lot of concern about pricing, there's a lot of attention to pricing," he said.

One of ATI's more notable partnerships is with video game company Nintendo Co Ltd for its GameCube game console, and Rolston said ATI was looking at pursuing deals for future versions of both that console and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox console, which uses NVIDIA technology. "We would consider both of those to be of great interest," he said, adding that they "have ongoing discussion with both of those players."

NVIDIA recently settled a dispute with Microsoft over pricing of its chips for the Xbox, a settlement that boosted NVIDIA's revenue, and NVIDIA said the two sides planned to work together on future technology. Neither Microsoft nor Nintendo have announced their next generation of consoles.

Those you you that have attended a Game Developer Conference, Meltdown, Siggraph, etc. or frequent the directx-dev list have seen Richard Huddy in action. DriverHeaven has posted an interview with Richard in which he talks about his move to ATI, his job there, and why he and nearly all of the NVIDIA European Dev. Group left the company. It's got some juicy quotes like this:

Huddy:NVIDIA used to be a technology company pure and simple but has recently allowed itself to become led by marketing. To give two straightforward examples of things it has done wrong, it produced a product called the GeForce 4 MX, which is clearly a GeForce 2 class piece of hardware, and it spent almost a year too long producing the GeForce FX. The first costs the trust of buyers everywhere, and the second cost them the lead in a very competitive race.

Yes, all the Code Mafia guys could see this kind of thing happening at NVIDIA. We fought these errors from inside NVIDIA but the management didn't agree with our judgement about what was wrong - so we agreed to part company. We actually left on really good terms - but I admit that they weren't too pleased when we signed up with ATI!

Why in God's name they have to hold the thing in San Jose or Santa Clara every year I'll never know. One year they did hold it in Long Beach and that was at least different. But in any event, it's that time of year again. If you've never been to one, you really should, particularly if games are of professional interest to you. This year's should be particularly interesting, NVIDIA is going to unveil the GeForceFX (wait - didn't they do that at Comdex?) (Thursday night at the Fairmont - let's see if they can party like ATI can!), Microsoft is having an High-Level Shader Language workshop - it's first come first serve for these two-hour sessions, register here. If you want a more general introduction to shaders you might try Wolfgang Engel's session on Friday at 10:30 am. Things I've heard but haven't confirmed are the announcement of DirectX 9.1 from Microsoft and the announcement of the next generation of ATI cards based on the R350 chip. Of course you don't want to miss Suite Night at the Fairmont, Friday, 7:30 pm. (Hint: about 9pm wander the stairwell peeking out on each floor, listening for those loud, private parties, or see if you can score a suite party list.)

While there's no doubt that the GDC is a money-making interest (the top-shelf VIP pass is a staggering $1975) it's the only games-dedicated conference around (There's a GDC Europe as well later in the year).

One has to wonder what's up with the GeForceFX. We've all been waiting for this puppy to show...and we're still waiting. In the mean time rumors abound. Some of the hard facts that have appeared place the FX as a slightly more muscled card than the RADEON 9700, but they've also stated that the "unique" method that NVIDIA has of dissipating heat is of some concern. The cards seen sofar hog the PCI slot next to the AGP slot because the GeForceFX apparently generates so much heat that there's a separate duct/fan over the chip so that the PCI window next to the AGP slot gets used as a vent. This fan is set so that when a 3D app runs the fan kicks in, giving rise to the "Dustbuster" nickname. It's apparently pretty loud too. John Carmack's latest .plan compares the NV30 vs. the R300 and while he likes the NV30 slightly better overall, even he complains about the noise.

Further rumors abound around the lateness of the FX, including my favorite that got started about three weeks ago that NVIDIA's halting production after 100,000 FX cards in favor of pushing up the NV35. I got reaffirmation of the rumor from another 3D chip manufacturer - apparently those Taiwanese are pretty chatty. With ATI breathing down their neck with the soon-to-be-announced R350, it wouldn't surprise me if this turns out to be true. It also wouldn't surprise me if NVIDIA makes a come back. They didn't get to be #1 by just sitting around worrying about the competition.

An NVIDIA press release announced that they had reached an agreement with Microsoft over the pricing dispute of the GPU (graphics) and MPU (audio/networking) chips that NVIDIA manufacturers for the XBOX. NVIDIA president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, states "This is a win for both companies, and we couldn't be more delighted with the results, NVIDIA and Microsoft can now take our partnership to the next level and focus our substantial resources to maximize the full potential of Xbox game console." which is seemingly some happy-happy joy-joy speak if you've read an earlier report from The Inquirer that NVIDIA "will not interfere" with Microsoft's arbitration attempt. We speculate that they reached some happy arrangement about NVIDIA manufacturing chips for XBOX II and that NVIDIA is firmly entrenched in the XBOX II camp, willingly or not. This is an about face from earlier this week even though there were rumors of Microsoft courting ATI from last month. Given that XBOX has only sold about 8 million (compared to PS2's 50 million), this might not be a good deal for NVIDIA, especially if it turns out that they have to manufacture the chips at a loss for Microsoft. Reuters reported that NVIDIA claims that Microsoft owed them $46.2 million back in July, NVIDIA's fiscal Q2.Details of the exact agreement are due out at NVIDIA's quarterly conference call Feb. 13th.

MaximumPC previews the GeForceFX in this article. They got a prototype Alienware system with a beta GeForceFX card in it and did some very limited testing - limited apparently by how much NVIDIA allowed them to stress the board - limiting their testing to pre-approved benchmarks. The lowdown? The GeForceFX is a really fast card but isn't as bandwidth capable as the RADEON 9700.