It's true: *new* 3Dfx drivers. They're coming...

[Tagrineth]

Courtesy of 3Dfx Underground (http://nat.mine.nu:81/3dfx/), the awesome team of Aqueous, Devo, Colourless, and Koolsmoky are already in the beta phase of the totally new 3Dfx Voodoo3/4/5 driver set - 1.09.00.
<blockquote>"Ladies and gentlemen, mark your calendars. Saturday, May 25, 2002, the 1.09.00 drivers will be released. We are also now announcing that there will be private beta tests, prior to this date. The beta testers have already been chosen from within the 3dfx community and we will contact all beta testers; please do not contact us inquiring about beta testing.

These drivers have been long in the making and much longer than we originally expected -- but now you can count the days until you get them. Thanks for all of your support and understanding!"</blockquote>Most enhancements come in the form of a completely new OpenGL ICD created by Aqueous. The ICD is OpenGL 1.2 compliant and features fixes for things like cracked textures in Return To Castle Wolfenstein and fog effects in Medal of Honour: Allied Assault.

GLide2x and GLide3x have received fixes as well from Beyond3D regular Colourless and Koolsmoky - the already established GlideXP (http://nat.mine.nu:81/3dfx/glidexp/) team.

The only thing not so much affected by the coming update... is Direct3D. That's right... no DirectX 8.1 compatible drivers just yet. But they'll come in the future. It is unclear whether 1.09.00 will include any changes to DirectX or not...

Anyway, that's it for now.

[darkblu]

wow! cudos go to aqueous, devo, colourless, and koolsmoky for the effort and good will!
guys, in case you plan on supporting the v2 as well and if you feel you could use another coder for the task consider my application :)

[Colourless]

Ok, call me sceptical, but I doubt you'll see these released on May 25th. I am one of the people who are working on part of them, and I haven't even seen one bit of real evidence that the ICD even exists. Not only that but the claims that they make about the capabilities about drivers are somewhat fantastic and are beyond the capabilities of Voodoo cards.

There has also been known incidents with some of the others spreading FUD about the drivers, so I'm just saying, don't expect to see them on the 25th, or if you do, don't expect miracles.

-Colourless

[Tagrineth]

Ah well, who really knows when Devo's involved? :lol:

There must be something to it, though... Devo's received a lot of flak over at x3dfx (http://pub43.ezboard.com/bx3dfx) for giving news too quickly. Hopefully he'll learn... eventually... somehow... ^_^;

[Colourless]

Yeah exactly. :-(

[ArchAngelCD]

I really hope your wrong about this Colourless.
I'm looking forward to the release and have been patient the whole time. :roll:

[Nick[FM]]

Well, I know from experience that it is worth to "delay" the product in order to deliver a much better product.. Rushing into releasing something has usually an ugly end. :-?

[Tagrineth]

Apparently some beta testers (gc12 for one) are reporting >100FPS at max-Q Q3A 1280x1024x32 on their Voodoo5 5500's with the old 761 OpenGL ICD + Koolsmoky's GLide runtime. :)