Summary

The TNT is the winner of this comparsion. Although the performance of the Banshee is sometimes very close to TNT, there are too many features missing. Primary the missing multitexturing capability is big gap. In future games this will be used very often (mirror effects). So Banshee will drop very much here. In 'converntional' games, the performance is good. But the TN can outperform it in a Pentium II system.

In image quality the Banshee is behind the TNT. The dithering is too conspicuous and the stripes produce a interlace-like image. And you canīt change to 32Bit rendering to change that. The TNT can allready render in 32Bit. People who say that this feature canīt be used today are nonsense. Incoming for example runs absolutely smooth with over 40fps in 32Bit at 800x600!

A disadvantage of the TNT is the high needed CPU- (FPU-) performance. You can see that fact in the K6-2 results. But the Banshee is not faster here!
Both cards have a similar performance here. I was a bit surprised of the Quake2 performance of the TNT in the K6-2 system. It seems that the TNT canīt use its multitexturing capability very much because of the low AMD FPU performance.
But you should not forget that the Banshee uses a OpenGL Miniport driver optimized for that game! The TNT uses a full ICD OpenGL driver that must also work with other OpenGL applications!

(The TNT ran very well and without any crashes in the Tekram P5MVP-A4 mainboard with VIA Chipset. A report abaout TNT in SS7 systems will follow soon!)

A full OpenGL driver for Banshee is not available yet. It was announced by 3Dfx but there is still only a beta version available.

The main advantage of the Banshee is the support of the Glide API. Mainly older games need Glide to run well. If you want to buy a cheap K6-2 system and donīt want to renounce on Glide you should take an eye on Banshee. Glide is onboard and you donīt loose a PCI slot for a AddOn card...besides of the costs of the graphics card. In times of PCI ISDN and PCI sound cards PCI slots become rare very fast.
If you can renounce on Glide or want to use a sometimes faster Voodoo2 (Voodoo2 has a second texture unit) board, the TNT is the best choice. In a Pentium II system the TNT performs a lot better than the Banshee. This is not the fact in a K6-2 system. But the TNT has a lot of more features at the same performance than the Banshee. So TNT can take the lead even in a SuperSocket7 system.

One more fact is the lack of a stencil buffer in 3Dfx chips. The upcoming S3 Savage4, the ATI Rage 128 and the TNT already have this feature. Game developers can use it to produce realtime shadows. In future games this feature will be used! Even Voodoo3 will not have a stencil Buffer!

Bad on both cards is the bad AMD 3DNow! support!

Conclusion

As a all in one card the TNT shows superior to the 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee!

The Banshee seems to be rather old today with its lack of features. In times of S3 Savage (texture compression), ATI Rage 128 and the announced Permedia 3 (watch Lux3D) there is too much thatīs missing. New games will use features like environment mapping, bump mapping, real time shadows (stencil buffer) and high-res textures.
TNT can even do that today and with the use of multitexturing itīs twice fast (theoretical) as Banshee.

At the end of this comparsion a table with the pro and cons of the chips:

RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand