MSI Geforce 7800GTX - The First Geforce 7 of MSI

MSI has released its first Geforce 7 graphic card, this graphic card was being tested and the result was posted in the http://www.anandtech.com/ claiming to out-performed most of the graphic card with the same chipset.

The spec of the MSI Geforce 7800GTX as follows for your reference:- [extracted from www.msi.com]

Geforce 7800GTX Chipset Features
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture
Vertex ShadersPixel Shaders
Next-Generation Texture Engine
DirectX and S3TC texture compressionFull 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

NVIDIA Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology
Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (up to 128 Taps)
Rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
Fast z-clear
Support for normal map compressionNew transparent super-sampling and transparent multi sampling Anti-Aliasing modes

NVIDIA UltraShadow™ II Technology
Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games, like id Software's Doom 3

SLI Technology
Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance
Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications
NVIDIA nView® multi-display support for scalable performance across two displays

NVIDIA PureVideo™ Technology
Three dedicated video engines
H.264 hardware assist
Industries most advanced video algorithm
DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080p resolution
Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pure down
Display gamma correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple videowindows with full video quality and features in each window

Advanced Display Functionality
Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability

Advanced Engineering
Designed for PCI Express x16
Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring delivers cooling at 24dB

NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0 Technology
DVC color controls
DVC image sharpening controls

Key Specifications
430MHz core clock speed
1.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 memory
256-bit memory interface
38.4GB/s memory bandwidth
24 pixels per clock
10.32Bps Fill Rate
8 Vertex Pipes
860M vertices/second
400MHz RAMDACs
NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 engine
Intellisample 4.0 technology
64-bit FP texture filtering & blending
NVIDIA SLI Ready
DX 9.0 / SM 3.0 & OpenGL 2.0 supported

ATI Drivers Catalyst 5.7

Catalyst 5.7 has been released in July 2005. As stated in the Catalyst 5.7 release note, this new driver has resolved the warcraft III issue, “playing the game under Windows XP no longer results in display corruption being noticed when rotating the display 90degrees counter-clockwise”

However the known issue of this new driver with the Worold of Warcraft as stated “Display corruption is noticed when switching between the game and the Windows desktop, when the desktop is set to 1280x1024 and the graphic preferences is set to Optimal Quality.”

Indicated by ATI that there is a performance improvement as stated:
· 5-15% gains in 3DMark05 on some products
· 20-60% gain in Far Cry Regulator across multiple settings
· 25-60% gains in Half-Life 2 at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF
· 40-60% gains in UT2004 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
· 50-100% improvement in Comanche4 at 1600x1200 6xAA 16xAF
· 50-200% gains in certain ShaderMark tests at high resolution

In my opinion, the indication of the increased of the performance normally varied from computers depends on the manufacturer of the graphic card as well as the overall components of the computers, and the software application.

Design of The Clan Bala Logo

We are inviting all to participate the Clan Bala logo designing.
Please refer to http://p2.forumforfree.com/designing-of-clan-bala-logo-vt19-clanbala.html for more information.

War of the Dual Core - AMD vs Intel

The processor chip technology has gone to the new era after the 64bit technology. Now everyone is talking about the dual core processor. I have found few interesting website which they have done some testing on Intel Dual and AMD dual, as comparison in terms of performance, stability, performance cost per watt and etc.

Do take note that the wattage consumption is not cheap by using the dual core processor. As the consistent gamers like us, I believe we need to think twice before investing on such technology.

The followings are some summary which extracted from the website. Article extracted from http://www.tomshardware.com/ arthur: Frank Völkel, Bert Töpelt, Daniel Schuhmann.

• Thus, when making a purchasing decision, the question to ask is whether or not multiple applications will be running simultaneously. If the answer is yes, then the Intel Pentium 840 EE is your first choice. Otherwise, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ will give you much better performance for single applications.
• In the end, we can conclude that the Intel Pentium 840 EE should be used with a motherboard that has the Intel 955X chipset. We do not recommend its use with a board with NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset.
  With the AMD platform you've only got one option, which fortunately is stable: to combine the AMD platform with a motherboard based on NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset. The results of our stress test show that the nForce4 SLI chipset for the AMD platform has matured.
• With no load on the systems, you can already see the difference between the Intel and the AMD platforms - the Intel system uses 13% more power than AMD. This increases to 30% when both systems are running under a full load.

