More Tom rebuttal:
Referring to the "Expendable" benchmarks:
The 3Dfx products have hardly got any advantage over TNT under Direct3D as long as the game is CPU intensive.
This is the dumbest statement I've ever seen Tom write. First off, CPU intensive games, by definition, don't test video cards very well. Secondly, I'd rewrite the statement like this: "Voodoo2 beats TNT under both Glide and D3D, especially when the game is CPU intensive." ;-)
In some cases TNT is even faster than the much more expensive double Voodoo2 configuration. Voodoo2 SLI does still have a slight edge over TNT at high resolutions, but this can hardly justify the price difference between the two.
This statement comes in the summary of benchmark results for the "Expendable" demo, yet Tom chooses to focus on the price issue. BTW, in this benchmark, TNT only wins on slower, non-Intel computers.
Referring to the "Incoming" benchmarks:
It's surprising to see that Banshee isn't faster than TNT, although it has the higher fill rate.
Chip: "It's surprising to see that Banshee is almost as fast as the TNT, despite all the hype to the contrary."
Incoming doesn't use multi-texturing, so that the second texture unit is completely unimportant in this game, making single Voodoo2 fall behind.
Only Quake2 uses multi-texturing so the first part of this statement applies to most of his other benchmarks too. The second part implies that there is a penalty for having two texture units - wrong!
A game that does not require quite as much CPU power is still able to give the double Voodoo2/SLI configuration an advantage over TNT. However, we don't benefit from framerates over 30 fps whilst we do benefit from higher resolutions. It doesn't help that Voodoo2 can reach astronomical frame rates at 1024x768, if it cannot produce any higher resolutions.
AGAIN, Tom's chooses to ignore his benchmark results in favor of resolution, justifying it with the totally incorrect assumption that framerates above 30fps are unimportant. He is so wrong. This is probably the worst instance of bias in his report.
From the Overall Summary:
...in the long run TNT will easily win. The clear advantages
+ price,
+ higher screen resolutions,
+ image quality significantly better,
+ AGP 2x texturing,
are more important than huge frame rates of Voodoo2 SLI in some applications.
Grrr... So in the final analysis, Tom chooses to ignore his benchmark results and hide behind price and a mildly higher resolution that provides barely acceptable framerates. He provides no screen shots, so the image quality advantage is a subjective statement. Finally, HE NEVER MENTIONS AGP 2x TEXTURING AT ALL! (And if he did, you know I'd refer to Got2MuchTime's article refuting that capability!).
Sadly, I agree that this review is "normal" for Tom. The problem is that everyone considers him an objective hardware reviewer, which his most definately is not. The charts are awesome, but the commentary and conclusions are very subjective and IMNSHO, biased.
Chip "Phewww" Anderson |
