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07/99
Windows 2000 RC1 was released internally within Microsoft on July 1st, and will be available for CPP customers on July 12th. Further release candidates are expected approximately every 6-8 weeks. Additions to this release include increased stability, full DirectX 7 compatibility, IEEE 1394 digital camera support, wireless LAN area, a new version of NetMeeting and support for a wider range of hardware, e.g. Soundblaster Live! & Voodoo 3.
Matrox Millennium G400/G400 Max has started to ship on 12th July following numerous delays. The first shipments will be for pre-orders. The delay for new customers is expected to be around 5 weeks. The Millennium G400 has a clock speed of 125/166Mhz (core/memory), a 300Mhz RAMDAC and will be available in both 16Mb ($149) and 32Mb ($199) varieties. The speedier Millennium G400 MAX has a clock speed of 166/200Mhz, a 360Mhz RAMDAC and will only be available with 32Mb of memory. The recommended price of the G400MAX is $249.
Both the G400 and the G400MAX are built on a 0.25micron process and include support for AGP4X, single cycle multi-texturing, single pass trilinear filtering, 32bit rendering and Z-buffer (called Vibrant Colour Quality 'VCQ' by Matrox), a 2048x2048 texture size and Environment bump mapping. The G400 will be shipped with a full OpenGL ICD. The bus architecture has also been improved from the G200 by introducing 256bit DualBus (two 128bit buses, as opposed to the G200's two 64bit buses, for communication between onboard memory and the graphics chipset). The G400 also introduces 'DualHead' technology, which consists of two independent cathode ray tube controllers (CRTC's). The primary controller is specifically for monitor output, with the secondary controller outputting to either digital flat panel (via separate add on module) or the integrated TV Out controller which can then output to either a TV (S-Video or RCA output connector) or a second monitor. The second CRTC does not use the G400's integrated 300/360MHz RAMDAC, and therefore only supports resolutions up to 1280 x 1024. DualHead also gives the ability to output full screen DVD to a TV whist running Windows at your normal resolution on the primary display. DVD support on the G400 is considered to be excellent.
On it release the G400 will be the only chipset to support a high quality form of bump mapping, in this case Environmental bump mapping. All other chipsets to date use the considerably inferior Embossing method. This is being touted as one of the G400's main strengths, and although it produces a fairly large performance hit the results are stunning.
The performance of the chipset is looking very promising. Although benchmarks have shown the G400MAX to be slower than the TNT2 Ultra and V3-3000 at 'normal' resolutions at a 16bit colour depth, its outperforms all cards when given a high-end CPU and very high resolutions. This, alongside benchmarks showing incredible FPS for games such as Forsaken which are almost completely fill-rate limited, show that the chipset has the best fill rate of any card to date but has relatively poor triangle setup performance. Hopefully this will be a driver issue, in which case it will be a very strong competitor to even the fastest Ultra TNT2 cards. 32bit colour depths produce only a negligible (5% or so) hit at this stage in driver development due to the massive fill rate of the card.
When the card was initially released its OpenGL performance, provided by a full OpenGL ICD, was rather poor compared to the competition. Initial benchmarks on the mini OpenGL ICD released on October 8th has shown significant improvements with Quake II achieving around a 20% speed increase in the lower resolutions and Quake III Test achieving around a 50% frame rate improvement across all resolutions. This puts the OpenGL performance of the G400MAX higher than that of its main rivals, the TNT2Ultra and Voodoo3 3000 . It should be noted however that this miniGL is specific to Pentium III and K7 systems and will not be used on previous generation processors.
The G400 and G400 MAX look to be very solid products. Not surprisingly for Matrox these boards have the best 2D and 3D image quality on the market and if the G400 MAX overcomes its triangle setup bottleneck then it will offer the best 3D performance too.
