Katmai/PIII news

The frame rate and visual quality of FS98 depends of a lot of parts of your PC: The mainboard, amount of memory, the processor, hard disk type and video board. But processor and video board are very important as FS98 as a graphical program asks a lot of calculations in the processors. If you are running a P133/P166/P200 you can get improved performance by buying a new graphics board like Viper 550 based on a the fast Riva TNT chipset. This will probably speed up the frame rate a lot. If you are still not satisfied you can consider buying  a new mainboard and CPU. Just prevent that your buy a new main board and cpu (or new PC) without improving your video board. You will probably still be disappointed.

If your hard disk is continuously reading you are more than likely having to hit the hard driver swap file. The swap file is on your disc, and when memory is being used at capacity, the OS starts writing the oldest used memory contents to disc, to make room for new stuff it needs. Even with office applications such as Excel, Word, 16 MD is no enough memory to run Win95 adequately.So: buy more memory. 32Mb should be sufficient but with the low memory pricing at this moment you can best buy 64Mb or even 128 Mb if you can afford this.

We have seen fast dropping prices of high end systems. If you are looking for a new machine take a look at the PII 350+Mhz systems. The 350, 400 and 450 Mhz Intel processors combined with the new 440BX motherboards and the new 100Mhz (memory) bus speed will give you frame rates of about 60-80 Fps. You need this (over)speed to have reasonable frame rates when you want to use multiple display's or very dense scenery's.

Katmai Pentium III

Since March 1999 we have Katmai, the latest processor made by Intel. Katmai started at 450 and 500 Mhz speed. Don't expect wonders of this processor. As the main change of this processor is the support of about 70 new instructions for functions as 3D and voice command, it will not be much faster at present Mainboards and software. Important for us is that PII processors became much cheaper.

More new PIII processors will be released this year. The PIII 550 & 600 in May and the PIII 533 and PIII 600 (running with 133 Mhz system bus)in September. Dropping prices can be expected. Estimations to be found at this site.

My advise is to buy system with a Intel440BX based Mainboard with a PII350 (or the similar AMD K6-2 350) including 128Mb 100Mhz Sdram. PII450 is OK too if you can afford it.......And put a Riva TNT based video board in it like the Viper 550 16Mb......

Buying Katmai is not necessary now. You can wait for dedicated Mainboards: the first Katmai systems will run on PII Mainboards and this will give only a little advantage. Please also note that AMD announced the K7 in the 2nd quarter of 1999, which will probably result in lower pricing of PIII/Katmai processors.

If you can't resist buying a PIII now (I can understand that....) beware that you get a system with a general, standard Motherboard, like original Intel Seattle, or the Aopen and Asus boards. With those boards it will be easy to upgrade to a PIII dedicated board as soon as they are released (Summer 1999). I guess some major (online) vendors use not-standard Motherboards which can make a later upgrade expensive or even impossible. Ask for this before you buy a PC. If you know what systems use a not-standard board, you can inform me . I will make this information available.

© 1999 JohanvC