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

To: Andrew Fenic who wrote (4892)	6/30/1998 9:06:00 AM
From: Tae Spam Kim	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

Here's a TNT preview by one of the guys at Voodoo Extreme. Now let's begin to realize, TNT will NOT be the big threat to Voodoo2 especially at these prices. And with Banshee kicking butt over Intel740, MatroxG200, and Savage3d at $150, man oh man, 3dfx has it covered. Tae Kim oursquare.com There is a lot of talk about supposed Voodoo2 killers, and with my little hands on with nVidia's TNT (STB board) I can see that we're still a bit away from an actual Voodoo2 _KILLER_. After seeing nearly every card/chip at one convention or another, they are just starting to match the Voodoo2s performance -- considering the Voodoo2 has been out for quite some time these chips should easily surpass the performance -- this has yet to happen. Contrary to popular belief the TNT is _NOT_ (IMO) a Voodoo2 "killer". When I think of a killer, I think of something that _completely_ kicks the competitors' ass. The TNT (in the state that I saw it) did not completely kill the Voodoo2. STB claims that what I witnessed was the TNT running at about 80% of what it will capable of when it ships in late August -- other sites have posted that the Riva boards (currently) are only running at about 50% of their total capacity, but this could be due to the fact that I saw a more recent product. Another thing that was very interesting is, according to STB, the TNT will _NOT_ be nearly as fast as two Voodoo2s in SLI. This has been a very popular rumor floating around...for extreme power users, it looks like dual Voodoo2s will still be the way to go. Even taking the Banshee into consideration, I think the TNT will probably be the best performer of all the upcoming 2D/3D combo cards (but depending on what the final street price is on the Banshee and the TNT, my opinion on this could easily be altered). My biggest bitch about the Riva 128 is the crappy visual quality; fortunately nVidia did fix this aspect in their newest incarnation. The TNT now supports per pixel mip-mapping -- visually this thing is right up there with the i740 (which wasn't a speed demon but had the goods in the visuals department). No more complaints about the visuals, this thing looks golden! Another interesting tidbit is that the silicon/drivers that I was shown was running at a core clock of 100MHz with a memory clock of 125MHz. STB anticipates that there is a LOT of headroom left in the TNT, possibly with an increased core clock of 150MHz possible and a memory clock of 200MHz. Although there was no way to really test this, STB claims that the 2D on the TNT will be as fast as the Banshee -- since 3Dfx is pimping their 2D on the Banshee like nobody's bidniss, I would like to see some actual numbers on this. Unfortunately, because of the monitor, we could not get the card to run at 1280x1024 (once again, this was a limitation of the monitor). At 1024x768 the TNT was noticeably slower than two Voodoo2s, but very playable running Quake2 (easily over 30FPS). Incoming at the same resolution was absolutely gorgeous, and ran smooth as hell, never missing a beat. On average, my GUESS (as I did not see any numbers, and I wasn't allowed to benchmark) is that the TNT is currently around 10% faster than a SINGLE Voodoo2. With the card running at 80% of its capacity this obviously will go up, but nowhere near the speed of two Voodoo2s. Btw - they had the TNT running on a P2 400MHz with 64MB of ram. I was very impressed, overall, with the TNT (as I have been in the past, at shows and such) and think that nVidia has what will probably be the best 2D/3D combo card and will easily kick the PVRSG, G200 and Savage 3D's goods right in the jimmy (in overall performance). The initial release of the STB board should be loaded with 16MB of ram with the possibility of an 8MB board as well as _possibly_ a PCI board (although it is doubtful). With an initial suggested retail price of $299, my guess is that we should see these bad-boys hit the street at around $270.00, or even less with rebates and such. Of course this will probably drop drastically shortly after its release.