Some time ago Matrox announced the G400, a chip roughly 2.5x the power of the G200. We should see boards based on the G400, with up to 32 meg of onboard memory, in the next month or so.

The G400 is evolutionary, and not revolutionary, but the speed increase is in line with the advances in other 3d accelerators.

Where this becomes interesting is in the possibility of the G400 in SLI mode. Metabyte has demonstrated that they can interleave any chip design, and the most likely candidates for the technology are the Savage4 and the TNT2. However, to stay in the running this year, I am betting that Matrox may also take advantage of the opportunity.

New 3d Accelerators.

From the chart you can see that at 5 million triangles per second fill rate, the G400 is a bit behind the cutting edge. However, place two of these boards in a single system and you have more power than even the top of the line Voodoo 3500 can generate. Interesting, no?

At the extreme right of the chart I show the fill rate for Voodoo3 model 3500 and TNT2 as approximately the same at 8 million triangles per second (in fact TNT2 Ultra will exceed this number). The chart does not show an SLI speed rating for the V3 chipset, because 3dfx has not expressed any interest in an SLI mode, at least not publically. In our last Game News piece I detailed some of the developments around Metabyte's SLI technology.

An Unusual EAW Screen.

This screen was sent to me by one of our readers a month or so back. A nice evening shot of an Me262 which has already knocked some stuffing out of this B17.

Click to continue . . .

Slocket with jumper wire.

My Kingdom for a Slocket!

The dual celeron race is heating up, with a couple more articles appearing at various hardware crazed sights over the past month. The latest information indicates that the PPGA Celeron is actually easier to overclock than the Slot 1 Celeron most of us have in our overclocked Celeron gaming machines.

However, using a PPGA Celeron in a Slot 1 machine requires a special socket adapter which is being produced by Gigabyte, MSI and Abit. The slocket produced by MSI has some features which make it easily adaptable to a dual Slot1 mainboard configuration, so that a dual PII design can be built cheaply. MSI will release version 1.1 of their MS-6905 in a few weeks, allowing dual celeron configuration in a Slot 1 mainboard with no other modifications needed!

Silent Hunter II

SSI mailed me some new screens from Silent Hunter II recently. Here are two of the best:

Deck Gun on Type VIIb.

The sea in SH2.

For more on Silent Hunter II see our Naval Previews index.

Revised F4 Cockpit

. Click the image to download. Includes bug fixes. These files are 800x600 resolution. By Jung-Hoon Kim.