Intel Price cuts occurred on July 18th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Windows Millennium Pre-beta was released to selected testers on July 23rd, and is the successor to Windows 98. The main goal behind Windows Millennium is to greatly improve reliability by removing the legacy functions of the OS. The 16-bit backend of Windows 98 is to be removed making the OS fully 32bit. This means that MSDOS will no longer be present so real-mode device drivers and applications written exclusively for DOS will no longer function. Legacy I/O will also not be catered for, which is likely to mean that support for ISA cards is to be removed. At this stage Windows Millennium looks virtually identical to its predecessor, save for the lack of a startup screen. Most changes made for this release were at the low level, where the Windows 98 code has been partially merged with Windows 2000 code.
3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 was released on July 30th. The V3-3500 has a clock speed of 183Mhz, a 350MHz RAMDAC, 16 MB of SDRAM and an STB designed TV subsystem. This system includes a TV tuner, stereo in/out, composite in/out, S-Video in/out, and NTSC/PAL in/out. Digital Flat Panel support, which was initially specified for the product, has been dropped in favour of the TV subsystem. The included software can encode at full D1 quality Mpeg2 (740x480x24 at 30fps (10Mb/s)) in real-time on a Pentium II 450. These AV facilities brings the card into competition with the Matrox Marvel and ATI All-In-Wonder, and first impressions suggest that it will be an excellent rival. The suggested US retail price is $249.99, including a game bundle which is likely to be similar to that for the V3-3000. It will be available in AGP form only.
Alpha 21264 750 was expected to be released during July, alongside Slot B Alpha motherboards, although I have yet to confirm that it is available. This 750Mhz processor is to be manufactured on a 0.25 micron process.
08/99
Pentium III 600 was released on August 1st. This processor is to use Intel's 0.25 micron Katmai core which will be superseded by the 0.18 micron 'Coppermine' core in late October.
Celeron 500 was released on August 1st.
AMD Athlon 650 was officially announced on August 16th.
Intel Price cuts occurred on August 22nd. See the CPU Prices page for additional information. The PII 400 and 350, PIII 450 and (according to the register) the Xeon 500 and 550 are to cease production on this date.
3DLabs Permedia 3 chipset, which was expected to be release during June, has been delayed and is now expected to be available during August. Although it aimed at both the professional CAD market and gamers, its core is mainly optimised for CAD work, with a high polygon throughput but a relatively low fill rate. Initial game-based benchmarks of the chipset have shown that it performs quite poorly compared to opposition such as the TNT2, Voodoo 3 and G400. The chipset is clocked at 110Mhz with a triangle setup speed of 11 million polygons per second. It has support for AGP4X, 32bit Zbuffer and rendering, 32Mb memory support, a 270Mhz RAMDAC and DVD Motion compensation. Features more specific to the chipset are environmental bump maps (like the G400) and true XYZA8 bump mapping (a high quality form of bump mapping), 2 texture reads and 3 texture blends per clock for excellent filtering and multitexturing performance and Virtual Texturing. This technology minimises the stalls which occur when the texture memory limit is reached by allowing reads to be interleaved with other functions, such as triangle setup, and by only fetching those parts of the texture that are necessary (i.e. visible). Virtual Texturing, like S3TC, should prevent choppy frame rates and improve performance in applications with large textures.
The Permedia 3 chipset, like the Permedia 2 before it, is designed to appeal to the graphics professional who wants an affordable 3D modeling card for use on a Windows NT or 2000 workstation. The chipset will offer excellent 3D image quality with full support for OpenGL 1.2 as well as DirectX 6.1. Drivers will be available upon release for Windows 95, 98, 2000 and NT 4.
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 6800 is the 7200rpm version of the Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 and is expected to enter volume production during August. This drive series features a 7200rpm spindle speed, 6.8Gb per platter areal density, <9ms seek, an ATA-66 interface and a 2Mb cache provided by 100Mhz SDRAM. The largest drive size provided by this series will be 27Gb, which is estimated to be sold at $399. Like its brother the DiamondMax 6800, the Plus series will incorporate Maxtor's DualWave multi-processor controller and the ShockBlock and MaxSafe data protection systems. Reviews indicate that this drive is an excellent performer in both Windows 9x and NT, generally outperforming all currently available ATA drives (e.g. Quantum's Fireball Plus KX, Seagate's Barracuda ATA and Western Digital's Expert series).
