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To: jamok99 who wrote (25851)	1/19/2001 11:00:13 AM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Jamok: I'm not sure what you mean by 'screwup' with the TNT1 - I wasn't aware it was late or less than promised. Well, it was. And a lot of hardware sites (Tom's and Anand's, for example) were not very kind to the Riva TNT. What I can state as fact is that it kicked the butt of the leader's offering at that time - 3dfx's Voodoo 2 card - and spelled the beginning of the end for 3dfx I bought a TNT shortly after it was available. To say that it "kicked the butt of the" Voodoo2 is an exaggeration at best. Almost all games at the time could run using the Glide API, which gave the V2 a significant advantage. The reason the TNT was a (much) better solution for NVIDIA was that it was a single chip solution, providing full 2D and 3D on a single chip. 3dfx used 2 or 3 chips just for the 3D and then you needed to buy a 2D card on the side. 3dfx' first attempt at a combined 2D/3D card, the Banshee, used the same number of chips as the Voodoo2 - but in order to get there, they had to sacrifice one of the 3D chips (essentially one pipelines). Despite being clocked somewhat higher, the Banshee was generally slower than the Voodoo2. Like the Voodoo2, the Banshee also didn't include 32bit color support (in 3D).' To tell you the truth, I'm somewhat surprised that you have this view, given that your posts usually seem to be pretty congruent with reality and on target. I think you misunderstood what I said to some extent. I was a huge fan of NVIDIA and advised anyone who would listen to me to invest in the company. It was obvious that the 1-chip solution from NVIDIA was the way forward - despite it being late and slow (-er than promised). FYI, the specs promised for the original TNT were about what NVIDIA delivered with the TNT2. It was never entirely clear at the time, but there was some reason to believe that the fault was not really NVIDIA's, but rather "Taiwan Inc.". I believe they had been promised .25mu process technology, but when the time came, the foundries only had .35mu available. This is speculation on my part, however. As I said, the facts were never really uncovered (or disclosed, anyway). I worked for a website called FullOn3D.com (which still exists, btw), so I was paying quite a bit of attention to all these things ;). ..... If you still don't believe me... Curtesy of AnandTech's Canopus TNT review: 128 Reasons not to buy nVidia ...(snip)... The nVidia Riva TNT, a chipset whose description on paper could have been the best graphics accelerator of 1998. What you see isn't always what you get According to the first press releases directly from nVidia, the Riva TNT chipset was supposed to be manufactured using a 0.25 micron process, clocked at 125MHz, and was supposed to be powerful enough to be a Voodoo2-killer because of its 250 Million Pixels per Second fill rate. According to the Canopus Spectra 2500 sitting on the test bench AnandTech reviewed, the Riva TNT chipset was manufactured using a 0.35 micron process, is clocked at 90MHz (although there is a chance of Canopus shipping their boards at 100MHz), and has a fill rate in the range of 190MP/s. Two statements that are almost as different as night and day, and two statements which will end up ruining nVidia's credibility in the future. -fyo