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Technology Stocks : 3DFX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chip Anderson who wrote (3640)	6/1/1998 10:17:00 PM
From: larry oertel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Riva Zone's peak at the TNT . This is fan page stuff so take it a grain of salt. >The RIVA TNT was our first destination at E3. We wanted to see what NVIDIA's new graphics chip could do, even in its early stages. We watched Mark Daly from NVIDIA run the demos on the P2 400 system on a preproduction TNT that was running around 50-60% of its full speed. We watched Gremlin's Motorhead zip by at very smooth framerates at 1600x1200 resolution. The colors were very vibrant, there was fogging that looked very good. There was no banding, dithering, popping or cracking visible in any of the demos shown. The next demo shown was the OpenGL standby, Quake 2. It was cranked to the maximum, 1600x1200 and was smooth. There was absolutely no cracking at all, and the textures were interestingly a bit "under detailed" when you got right up on top of the wall or a switch. It seems that ID designed Q2 textures for a lower resolution. Even in the early ICD drivers the board was using, and the underclocked TNT, it ripped through Quake 2 with ease. We were shown a few custom-made demos that were meant to show off the technology of the RIVA series of chips. One had a duck swimming in a pond, bubbles floated above the duck and would occasionally break on the water, creating ripples that would collide with the wake from the swimming duck. The duck, bubbles and lights were reflected in the water, very cool stuff. It showed some of the realistic effects that multitexture provides and how much more realistic games can look on the RIVA TNT. The next demo that amazed us was a partially finished demo that showed a zoom from above a city, down to a pool on top of a building, to a lion's head statue that was by the pool, to a bee on the nose of the lion. It was very cool, not very polished, but it really showed off the accuracy of the Z-buffer. Mark told us that many of the demos were being updated to make use of all the extra power and cool featues that TNT will support. We should have some screenshots from those demos when they are completed. The most impressive demo of all IMO was a spinning array of points that would twinkle, then lines between the points were drawn, giving the vertices of the polygons. The polygons were then flat shaded, gouraud shaded, and then textured with marble, creating the NVIDIA logo. The best part was when the reflection map was applied, the reflection of the floor and facing surfaces on the logo was extremely fluid. Turning on the colored lighting produced an added effect. The RIVA TNT was easily the most impressive hardware that I saw at E3. We took time to check out the S3, Matrox and PowerVR booths to see their upcoming chips. The irony of it all was that NVIDIA's simple cubicle with a single TNT system blew away all the flashy show of the other companies. Even with the early silicon, couple week old drivers and unoptimized demos, the TNT proved to be everything it has been hyped to be. I can't imagine seeing the full power of the TNT < If true, Glide may not be the deciding factor for a 3D card puchase in the near future. rivazone.com