The drivers were not yet final and still in a BETA phase despite the fact that boards are already on sale in Singapore and Hong Kong (the important thing is that Creative managed to jump the gun and get first to market again- nice one!). The card performs extremely well already with these drivers but chopping/changing drivers from 2.08/3.38/3.47 in order to gain maximum performance across DX6, DX7 and OpenGL games is not exactly ideal. The US release date isn't set in stone but the latest news we have is that EB is taking pre-orders for ELSA's GeForce 256, Creative's and indeed Guillemot's, which should all be released by the middle of this month. SDRAM Board versions might start appearing by the end of this week so watch out for them. DDR RAM versions ETA looks to be at least another month or two down the road.

This just in- we asked NVIDIA what prospective GeForce 256 owners should do, bearing in mind early boards have been released at retail in South East Asia. As of next week (probably the middle) NVIDIA will release a final RELEASE candidate driver set, which they recommend that you download.

There are also a couple of queries on the image quality side…

There's been some confusion regarding NVIDIA's stance on Texture Compression, which they've not been publicizing or evangelizing as hard as S3 and 3dfx recently. Many of you have assumed that NVIDIA is either not supporting Texture Compression at all or simple doing it in software (game developers also write their own compression tools customizable for their own games) .We asked NVIDIA for an official statement, which we hope clears this up,

"In all reality, NVIDIA's GeForce 256 GPU supports all 5 formats of Microsoft's DirectX texture compression, in addition to transform and lighting; where S3 only supports only one version."

In addition, Epic Megagames' 3D engine guru, Tim Sweeney, had this to say about the subject,

"We'll be taking advantage of the GeForce256's DXTC / S3TC texture compression, and also their palletized texture support as soon as they expose it in their Direct3D drivers. Their hardware supports palettes, but the initial retail drivers don't expose it. Paletted textures reduce texture memory usage by 2X and theoretically improve texture management performance by 2X. We won't be supporting hardware T&L initially when Unreal Tournament ships, but T&L clearly rocks, so you never know what the future holds."