A
ccording to a recent report in
DigiTimes , motherboard and vid-
eocard maker Abit is trying to recover
from a spate of fi nancial problems.
The company is reportedly on shaky
ground these days, with banks threat-
ening to freeze the company’s assets.
The banks made this threat recently
after the Taiwan Stock Exchange
forced Abit to provide a full accounting of
its present fi nancial situation.
We asked an Abit spokesman about
the hoopla and he confi rmed that the
company did experience some addi-
tional scrutiny recently. “Everythingyou read [about the Taiwan Stock
Exchange] is true,” said Abit spokes-
man Harry Yen. “However, none of that
has affected our sales at this point
[and] Abit was never delisted from the
Taiwan Stock Exchange.Abit Hits a Rough Patch
Financial woes hit mobo maker
D
ual videocards aren’t just for hardcore gamers anymore. This fall
nVidia mobo vendors will begin shipping SLI-enabled motherboards
that cost less than $100. That’ll happen after the company launches
upgraded versions of its nForce4 chipset for Athlon 64/FX processors
and Intel Pentium 4/D chips that feature two full-speed x16 PCI-E slots.
Current SLI-enabled motherboards sport just two x8 slots. The nForce
SLI x16 chipset will feature a total of 40 PCI-E lanes, which is twice the
number of x16 lanes found on most consumer boards.
nVidia also plans to kick ATI while its down, by releasing a new
GeForce 7800 GT board. The GT board will feature 20 pixel-shader pipe-
lines and 256MB of DDR3 memory. With the right clock speeds, that
could make the $450 card faster than ATI’s fl agship Radeon X850, which
has only 16 pixel-shader pipelines.
The introduction of the 7800 GT will cause the 16-pipe GeForce 6800 GT
to drop to $300, and the 12-pipe 6800 will fall to $200.nVidia Takes SLI Mainstream
Also introduces new high-end dual-card chipset and a midrange
20-pipeline videocardPreview
to drop to $300, and the 12-pipe 6800 will fall to $200.Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless maga-
zines and newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey
Pine Barrens.A
s most golfers will tell you, golf isn’t a
multiplayer-friendly game. A golfer com-
petes against the course: The other golfer
is just there for companionship. Comparison of
scores is mostly used to determine who pays
for the drinks at the 19th hole. So when I heard
about a massively multiplayer golf game, my first
thought was “Koreans.”
You see, massively multiplayer has long
occupied an important niche in Korean computer
gaming culture, with millions of gamers signing
up for arcane games often played in “PC Baangs”
(literally “PC rooms”) thick with cigarette smoke
and keyboards sticky from spilled soda.
Without a role-playing hook, however, a
game is unlikely to catch on in Korea. Thus, we
get an unlikely collision of anime style, leveling-
up, inventories, and golf in Shot-Online ( http://www.
shot-online.com ). In the game, you create a
character, practice and play to gain experience,
and then level up to increase stats such as driv-
ing power and endurance.
Along the way you earn money, compete
in matches, and at some point, take on quests
to obtain special gear. The game is, like many
Korean MMO games, extremely rough around the
edges, with plenty of Korenglish (“Please look for
character who has mark of interrogation above
head!”), a pathetically small library of sound
effects encoded at approximately 8Kb/s (com-
bined), and a putting grid lifted from Tron.
Yet for all its homemade qualities (or perhaps
because of them), the game is strangely compel-
ling. Because of the deliberate hobbling of level 1
characters (a perfect hit with a 1-wood should go
further than 150 yards), the bizarre role-playing
stat-twiddling item-gathering elements become
a quest to squeeze out a little more yardage, a
little more accuracy. The “massively” part of the
MMO equation is of dubious merit, but it does
provide a leaderboard and a server full of live
golf competitors, which in turn helps increase
the amount of money you can win and thus the
goodies you can buy.
And like every good RPG, it’s all about the
goodies, whether it’s a +15 Sword of Healing or
a +2 pitching wedge.Happy Fun
Golf
GAME THEORY
THOMAS
MCDONALDquick start THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
14 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2005
nVidia’s upgraded
nForce4 chipset will
sport two full-
speed x
PCI-E lanes
instead of
the two x
lanes on current
boards.