April, 12
19999 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Available : NOW
Recently, in the PC Hardware Industry, we
became acquainted with cards like Voodoo2 and Banshee 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 and Banshee based card. If you read and believe the tech specs on the nVidia
Riva TNT Chipset then this card should be faster. Well, after testing. The TNT equals the
Banshee.
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.
2D Features
High performance 128-bit 2D/GUI/Direct Draw Acceleration
Optimized for multiple color depths including 8, 15, 16, 24 and 32bpp
Hardware motion compensation for DVD-playback
3D features
100% hardware triangle setup
TwiN Texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline
2 texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock
Single pass multi-texturing
Bump mapping
Texture modulation
Light Maps
Reflections Maps
Environmental Maps
Point sampled, bilinear, tri-linear and 8-tap anistropic filtering
Per pixel perspective correct texture alpha
24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer
Full scene anti-aliasing
Misc. Features
Flicker filtered S-Video connector, supports NTCS and PAL (standard) Integrated 250Mhz
RAMDAC supporting up to 1920*1440
AGP 2x support 
Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved
Hilbert Hagedoorn |
