3D Card News

Because our 3D card reviews were written some time ago, we thought you might like to have a place to go for regular updates and news about the latest patches, drivers, product releases, and more in 3D graphics technology.

3D Card News will keep you up to date. Here's our update for December 17, 1997.

ATI All-in-Wonder Pro This card combines the Rage Pro chip found in the ATI Xpert@Play with a TV tuner and robust tools for managing multiple TV channels. It's really quite cool. ATI has also just released the 2278 driver set, which now demonstrates benchmark performance in 3D Winbench 98 that's every bit as good as any of the RIVA 128 boards. We haven't tested it enough in real games to say how well the new driver performs, but it seems to be an impressive comeback for ATI.

Diamond Stealth II Rendition owners definitely need to wander over to Bjorn's 3D World. There you'll find a mini-GL driver for the Diamond Stealth II and a wealth of information for owners of Rendition cards.

RIVA 128 Chip-set If you go to a web site called Zone 128, you'll find an alpha release of a full OpenGL driver for the RIVA 128 boards. Bear in mind that these are alpha drivers, and they will have bugs. However, you'll have some idea, if you're a RIVA owner, of how GL Quake or Quake II could look.

One interesting controversy has popped up since our 3D card reviews conducted for 3D Showdown. There's been some discussion of poor 3D image quality in some games with RIVA 128 boards such as the Diamond Viper 330 or the STB Velocity 128.

Here's the scoop: The RIVA 128 is capable of automatically generating level-of-detail MIP maps for games that do not do MIP-mapping. The algorithm is less than perfect, and a few games (Tomb Raider II comes to mind) have problems with this feature. You can turn it off with a registry hack. Here's how to do it:

1. First BACK UP YOUR REGISTRY. You do this by copying the hidden files SYSTEM.DAT, SYSTEM.DA0, USER.DAT, and USER.DA0 to a different directory.

2. Click on the Start button, then Run, then type "regedit."

3. Double-click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

4. Double-click on SOFTWARE.

5. Within SOFTWARE you should see an entry called NV3D3D. If it's not there, go to the Edit menu, select New, then Key. Call the new key NV3D3D.

6. Now, with the NV3D3D key selected, go to the Edit menu again, select New, then DWORD value. Call it MIPMAPLEVELS. Give it a value of 0 (zero). Now quit regedit and reboot.

That should stop the RIVA from auto-MIP-mapping. It may slow down a few games, but Tomb Raider II should look better.

In truth, the auto-MIP-map idea is an interesting one, and hopefully newer drivers will make it smarter. In some games, it reduces that annoying visual "popping" of texture maps, making it less noticeable.