Fyodor,
I stand corrected, as I said I wasn't aware that the TNT1 was less than promised, and you documented this pretty flawlessly. It is ironic, however, that the review you quote worried that NVDA's over-promising might hurt their credibility in the future, when this is exactly what happened with 3dfx going forward. I used to own (to my disappointment) a fair chunk of 3dfx back in 1998 or 99, and finally dumped it when it became clear that Greg
Ballard, the CEO, was purposively lying about shipping dates and promised performance, and continued talking about 3dfx's "technological lead" long after they clearly lost it. I always tend to get nervous when a company spokesperson seems to have a clear disconnect with reality ;-) In any case, one other basis of my experience, albeit subjective, is that, until recently, I ran a TNT1 and a Voodoo2 in my machine concurrently, and pretty consistently felt the TNT looked and performed better. Your points about the usefulness of Glide are well taken, as at the time a number of important games would only run (or run well) under glide, (hence my use of 2 cards in one machine) and I applaud your documentation of your viewpoint. I'd also reinforce the idea that the voodoo2's lack of features such as 32 bit color, and such features as 12 mb vs. the 16 mb for the TNT1 were the first signs that 3dfx was behind the curve, and ultimately ended in their demise. |