AMD K6-2 500 was officially announced on August 30th.
09/99
DirectX 7 RC4 was released on September 4th.
AMD Price cuts occurred on September 10th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
DirectX 7 final version went Gold on September 11th, and was released to the public on September 22nd. The main features of DX7 are improved texture management and support for the hardware acceleration of lighting and transformation geometry.
Intel Price cuts occurred on September 12th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Windows 2000 RC2 was released on September 15th. This latest build includes broader hardware and software support, simplified administration, bug fixes, performance enhancements, a more up to date version of Windows Media services and something called the 'Web Telephony Engine'.
Mobile Celeron 466 and 433Mhz were released on September 15th. It should be noted that until the Mobile PIII's arrive in late October/November these Celeron processors will be Intel's fastest mobile CPU's, beating the current top of the range Pentium II 400 under the vast majority of circumstances.
Mobile K6-II (K6-IIP) processor was released on September 20th at clock speeds of 433, 450 and 475Mhz.
Mobile K6-III (K6-IIIP) processor was released on September 20th at clock speeds of 400, 433 and 450Mhz. In raw clock speed terms AMD's mobile processors are faster than the current Intel line up (K6-III 450 vs Pentium II 400 and K6-II 475 vs Celeron 466). For Office applications the K6-IIIP 450 will generally be the fastest x86 processor available at this time.
S3 Savage 4 Xtreme cards have been available from the end of September, the first of which was Diamond's Stealth III S540 Xtreme which was released on September 23rd. This chipset is the successor to S3's Savage 4 chipset released in May and will come in two varieties. The Xtreme 166 is intended for the retail sector, and will feature core clock of 160Mhz and a memory clock of 166Mhz using 6ns SDRAM modules (up from the current Savage 4's 125Mhz with 8ns SDRAM). The Xtreme 143 is intended for OEM's and will be clocked at 143/166Mhz. The Savage4 Xtreme will also feature AGP 4X, a 300Mhz RAMDAC and Digital Flat Panel support. The memory bus for both chips is 64-bit which limits fill rate compared to the 128 bits busses of its more expensive competitors. The image quality of this chipset is top-notch, with excellent 3D output and a good quality RAMDAC for high-quality 2D output. Diamond's Stealth III S540 Xtreme contains the Xtreme 160 core, comes with 32Mb of 166Mhz SDRAM and retails for $99 (after a $30 rebate).
Boards based around the Savage 4 Xtreme 160/166 will be competitive with the Voodoo3 2000 and 125Mhz TNT2. The Savage 4 tends to be best with low resolutions in both DirectX and OpenGL (i.e. 640x480) where it completes quite well with, and sometimes beats, the two aforementioned products. At 800x600 or above the Savage4 cards loose out to both competitive cards due to its 64-bit bus, with TNT2 outclassing V3-2000 which in turn outclasses the Savage4.
Maxtor DiamondMax 36 drive series entered volume production in September. This 5400rpm drive series features a 9.1Gb/platter areal density, 2Mb buffer, sub 9ms seek time, a UDMA-66 interface and capacities up to 36.5Gb. Also present are Maxtor's ShockBlock and MaxSafe data protection technologies.
i810e chipset is the successor to the i810 and was released on September 27th. The chipset is identical to the i810 apart from its 133Mhz FSB support. See the Tips page for a comparison of Intel's chipsets.
Pentium III 533B & 600B were released on September 27th. These processors will be the first to use the new 133Mhz FSB speed supported by the latest Intel chipsets (i810e, i820 and i840) but the last to use Intel's 0.25 micron Katmai core before the move to 0.18 micron Coppermine in late October.
Windows Millennium Beta 1 was released on September 27th. See the final product entry in the Roadmap for additional information.