Clan Bala is in Yahoo Search Engine

Proud to inform that Clan Bala website is already listed in yahoo search engine. Type " Clan Bala" in the yahoo search, you are able to see the search link in yahoo machine !

Let us drop more info in forum and posting more replays in the website, to make the clan web become popular.

In House Tournament Updates

Latest updates of In-House Tournament. Please note that this result will be updates weekly on Monday in future.

We encourage more players shall take this opportunity to learn from each other by playing more games.

Good luck.

PCI Express or AGP for Warcraft 3 Gaming?

The following are some anslysis of the AGP and PCI Express Video Card. I have read various such article before, and most of the review has proven that the latest technology does not mean is better than old technology, perhaps is only the way the manucturer to gain more on the profit margin.

Analysis: AGP on PCI Performance Penalty Likely Mis-Represented:
A true AGP-on-PCI solution is going to lack a GART driver and be limited to only 33 MHz of shared-bus PCI. In the majority of the tests moving from AGP .67 to AGP 1x and installing GART made the most difference out of any change. Any AGP-on-PCI solution on a standard PCI slot is going to be even more bandwidth limited (.5x AGP vs. our .67x) and hence, crippled from the start. The loss of GART is an additional performance whack that’ll hit performance far harder than 20%.
Even assuming motherboard manufacturers used an expensive, PCI-X solution, there’s still the problem of no GART and the fact that PCI-X is still a shared bus implementation. Using ANY 33-MHz PCI card on such a board would promptly prevent the PCI-X bus from running at its standard 66 MHz. A 33 MHz, 64-bit PCI-X-AGP card would have roughly AGP 1x bandwidth, and thus most games would be playable--but a considerable number of titles want 2x at a minimum to really see performance--and of course, there's the loss of GART.
Given the bandwidth chokepoint and lack of drivers we’d expect any AGP-on-standard-PCI solution to cut performance 50-70% in almost any game or professional application. Even UT2K3 will throttle downwards if AGP bandwidth is cut severely enough. AGP on PCI-X would offer more bandwidth and higher raw performance, but also packs its own penalties.
Bottom line? You’re probably going to be better off staying away. Far away. Very far.

Conclusion: PCI-Express on Desktop Likely to Offer Very Little Performance:
Is PCI-Express a bad idea? Not at all. It cuts manufacturing costs and simplifies trace design; from that perspective alone it’s a smart advance. But don’t confuse “smart advance” with “performance advantage.” Based on the numbers we’ve seen here, the average game and application (even the modern ones) typically do not take advantage of AGP 8x. None of our games showed more than a small increase. Professional applications are a different story, there we saw boosts of 30-40%. Its also been suggested that certain specified applications, like video editing, might run more smoothly over the PCI-Express system.
For the gamer, however, PCI-Express is going to be a non-issue. Given that most games today barely stress the AGP 2x bus, moving to double AGP 8x isn’t going to do anything. It’s the equivalent of widening a highway no one drives on. Had AGP developed in the direction it was intended to things might be different, but it didn’t. Now, to some extent, it’s a solution to a problem no one has.
If you’re still running on an original Athlon, P3, or Socket 423 P4, than a PCI-Express system might not be a bad idea, but if you’ve got something newer and aren’t using a specialized application demonstrated to gain from PCI-E, we wouldn’t bother planning to upgrade. You’ll just be throwing money away after hype. The reality is, in many cases we're barely pushing AGP 2x, sometimes 4x. 8x, despite now being two years old, is mostly hot air.

[article extrated from http://www.sudhian.com, original arthur by Joel Hruska.]

Clan Bala In House Tournament

Clan Bala is conducting the in-house tournament.

Terms:
1) Only Clan Bala members can participate this tournament
2) Only 1v1 game on battle.net official map is allowed

How to participate:
1) Any time. any days and any opponent, you need to save the replay and send it to Bala_Chieftain@yahoo.com.sg
2) Your points will be added into the scoring chart as in the picture. 3 points to win, 2 points to draw and 1 point to lose.
3) All games must be attached replay -or- witness by Shaman or Chieftain -or- agreed by both players.
4) We will then determine the top 3 players in the Clan.
5) This table will be effective for 1 year, till Dec 2006.
6) Not all names of player appear at this moment, until the game being played.

You may leave comment at this post or to discuss it further in the forum. You may record your own challenge record in the forum too.