April, 12 19999 - Hilbert Hagedoorn

The fight with 3Dfx is a long and hard one. The 3Dfx had just  announced the Voodoo 3 chipset when we were stunned by the announcement of nVIDIA's TNT 2 chipset. Has the king of 3D chips been decrowned ? Well, hard to say. Seeing is believing. But nVIDIA is getting close. At least its obvious that nVIDIA is a very  strong competitor for todays 3D market.

The new TNT 2 accelerator will be available in several formats in several clockspeeds. (like voodoo 3 2000/3000/3500).

It has been confirmed at this time that the following versions will become available. the 125 MHz version, the 150 MHz version and last, but certainly not the most least, the 175 MHz version which will be capable of processing 350 Mtexels a second. (to help you a little bit out of the tech jargon, a single Voodoo2 card does 180Mtexels/s).

The 125 Mhz version is to be targeted at the low-end market. Good solid value for a low price. Ofcourse for the hardcore gamer who doesn't need to look at his budget the 175 MHz will be the obvious choice.

The Riva TNT 2 will chip in 16Mb and 32Mb RAM version. Suspected is that the 125Mhz (low cost) will be equiped with 16Mb (150MHz) and the higher version with 32Mb RAM (183/200 MHz).

Each manufacturer is free to choose the product aimed at its target area.

I expect that the 175 MHz version will be the 'standard' TNT 2 card to buy within a flash. The name for this card is the 'Ultra' TNT 2. Clocked at 175 MHz with lighting speeds of 350Mtexels/s polygonic fillrate. This card will probably beat Voodoo 3 2000/3000 in terms of speed. (Voodoo 3500 i'm not to sure about) . Another plus is that this card can render in 32Bit (Voodoo3 does 16Bit)

2D Features
High performance 128-bit 2D/GUI/Direct Draw Acceleration
Optimized for multiple color depths including 8, 15, 16, 24 and 32bpp
Improved 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
Procedural textures
Backend blend
32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha
Point sampled, bilinear, tri-linear and 8-tap anistropic filtering
Per pixel perspective correct texture alpha
24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer
8-bit stencil buffer
Full scene anti-aliasing

Misc. Features
Digital Flat Panel support (connector IS standard)
Flicker filtered S-Video connector, supports NTCS and PAL (standard)
300Mhz RAMDAC supporting up to 2048*1536
AGP 2x and 4x support

Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved Hilbert Hagedoorn