#DIAMOND LIES?!!!
10 messages in this thread
Martin –
The Genoa is a good choise for 3DS, since it's a et4000 you will have no flic
playing problems from within 3DS. Also we support all the modes of that board
so 3DS will work great.
Our currently shipping drivers do not suppor the Stealth 24. These will be
supported in our next maintaince release.
Jack Bayt – Vibrant
Jack,
Yes, the Genoa 7900 is a nice trusty board and it's been a blessing to have to
worry about one less thing than normal <g>.
To their credit Panacea have been working diligently to try and resolve the
debacle of the premature release of the new Diamond boards before there had
been a reasonable amount of time to come up with working drivers.
Part of the problem with Diamond Boards [I've got an SS24x] is that there are 3
or 4 parties involved with the drivers. Panacea wrote the 3DS drivers. Binar
wrote _some_ of the Win3.1 drivers. Diamond probably did work on the DOS
drivers, etc. So, figuring out how to solve a particular problem means ya
first have to determine who to talk to! Then, there's the VESA compliancy
issue – which looks nasty.
Fortunately, Diamond has a forum [go GRAPHBVEN] and the Panacea rep [Chris] is
an active participant. Granted, everybody is really trying to correct
problems…but it looks overwhelming! I agree with you about rushing the
product(s) to market – and in fact, said it last Summer. But, despite all the
problems, the Diamond Speedstar 24x still gets 'thumbs up' from reviewers.
Even a recent issue of Cadalyst had a board survey by Art Liddle, who liked it!
In light of all the problems people are having with it, at all application
levels, I find articles which endorse these boards to be doing more harm than
good – to users!
E.
Eli,
you're right. It seems like the reviewers didn't pay much or any attention to
the drivers.
I just got the 24X and I'm seeing color bands when I render true color in
3DS. I thought that 16.1 colors would eliminate this. Right now the best
still image I get is when I dither to 256. Is this normal for the 24x?
Can anyone recommend the best 3DS drivers for the 24x?
And has a solution been found for the FLC playback problem?
Rich
Rich –
When you say color bands, do you mean the minor ones that one may expect to
see, almost not visible, or are they major?
We believe that our driver is the best on the market for the following reasons.
Solid support for RDPADI. Large usable materials editor. Seperate resolutions
between display, materials, rcpadi rendering, and rdpadi rendering. Color
mapping icon. Enhanced display redraw performances (really helps out in the
keyframer). Full support for the 24x. Image viewing from the materials editor.
APATCH program fixes misc bugs in 3DS. Large number of users using it. Most
3DS dealers also carry our products. Long term commitment to 3DS.<g>
There still is no complete solution to the flic problem. Some have been able
to resolve it by loading the VESA driver, but the best solution is to add
AAPLAY to the program menu. We do have a development effort attempting to
resolve this problem, but no promises.
Enjoy –
Jack Bayt – Vibrant
Rich,
that sounds wrong. A 24-bit image should *always* look better than a 8-bit
image and banding should also be unlikely. Are you sure you are using the
RCPADI drivers? The latest is 1.01F I think and they are hot off the press from
Panacea and they seem to work fine. Tell us how you are setting up things? You
should have the following statement in a batch file when you start 3ds:
call d:\turbodld\pana3ds.bat
the file contains something like:
SET DLDCFG=d:\turbodld
SET RCPADI=d:\turbodld\RCTURBOD.EXP
and your 3ds.set file should have the rendering display set to rcpadi.
Also you may need to delete 3dadi.cfg in your 3ds directory so you can
configure the adi driver to the correct colour depth – typically
640x480x16.77million.
Good luck
Jack,
I hope I can cut in and ask you a quick question about your drivers?
So….
I have your 2.0 version of the software, and have been using it for 3DS. I
recently lost my old VGA card and now have an Artist Winsprint 100+ (very nice
card) which has a S3 on it. Upon re-configuring the driver for 3DS I saw that
there are four different versions of S3 drivers. Not all of them work!
I used the generic S3 for the display screen, and I had to use the S3-VGA for
the materials display. I am not using the card for rendering since I have a
Targa+, but I would like to know if your drivers support this card in it's
ability to do 32,000 colors for rendering?
Hope you don't mind my jumping in!
-Mike.
Michael,
I, too, have an Artist WinSprint 100+, and the Vibrant SoftEngine
drivers work very well with it, although you should have ver 2.1.5 to avoid a
small bug or two in the earlier versions. Or if it's just for 3DS, you can use
their ProRes 3DS. The 32,000 color RENDER display works just fine. BTW, be sure
the bios on your card is at least 1.9. There were some VESA problems with 1.8,
and Artist will send you a new bios chip if you have an older one.
John Schmidt (A/E/C Technologies)
John – Thanks for the quick answer.
Micheal, if you don't have our v2.1.5, please just either send me EMAIL
requesting the update, or call our sales folks, they will take care of you.
Jack Bayt – Vibrant