Conclusion

You can have a lot fun using a NVIDIA RIVA TNT2.... if you have a CPU >= intel Pentium II / Celeron 400MHz. The gain you get with a TNT2 is too small if you have a slower CPU. In special the AMD K6-2 350MHz is a disappointment here. Unreal is only a slide show with that CPU. But TNT2 rushes on a Celeron 300A@450 or a Pentium II 450MHz in nearly all games. The TNT2 is playing in another league compared to the TNT on such a system....This rocks!

TNT2 ULTRA or TNT2 !?!

The strength of the TNT2 ULTRA is the better performance in 32Bit. You can see the ULTRA perform a lot better than the normal clocked TNT2 at 1024x768-32. There is no big difference in 16Bit resolutions up to 1024x768. The fillrate of the TNT2 is high enough or letīs say it this way: my 450MHz PII CPU canīt get it to the limit. You can see an increase at GLQuake but is it really important if you have 106fps or 126fps...?
If you want to play in higher resolutions than 1024x768 you should take a TNT2 ULTRA cards. But 1280x1024 doesīnt look much better than 1024x768 im my opinion.

A TNT2 ULTRA is for those who always want the max performance. All others can also get happy with a normal TNT2.

You should think a bit different if you have a Pentium III or plan to buy one. The future will show if game developers will use intels Streaming SIMD technology. The FPU power of the CPU is increasing dramatic if it is used. Owners of a Pentium III should take a TNT2 ULTRA because the graphic card is the bottleneck with such a high CPU power.

Owners of a AMD K6-2 350Mhz should not buy a new graphic card. They can get way better results when they update their system CPU. A K6-2 350 even canīt get a TNT to its limit. A hope is the announced support of 3DNow! in future NVIDIA drivers. CPU tests in 3DMark99 MAX show that a K6-2 350 can reach the FPU performance of a PII 450 using 3DNow!. But another problem is that games must support 3DNow!. Driver support is only one thing... I donīt own a K6-III so I canīt tell you anything about TNT2 with this CPU.

Features

There is a lack of some features in the newest NVIDIA chip compared to its competitors: NVIDIA does not support S3TC (texture compression) like S3 Savage4 (ATi announced support for S3TC) or Environmental Bump Mapping like the Matrox G400. There is only small support for these features in games yet. The lack of S3TC is not very important at the moment. The TNT2 can handle 2048x2048 textures and has up to 32MB memory. So you can also use high detail textures on a TNT2. The Savage4 can handle more than 64MB textures in compressed format but the performance of the Savage4 is lower than the TNT2 so the chip must be able to handle the amount of textures. Also the large amount of 3Dfx cards on the market that do only support 256x256 is a reason why games will not use too large textures.
Environmental Bump Mapping is a nice feature. The game Expendable is the first game thatīs using this technology. Weīll have to wait and see if there is more support in future games or if you get a performance decrease by using it. But it would really be nice if NVIDIA would support these techniques. Maybe in future drivers by software...!?

A fact I have to mention here is the great OpenGL ICD NVIDIA offers for Win9x and Windows NT4. This allows the use of professional 3D software. Another point that canīt be found everywhere are the video in and out capabilities made possible by the CCIR-656 Video Capture and Bidirectional capture port. ASUS and ELSA offer TNT2 cards with Video-In and Out features.

DVD: I donīt think that hardware DVD support is still needed today. The chip is made for CPUīs higher than 400MHz and you can decode DVD by software without problems on a 300Mhz CPU. Another point is that you can easily update a sofware but what happens if you have a bug in HW...?

open questions? Opinions? ---> Discussion Board

I hope this article helped you to get an overview about TNT2, its performance and its features!

RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand