Magic TNT
(nVIDIA Riva TNT) from Skywell Technologies
Monday - January 18, 1998 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Asus P2B Motherboard
Pentium II 350Mhz 100Mhz Bus
128Mb PC 100 SDRam
Awe-32 Creative Sound Blaster
Software used
Windows 98
DirectX 6.x
Latest nVIDIA software drivers
General
VSYNC is Synced to Monitors
refresh rate
The beginning
Finally, the day of truth has
come, today we will be reviewing the mighty nVIDIA's TNT based card. This card is
manufactured by Skywell-technology and has been released after their succes series of
voodoo based cards. The name ' Magic TNT'.
Skywell is (as almost any hardware
manufacturer) based in Taiwan. They don't rank high in the top with names as Creative and
Diamond, so therefor you do not have to expect nifty game-bundles, juiced up drivers and
huge technical changes, no what they do bring you is a high-quality reference based card
for a very good price.
I have been following skywell the
past year and a half and this formula is working very well for them. I see them grow in
every month that passes.
Recently, in the PC Hardware
Industry, we became acquainted with cards like Voodoo2 that hit the gaming industry like a
storm. If you remember the comparison between almost any two Voodoo2 accelerators, it
usually came down to a comparison of software bundles or drivers. And framerates hardly
made a difference.
Now we finally have a real
competitor to the Voodoo2 based card. If you read and believe the tech specs on the nVidia
Riva TNT Chipset then this card should be faster. (don't you love it when i do some
benchmarking-lovin' for you?).
What the TNT does bring to the
table is resonably impressive considering that in relative comparison, their last 2D/3D
chipset (Riva 128) was a total dissaster in terms of overall quality. The TNT
chipset supports 3D, Z-Buffered, resolutions of up to 1600 x 1200 and does support 32-bit
rendering giving it a slight visual advantage over 3Dfx's Voodoo2 chipset. (and soon also
the Voodoo3 chipset, what is 3Dfx thinking ?!)The image quality on the TNT is vastly
superior to that of the original Riva 128, but better yet, it is virtually on par with
that of the Matrox G200. The TNT's image quality can be considered to be virtually
on-par with that of the G200.
The 128-bit graphics engine of the
Riva TNT chipset is intended to be a direct competitor to the best of the best when it
comes to 3D accelerators, bringing a 250MHz RAMDAC for crisp 2D output keeps the TNT on
top of 3Dfx's Voodoo2 making the chipset a true high-end
2D/3D combination solution. Featuring dual internal
texture pipelines, the TNT has been claimed to be able to process multi-textured objects
in a single pass, picking up where 3Dfx left off, nVidia managed to accomplish this using
a single chip instead of using the two separate texelfx processors the Voodoo2 uses.
TNT is looking at a shared 1st place with Voodoo2.
And now after 3Dfx's merger nVIDIA
will become/is a true competitor in the hard and fast accelerator market.
Bundled Software
Included on the Driver CD are, the
latest reference drivers, Powerstrip (monitor utility), DirectX 6.x, PowerDVD and a demo
from nVIDIA.
Installation
As always, skywell gives us a
resonably simple installaion proces based upon the windows installer. The plug and pray
sequence starts up, a PCI-Device has been found, you direct windows towards the drivers on
the CD and voilla, after a reset your card has been fully installed. (Don't forget
to install the DirectX Drivers my friends. Without some Bill-lovin' gameplay won't work
anymore these days.
User's guide
The user guide is small, it gives
you the basics in 5 pages. Pictures are included to support the installation proces. both
Win 9x and NT installation are being supported.
Benchmark results
To spice this review up a bit i've
run extensive benchmark comparisations with Voodoo2 and banshee based cards. Since this is
the mayor issue for you as a custumor to buy a product.
3DMark '99
Endresult.- As you can see the Magic TNT is as fast as the magic Twinpower banshee.
However it is no match to the Gigabyte GA-630 Banshee (that card still makes me float ...)
3DMark '99 Polygonic Fillrate
(Multitexturing) - Compared to a standard Banshee card the TNT is about 25% faster. A good
score !
3DMark '99 Racing
game Simulation - As you can see in this Benchmark the result are about 5 Frames per
Second slower then a standard Banshee.
3DMark '99 Unreal Simulation - The
TNT card runs, well .. very well in Quake like games. The results in this section are
faster then a standard banshee and almost as good as the GA-630.
Above results are all kinds of
card tested with the Forsaken Bootmark, Final Reality 1.1, X Bootmark Wizmark, and 3D Mark
'99
The Magic TNT comes out very well
while benchmarking, sure its a bit slower sometimes in certain conditions, but in general
it is a very good competitor to the normal reference based Banshee card (even slightly
faster). However, if you compare design specs from a TNT with a Banshee, then you'd say
that a TNT should be faster a lot. Well, rember kids, all these cards are running at its
default Clockspeed. The TNT can be overclocked slightly faster then Banshee simply because
it is not running that hot. So theoreticly the TNT can be faster then a Banshee.
Recommendations &
conclusion
The Magic TNT is a very strong and
solid product. It is at the same level as Banshee (perhaps even a tidbit better due to
32bit gaming). When overclocked this card could even run faster then Banshee since it does
not become that hot.
Disadvantage - it does not support
Glide.
Advantage - It does support OpenGl a whole offalot better
then the banshee does. Also 32Bit gameing is something that Voodoo cards still lack
in.
The card has a very clear
signal-ouput and all looks crips and clear.
The price at this time January
'99, is 130$ Wich practicly is the cheapest TNT card arround.
Rating : an 8 (out of 10
points). Good customer support, high-quality video card, no game pack, no tv-out, but
otherwise a great product!
Contact
You can visit and contact the lads
of Skywell here:
English/Chinese: skywell.com.tw
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