Comparsion: 3Dfx Banshee vs nVidia RIVA TNT

Many discussions and my own curiosity was the motive to check out: Where is NVIDIA RIVA TNT compared to 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee? How about performance and image quality?

To get an answer to this I tested the ASUS AGP-V3200 Banshee with 16MB SGRAM and confronted the card with a ASUS AGP-V3400 TNT with 16MB SDRAM.

I´ve used a 450MHz Pentium II system with 128MB RAM on a ASUS P2-B mainboard and on a AMD K6-2 System runnning at 350MHz in a Tekram 5PMVP-A4 Super Socket 7 mainboard to test the cards. A detailed review of the V3400 TNT from November 98 can be found here.
I used the most actual drivers for all tests (not Beta).

3Dfx Voodoo Banshee

The 3Dfx Banshee is the successor of the 3Dfx Voodoo Rush. This chip was not very successful in the past. It also was no all in one solution: it had a special 3D part and a 2D part (Alliance Chip). Like TNT, the Banshee is a 2D/3D combination - the first from 3Dfx. The 2D core is a 3Dfx own development. The 3D core is based on the Voodoo2 chip, but 3Dfx dropped the second texture unit of the Voodoo2. Therefor the card is running at a higher clockspeed and uses faster SDRAM/SGRAM memory chips than Voodoo2 (EDO-RAM). So the Banshee is faster as Voodoo2, if there is no work for a second texture unit.
Besides of the positiv aspects of the Voodoo2 inheritance there are also the missing features that follow with this: Like Voodoo2 the Banshee has the same 256x256 pixel limit, only 16Bit Z-Buffer, no 32Bit rendering. A SLI mode that can be used on Voodoo2 boards is not possible with Banshee cards.

There´s also a couple of 3D features missing in comparsion to actual 3D Chipsets (watch table below). Banshee supports only AGP 1x and does not support AGP features. The cards are not capable to use System Memory to swap textures.

But in contrast to Voodoo2, Banshee is not limited to fullscreen mode. Banshee can accelerate games and applications in window-mode.
As TNT, the Banshee is manufactured in 0.35 micron. So you need a higher voltage to run the chip and this results in more heat. The consequence is the use of a fan (ASUS/Diamond) or a hetasink at minimum (ELSA/Guillemot/STB/Creative).

(Rumors speak that TNT and Banshee are manufactured in the same factory and that this is the reason why both chips have the same 0.35/0.25 problems, caused by production problems. But that rumor is not confirmed yet :-))

Chipfeatures

The table below shows the features of TNT and Banshee/Voodoo2. The table was taken from Lux3D (ThanX Jo!)

See more Chipsets and details at Lux3D!