I almost fell out of my chair. Seriously.

Ok, let's back up a minute, and give you some primer as to why I'm so excited. I went to visit Rudolf Cornellisen, whom as you know is working on a series of related drivers for nVidia graphics cards, etc etc. Well, the official purpose of my trip was to present to him formally, on behalf of all of the BeOS Communities, a brand new GeForce4 ti4200 dualhead graphics card.

We had a nice chat, ate some good food, and discussed the direction he is headed in with his development of Matrox, GeForce, and TNT based cards. For now, Rudolf aims to bring up to speed the nVidia driver, and will focus first on adding hardware acceleration support in the GeForce family of cards.

That's the immediate step. After that, several bugfixes are planned, more features are to be slowly added to the driver base, with plenty of testing to occur throughout the development cycle. I can't stress enough how important Rudolf impressed upon me the development process he has undertaken so far, and will take in the future. He is a very sharp, methodical, and determined programmer who has been given a much nicer card to test/play with, with the results benefitting everyone in the community. I'm quite happy to see how happy it has made Rudolf to finally get a very nice card, one that will very likely accelerate the development process tremendously.

Rudolf wanted me to pass on to everyone his sincere thanks, and appreciation for the graphics card, so here it is.. a virtual handshake, from me, to all of you. Pat yourself on the back if you have or thought about donating money to the driver fund.

Now we get to the exciting news. ;) What, you thought this is already exciting enough? This next bit is straight from Rudolf himself, in an email to me after he got home. Check it out:

"Hi Chris!

Hope your trip was without trouble.. and that you are safe and sound at home now :)

Here's the priliminary result!!

Let's start with: WOW!!

Cool testing that card with my driver. And yes, I already fixed several problems I would never have found without actually testing the card...

->Overlay did not work at all. Small problem (I suspected it a bit already I must admit), but I was able to test it and confirm what I have to do to get it working. It now actually works perfectly :)

->There are cursor distortions after all. I have to sync that thing to retrace. I asked users to watch out for that problem, but the best they could do was telling me something like:"Sometimes I see some flickering on the screen briefly." Can't blame them, but that won't help a bit (apart from me knowing there is _something_ not just right yet). Testing the card myself does. (I simply notice that upon moving the mouse sometimes flickering occurs. It happens more often if I move it wildly.)

->Hehe, I just setup a workspace of 800x43000 pixels in RBG32 ;-) I _never_ did _that_ before. (you need 128Mb RAM to pull that off.) I can now deny BeOS having trouble with 128MB mappings. It's working perfectly over here. Did spot a Be bug though, somewhere around pixel 40000 (>100Mb). I'll look it up, some var is rolled over.

Second confirmation on 128MB no problem: overlay is working in my driver by placing the needed bitmaps at the end of your card RAM. So it counts down from 128Mb in this card. Mister Kirkhope (I believe his name is) said very firmly (in some forum about the funding..) that BeOS was unable to use beyond 32 (or 64?) MB card RAM. Well, guess again ;-)

The card is a AGP 8x version BTW/. Nicely recognized including cardRAM amount detection. Me happy!!! :)

The bugfixes I am talking about here will be included in V0.04, coming up monday or tuesday.

Thanks again! (to the entire community)

Best regards (and see you..)

Rudolf."

So... What does this mean for BeOS users who have a GeForce4 card? I'll let you decide that, to be discussed in the forums, specifically in the "Nvidia Hope" thread. Go wild...