Neowin.net

Woohoo! New patches are goooood. ;) I'm a patch nut and I'm willing to bet a lot of you Neowinians are too! I noticed this on my morning "before-work" cruise around the net...

Neverwinter Nights v1.21 is out! Get the patch by using the update feature or download it directly from BioWare. Here are the fixes in this patch:

• Items located in Creature Inventory slots will now be DELETED when validating a Player through ELC and ILR. Custom modules that use Creature Inventory slots to assign Sub Race abilities will have to re-add items on joining the custom module.
  
• Item Costs will now be properly calculated for Plot items in ELC checks. - Sped up character listing coming from a Dedicated Server.
  
• Fixed an issue with saving at inopportune times resulting in breaking save games.
  
• Fixed some item "ghosting" issues.
  
• Fixed the DM Faction bug, where possesing a creature results in that creature's friendly faction going hostile.
  
• 2DA files are now being loaded in the proper order in Hak Paks.
  
• General bug fixes.
  

News source: PlanetNeverwinter

The 3D Prophet 9000 and 9000 Pro series architecture is based on 4 texturing pipelines - pumping texturesing into triangles animated by a hardware Vertex Shader - and achieves per pixel programmable effects through a hardware Pixel Shader. This architecture combines:

• the power of a quad-pipeline rendering engine,
• a state-of-the-art hardware Vertex Shader to handle on-board the massive geometric complexity of new games,
• a Pixel Shader to add per pixel shadows as that help create life-like textures and to create the most realistic finest water and lighting effects on the smallest of objects, such as fur, hair, or blades of grass
• a solid video playback hardware, which decodes MPEG2 for DVD, de-interlaces video for display on a TV and enhances online video playback.

The 3D Prophet 9000 series means faster games, and finer realistic texturing effects, thanks to its large texturing engine and its’ the hardware acceleration of Microsoft DirectX 8 API hardware acceleration.
The 3D Prophet 9700 is the reference strongest 3D accelerator for the most demanding gamers, adding in hardware the processing of new APIs to enhance games. Radeon™ 9700 architecture gathers on the board has enough 3D processing power to turn a workstation green with envy:

• t3D Prophet 9700 has a huge large rendering engine of 8 pipelines, with 16 textures maps per pass, and fuelled by a 256-bit DDR RAM interface.
• Microsoft DirectX 9 hardware acceleration is processed by 8 Pixel Shader engines and 4 Vertex Shader engines.
Catalyst drivers offer the user an interface for controlling the 3D features and provide regular updates for the gamers.
Availability

3D Prophet 9000 series will be available in August.

3D Prophet 9700 will be available in September.