Image Quality

The image quality of the Banshee in Direct 3D is a lot below the quality the TNT produces. The dithering the cards need to produce in 16Bit color depth is more badly solved by the Banshee than the dithering the TNT does. In the following you can see two sections of a 1024x768 Tirtanium screenshots resized to 200%.

3Dfx Banshee	nVidiaRIVA TNT

The Banshee is using a simple pattern for dithering. In games dithering is used for alpha blending operations for example(half transparent objects or smoke). You can recognize the dithering of the Banshee even in a running game!
The dithering algorithm of the TNT is a lot better here. You canīt recognize it as soon as the 3Dfx pattern.

The image quality of the Banshee in OpenGL is a matter of taste. Objects are drawn very 'soft' and sometimes everythings seems to be a bit unsharp. The TNT produces a very sharp image with hard object-borders. Itīs dependent on your taste and on the scene you look at to decide which is the best solution.

But a fact thatīs disturbing the quality of the Banshee in Glide are the stripes in the rendered image. You can recognize them best in lower resolutions:

3Dfx Banshee	nVidiaRIVA TNT
Both images show a section of a Quake2 640x480 screenshot, resized to 200% (Not resampled)

Besides of ansiotropic filtering and environment mapping the Banshee canīt render in 32Bit. Here the cards no longer need dithering because there are enough colors available:

16 Bit (200%)	32 Bit (200%)
Both shots nVidia RIVA TNT

A good demonstration of 32Bit/16Bit rendering can be found at Kick Engine. This modified demo produces a split screen: on the left is a 32Bit rendering | on the right is a 16Bit rendering. You can see stripes and shadows running through the image in moving sequences at 16Bit. (Download 5MB)

In addition the Banshee (as the upcoming Voodoo3) can only use textures of a maximum size of 256x256 pixels. Unreal for example does sometimes use textures of a higher resolution. But currently I must say that this game runs better (faster) with Glide than with TNT in Direct 3D. But after the announcements of EPIC this situation seems to change soon. In image quality the TNT is even better today:

3Dfx Banshee	nVidiaRIVA TNT
You can see the dithering of the Banshee in these Unreal screenshots. You can also recognize the stripes in the Banshee shot, although the JPG graphics format wipes them away a bit.