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• These are the answers of nVidia , the company that currently sells the most 3D accelerator chips. 1) I know that you guys at nVidia are working like crazy, I once spoke to Dwight Diercks at 3 a.m. PST. Did you try getting your new beta OpenGL ICD out before the i740 launch on purpose or didn't you care about Feb 12 ? We work hard because we set the difficult goal of delivering the best products in the world. When we specified our OpenGL implementation we wanted it to be fantastic. We could have cheesed a miniport driver but we wanted to deliver a full ICD. A full ICD is a big job. It's taken us a little longer than we had hoped but we put out the betas as soon as we had something we were proud of. 2) What are nVidia's thoughts about the i740? Do you think it's gonna be a tough competitor? The i740 is slower than the Riva 128 and almost a year later. It will probably be a tough competitor for the companies that don't have a great 3D product and who are trying to sell on price. 3) Who does nVidia see as most important competitors anyway? We try to be our own most important competitor. Our goal is to obsolete our products before someone else does. In the process of doing that we will deliver truly state of the art products for our customers. We've set the goal of delivering an entirely new generation of graphics capability and performance every 12 months. We have no fewer than 3 separate development teams operating concurrently to obsolete each other. Imagine 3 internal competitors that know exactly what each other are doing! That's the toughest competition anywhere! 4) How important is 3D Winbench for nVidia and how important do you think it is for the 3D card industry? Every developing marketplace needs some way of measuring the goodness of a product. 3D Winbench is a good start at a metric for measuring goodness of 3D cards and systems. Is it perfect? No. Is it important that the industry support such a metric? Yes. Otherwise, it's very hard to get a quick understanding of a product. But it's just that - a *quick* understanding, not a *complete* understanding. You wouldn't buy an automobile based on the horsepower of the engine. Yet knowing the horsepower of the engine does give you a quick understanding of the auto. And that's the value of 3D Winbench. 5) Is it correct that drivers can be easily optimized for one application, e.g. 3D Winbench 98? Yes, drivers can be tuned specifically for a benchmark. But trying to fool customers is a terrible practice and just won't work for long for any company that tries it. Real customers run real applications. 3D Winbench is just an approximation of a whole bunch of applications. It's a good first step but by no means as good as testing a bunch of real applications. 6) Has nVidia optimized the drivers of the Riva 128 for 3D Winbench98? Yes! But that's the wrong question. What you should have asked is whether we have optimized our drivers to exaggerate our performance on 3D Winbench98 relative to Riva 128 performance on real 3D applications. The answer to that is an absolute *NO*. We have certainly used 3D Winbench as one of the tools for improving our drivers. 3D Winbench does things with D3D that no existing applications mimic. Any company that has not extensively studied 3D Winbench is arrogant and has likely produced a set of D3D drivers that are far less robust than they should be. Similarly, any company that has high 3D Winbench scores with disproportionately less performance on real applications should be viewed with _great_ suspicion. NVIDIA is extremely self-conscious about Riva 128 performance and quality on real applications and has made a huge investment in testing and quality assurance. Looking great on benchmarks while looking slow on real apps is a slimy way to build a business. We won't do it. 7) If you were a normal home or office user, would you base your buying decision on the 3D Winbench scores of a 3D accelerator? No. 3D Winbench would be just one data point that would help me make a decision. 8) If 'no', what would you base your buying decisions on? For 3D applications, I'd also like to understand the performance on a mix of real world applications that seem similar to what I will use. I'd also want to know how state of the art my card was because that would give me some idea of how long it would be before I would have to replace it. So I'd try to understand the basic technology beyond 3D processor speed: AGP, amount of memory, graphics memory bus width, and support for high resolutions. I'd also want to know it's 2D performance and whether the technology was coming from a reputable company that would service their products. I'd also want to know the price and what software came bundled with the card. 9) Could you imagine that graphic card manufacturers would try and influence the buying decisions of users by optimizing their drivers particularly for 3DWinbench 98? Of course. Look at what happened with Dhrystone. That's why real applications performance must be measured in addition to 3DWinbench to get a complete picture. 10) What are the strengths of the RIVA 128 in your opinion? Great 2D and 3D performance in a single card. Extraordinary performance upside due to the 128-bit bus. Riva 128 based cards will run new high resolution titles well at 800x600 and beyond. Plus, the true power of the Riva 128 is just beginning to be tapped. Our next software release will *dramatically* improve performance on both D3D and OGL. Riva 128 based cards scale in performance well up to 400 MHz on P2 systems. Throw in a world class OpenGL implementation (full ICD!) and then be amazed at how little it all costs. 11) What are the weaknesses of the RIVA 128 in your opinion? For a few people, lack of 8M memory support for 1600x1200 true color. For most, es macht nichts. (Wow, Kevin shows his German roots!!! 'es macht nichts' means 'it doesn't matter') 12) What's the next chip of nVidia gonna be? When will it be launched? Even better than the first...but that's all I can say for now :-) 13) When will the final OpenGL ICD be finished? The OpenGL ICD is in testing now and will ship within 60 days. 14) Do you guys ever sleep? Generally very little. Our CEO never sleeps and we all aspire to match his abilities. Thanks a bunch Kevin for these detailed and very honest answers! Kevin Schuh, nVidia

• ASUS’ notebooks have come a long way. In fact, the company is the sixth largest vendor in North America, last we checked, with aspirations of a top-three spot. Not long ago, ASUS laptops were much like the Clevo designs we’re looking at today—colored neutrally and fairly generic. But the G71 Republic of Gamers design is decidedly bolder. Processor We’d expect a notebook with the word Gamer in its name to include some fairly high-end hardware. For the most part, ASUS does not disappoint. The G71 platform itself supports the latest quad-core QX9300—a 2.53 GHz Penryn with 12 MB of L2 cache on a 1,066 MHz bus. Of course, it’ll also do a dual-core Core 2 Extreme X9100 or lower-end Core 2 Duo T9000-, P8000-, or P7000-series chip. Our sample came with a Core 2 Duo T9400, released in July 2008. Next to a lineup of Core 2 Extremes and desktop quad-cores, ASUS’ T9400 looks a bit underpowered. However, the chip is still quite capable. It runs at 2.53 GHz on a 1,066 MHz bus (with a 9.5x multiplier), yet still sips just 35W. From a raw specs angle, the T9400 looks a lot like the medium-voltage P9500 at 25 W, so we’re expecting great things from this chip in the battery life tests to make up for its slight clock speed deficiency. Memory The G71 is a Centrino 2 design centering on Intel’s PM45 chipset. So, while CPU-Z reports that the G71 is sporting 3 GB of DDR2 at an unknown clock speed, there is actually 4 GB of Qimonda DDR3 running at 1,333 MHz. Naturally, since CPU-Z was unable to successfully identify the modules’ type, we were also leery of trusting its claim that our DDR3 was running 7-7-7 timings. A quick reference with Qimonda reveals the real timings are 8-8-8, though it is worth noting that the memory vendor does sell DDR3-1333 modules with 9-9-9 timings, making ours the more performance-oriented. Kudos to ASUS for its enthusiast nod. Graphics Here’s where the G71 is going to come up short versus the other contenders in this roundup. Instead of two—or even one—flagship graphics chip driving its gaming performance, the Republic