NVIDIAīs RIVA 128 scaled very good with the CPU in the past. But what about the RIVA TNT?
I made a couple of benchmark runs and compared the results of a PII 333MHz with a 450MHz PII CPU. A small comment here: The results make me sober. But more of that in the article: CPU-Comparsion: PII 450MHz vs PII 333MHz.

I got info from ASUS about problems with a Bios version v2.04.15 that was available at the ASUS-TW ftp-server. The windows flasher software did not identify the 16MB SDRAM version and flashed the Bios of the 8Mb SGRAM version. Thereīs no way to flash it back with that sofware. If you have this problem you can find a fix here!

I got mail that ELSA changed the newest Erazor II drivers v0012. The newest version is about 300KB smaller. The version iīve mirrored is also the old one. Download the newer version: ELSA Erazor II drivers.

There are rumors about a Viper V550 with cooling fan. DIAMOND told me that only a PCI version is equiped with a cooling fan but the AGP version does still come with a passive cooling element - as it was the whole time.

Creative Labs showed Volumetric Shadow effects in Unreal at Comdex. This is possible through new Creative TNT-OpenGL drivers. Rumors speak that these effects will be available for all TNT cards later. Screenshots that show the use of these shadows can be found at the Unreal Website in the Comdex report.

The website Texel focuses on the emerging class of NT workstations using OpenGL graphics cards to support technical applications such as SDRC Ideas and PTC's Pro-E.
They compare a STB Velocity 4400 (TNT) with 10x expensive professional 3D card, a 3DLabs Sota with GMX Oxygen and 96MB RAM. The test show some problems of the TNT OpenGL drivers using wireframe rendering - itīs very slow. At all, the TNT card looks not too bad against the GMX. You can find the article here.

2 new demos have released. One is a new demo of Motoracer2, the other Klingon Honor Guard, based on the Unreal-Engine. Screenshots made with ELSA Erazor II.

Motoracer 2
This new demo is a bit smaller than the previous one. 2 Tracks are playable...hope itīs summer soon :-) Homepage - Download (25MB): Server 1 - Server 2

Klingon - Honor Guard
The game is based on the Unreal Engine. The upper two shots are D3D, the two bellow OpenGL. You find the card setting in the Advanced Options menu (2.point from below in Options). I think you can still improve the quality with a bit tweaking....Itīs the Unreal Engine. Homepage - Download (31MB): Server 1 - Server 2

ASUS released the final version of the v1.01 AGP-V3400 TNT drivers. The 1.01 drivers that were available earlier were pre-release drivers. In addition there are new Windows NT4 drivers: ASUS AGP-V3400 TNT drivers

ELSA released new Windows NT4 drivers for the Victory Erazor (RIVA 128): ELSA Victory Erazor drivers

New Win9X drives are available for the ELSA Erazor II (RIVA TNT) that will fix the problems with AMD-K6-2 and SS-7 Boards: ELSA Erazor II drivers

New details about nVIDIAīs Vanta at RIVAZONE. It is not the successor oh the TNT but a very own chipset, based on TNT technology. It will be found only on mainboards and is equipped with a 64Bit bus. More details about that at RZ. Besides to this nVIDIA also showed a reference design of TNT card with TV-tuner onboard at Comedex.

VoodooExtreme posted an article where game developers take word on Voodoo3. Although some of them have good word for the card most of them criticize that the card can only render in 16Bit, the 16Bit Z-Buffer, missing AGP features and the low texture resolution (Things the TNT can allready do today). You can find the whole article here.

Creative released new Win9X drivers for the Graphics Blaster TNT. The drivers primarily solve problems with Super Socket 7 boards: Creative Labs TNT

Iīve stared to make a FAQ page about NVIDIAīs RIVA TNT. You can find it on the FAQ-page or dirctly here.

You can now find offical results on at 3DMARK99 website. The reportet TNT-values are in the same area like my own results (ca. 2350 at 640x480 with 333MHz P-II CPU). How the TNT compares to other cards can be found here. Only Voodoo2 SLI can beat TNT in that benchmark.

CPU-Review made a Quake2 comparsion between a Voodoo2 card, the Matrox Mystique G200 and the Canopus Spectra 2500 (TNT). The tests ran on 233MHz P-II CPU - overclocked to 262 MHz. The results show that the TNT also competes well with slower CPUīs. Remember: Quake2 is still Voodoo2īs best branch.

NVIDIA published some first details about the RIVA TNT successor VANTA (press-release). The VANTA builds on the RIVA TNT technology an will release in 1999. There are no details about features and performance yet.
The TNT Release2 (.25 Micron), that will come early 1999 will support AGP 4x and up to 32MB Memory. Rumours speak of a chipclock of 150MHz. A bit confusing is that you can read once that VANTA is TNT Release2, some other say that itīs its successor or a low-cost version.
In addition 3Dfx released some specs about Voodoo3 -> GNN. As RIVA 3D reports, Voodoo3 will not support AGP Texturing and 32Bit rendering.

You can find the newest nVIDIA TNT reference drivers v0.41 for Win9X and NT4 on a ZDNet ftp-Server. Use on your own risk: Windows 9X - Windows NT

Der RIVA TNT replaces the Permedia2 Chipset on the ELSA graphicsboard Synergy. The Synergy II will be a AGP card, equiped with 16MB. The card is made for professional applications like 3D-Studio Max/Viz, LightWave 3D, Nichiem Mirai, ESRI ArcView, Adobe Photoshop, and others and has a special drivers package.This was announced by ELSA-USA in a pressrelease.

In order to make your windows-start a bit more pretty Iīve made two Windows startlogos. Just copy the file 'LOGO.SYS' to 'c:\' (windows root-drive)... finished. Have fun!

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