of Gamers system includes a GeForce 9700M GT discrete adapter. It doesn’t sound like a far cry from Nvidia’s GeForce 9800M GT found in the Alienware and Eurocom notebooks we’re testing here, but the 9700M only sports 32 unified shaders (versus 96) and eight ROPs. Naturally, the GPU itself is completely different—a G96M, similar only in that it’s manufactured at 65nm. Like the G92M found in Alienware’s m17x, ASUS’ G96M is driven by 512 MB of GDDR3, albeit on a 128-bit bus rather than a 256-bit connection. As a result, theoretical memory bandwidth is slashed to 25.6 GB/s. This notebook’s graphics muscle is understandably only a fraction of what you’d find on one of the competing platforms. To be fair, ASUS is not yet a major presence in the mobile gaming market, and the G71 looks to be its fastest offering yet. We’re expecting good things from it in the productivity tests, but expectations should be tempered for our gaming benchmarks. Storage The G71 chassis boasts two hard drive bays, each able to take a 2.5” SATA disk. Our sample came armed with a pair of Western Digital Scorpio Blues with 250 GB of capacity each. Though the drives only support SATA 1.5 Gb/s (a good thing when it comes to power consumption) and spin at 5,400 RPM, they’re put together in a RAID 0 array and manage to outperform the array of 5,400 RPM drives in Alienware’s Area-51 setup. We still have our reservations about RAID 0 on the road, but the G71 didn’t give us any of reliability issues seen on the Alienware or Killer Notebooks configurations. Could our issues be related to the ICH7-M controller found on those other systems, fixed with the PM45’s ICH9-M? Perhaps—neither the ASUS nor the Eurocom Centrino 2 systems ran into storage problems. Networking Given its Centrino 2 pedigree, we’d expect to see the G71 with Intel’s new wireless controller cards. And indeed, it does come with the WiFi Link 5100. But while the 5100 supports 802.11a/g/draft-n, it only boasts one send and one receive antenna, limiting throughput to 300 Mb/s. Though that’s not bad at all, the other Centrino 2 offering in this roundup, Eurocom’s Montebello, includes the potentially-faster WiFi Link 5300. Fortunately, the 5100 enables the other benefits proffered by the latest Intel wireless products—mainly, power savings and Active Management support. Of course, Gigabit Ethernet is also a standard piece of ASUS’ latest enthusiast notebook. Chassis/LCD The 17” G71 is available with two different LCD screens: one features WXGA+ resolutions and the other sports WUXGA dimensions of 1920x1200. Straight-on, the higher-end display looks quite sharp. But as we moved from one side to the other, creating more acute viewing angles, certain areas of the screen appeared “hotter” than others, making those regions unreadable. We didn’t encounter this on any of the other notebooks. ASUS’ chassis is of the company’s own design with a handful of unique extras. There isn’t any I/O up front—just a release for the two clasps that keep the lid closed. The left and right sides are surprisingly free of visible ports as well. But it’s all cleverly hidden. To the left, you’ll see a DVD+/-R/RW combo drive that mounts flush with the rest of the notebook, along with a card reader plugged up with a plastic blank. An inconspicuous red door further up the side seems to be held in place magnetically. Behind that door you’ll find a pair of USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire 400 mini-jack. On the other side, you have an ExpressCard bay and on/off switch for the wireless controller. A similarly-placed magnetic door hides two more USB ports and audio I/O. The rest of the G71’s connectivity is on the notebook’s backside. There’s an HDMI output, an eSATA port, VGA-out, Gigabit Ethernet, and the system’s modem jack. Though we’d consider the back to be the least convenient place for all of those connectors, the Gigabit port is probably the only one likely to be used often. The G71 includes a 5,200 mAh battery, which isn’t as large as the Alienware or Killer Notebooks power plants. But because ASUS’ offering employs lighter-weight hardware and Intel’s Centrino 2 platform, we expect it to show more impressive battery run time results.

• Intel claims 40% performance gain with new Core 2 Extreme processor

  Los Angeles (CA) - Up until this year, the enthusiast gamer has been, by definition, a PC user - or, in deference to Apple, a "computer user." This year, thanks in large part to Sony, that's changing. From a marketing perspective, the enthusiast is the person who is more willing to spend money and adopt early. The money an early adopter might end up investing in a high-end, PlayStation 3-based gaming console is essentially what he might spend on at least a high-end computer, if not necessarily the top of the line. For that matter, the PlayStation 3 is essentially a computer, albeit without a keyboard and mouse. But it does, after all, run Linux, as do a growing number of Intel-based PCs. So the comparison is inevitable: Of the two platforms - the PC and the PS3 - which is the better investment from purely a gaming perspective? Intel, of course, has a tremendously biased opinion on this subject. But in the light of more substantive competition than it has ever faced before, will Intel's perennial arguments continue to hold up? Or will subtle changes to those arguments shed some light as to where Intel wants to go with its push into gaming? The company rented out a conference room to itself at this year's E3 Expo, where it showed off Core 2 Extreme-based desktop and mobile PCs that were clearly cranking out pixels at faster speeds than their predecessors - according to Intel, about 40% faster.  Humphrey Cheung and Scott Fulton of TG Daily spoke with David Tuhy, Intel's general manager for its desktop products division; and Jodi Geniesse, the company's communications manager for mobile marketing, about some of the underlying issues governing Intel's new performance message - including lower power - and how it plays out to a new breed of customer who may be moving up from a generation not of PCs, but of consoles. TG Daily: There are two top-of-the-line processors that are being tested here at E3 for performance. One of them is the Cell. The other one is in this room. Brass-tacks-wise, from the gamer's perspective, why is the Core 2 Extreme better? David Tuhy: You almost have to look at it from a system level...Cell, which is an IBM and Sony collaboration, is a very, very dedicated processor specifically to their console frame, highly optimized for the pixel processing. Obviously, we're putting our thing into a PC, which is an open environment, and we're trying to advance on standard operating systems, to run games on top of this. So we have to worry about a lot more... Intel's general manager for desktop platforms, David Tuhy, showing off one example of a portable desktop Viiv PC. In the Cell environment, it's a Cell processing engine plus a third-party graphics vendor. It's highly optimized to that workload for giving the gaming experience to the console. I think they've done a great job; they've actually got a three-operand flow through their architecture, we actually have two. They can do multiply/accumulates based on their architecture, where we do our multiply through SSE [Streaming SIMD Extensions], and on our Core 2 Extreme, we double the SSE performance. It's actually got a true 128-bit SSE engine, which we market as "Advanced Media Processing." The PC version of that is a CPU plus a graphics card, sometimes two separate, sometimes more. We have a system out here which has our top-of-the-line microprocessor, the Core 2 (the combined brand for the next-gen CPUs formerly code-named "Conroe" and "Merom"), with a quad Nvidia system for graphics. It's a different price point: It's going after the enthusiast gamers, but it can draw a heck of a lot of polygons. [I don't know off the top of my head] the number of polygons it can draw versus a Cell, but I think it's going to be higher, because there's a lot more bandwidth on the quad system than on the Cell system. TG Daily: Up to this point, for the last 15 years, the argument in favor of PC gaming has been, "Hey, we have the performance lead. We can put gamers into the experience." Surely, Intel is reliant upon second parties like Nvidia and ATI to help you out getting [polygons drawn], but even that's still part of the Intel architecture. How does that improve and evolve with Core 2 Extreme? DT: Specifically, we have taken a very different approach with Core than we have taken with any other architecture before on the desktop. We're leveraging what we've learned with the mobile architecture, that we learned back with Centrino, and we improved that in the desktop and the server architecture with 64 bits, virtualization technology, floating-point engines - we bill them together as "Core Engine." So for us, Core 2 is the biggest move forward in terms of an architecture advance that we've had in the last five years...in terms of net gain, both in terms of its performance - which is averaging 40% more in desktop - and also, at the same time, lower power. Usually, that's not what happens for us. Generally, when our performance goes up, so goes the power. We went a different way with a very power-optimized architecture. The second thing we did is, we didn't require new instructions. We chose to optimize the current instruction set and give it more resources, so the SSE engine is a true 128-bit SSE engine, the cache now has advanced dynamics, it's a four-wide, out-of-order [instruction queue] machine. So several things we've done in the architecture where you can basically take an existing game and it just runs faster. Which is great, because it can plug and play with existing stuff.