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To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (7966)	10/7/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Respond to of 16960

Some of the places I take issue with Tom: With Intel's Pentium II at 400 MHz and TNT you can play Quake 2 just fine at 1152x864, a resolution that is not achievable on any current 3Dfx product. It's pretty pointless to look at the results at 640x480 or 800x600 in my eyes. Why running at those low resolutions if it runs perfectly at higher resolutions? 1. Banshee can run Q2 at that resolution. 2. 800x600 is _the_ resolution for the majority of gamers today 3. Higher resolutions are not necessarily better on small monitors 4. The chart shows TNT can do a framerates of 32/31/27 at 1152x864. At those framerates, there will be jerkiness. In my experience, 45+ fps is needed for smooth Quakeing. There is not much to say about the results. Voodoo2 is running Q2 just fine with all CPUs at all offered resolutions. One Voodoo2 card can't do more than 800x600 and even two Voodoo2 cards can't offer more than 1024x768 resolution however This is the big disadvantage of Voodoo2, the ‘pixel per dollar' ratio is not very good. This is ALL Tom says about the V2 results! Even though the charts show V2 SLI framerates that _CRUSH_ TNT's at 1024x768. If you stop to compare those numbers you'll see 75/62/43 for V2 SLI vs. 40/38/32 for TNT (P2 400Mhz). All Tom sees is the resolution increase. BTW, I'd love to see a chart of the pixel per dollar ratio over time. To be continued...

To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (7966)	10/7/1998 3:00:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Respond to of 16960

Issues with Tom (continued) You can see that Quake 2 with a Pentium II 400 and Banshee at 1024x768 is already too slow for reliable online game play, but with some tweaking you could get it running properly. 1. Huh? The Banshee 1024x768 scores are 28/27/21. Not _that_ much slower than the TNT scores for 1152x864 (32/31/27). Seems like an awful narrow range between "great performance" and "too slow to be reliable". 2. Many Quakers deliberately limit their on-line framerate to 30fps to improve modem performance. Why would 28fps be unreliable? Take in consideration that the two Voodoo2 boards cost you at least double the money that TNT costs and then you still need a 2D card to go with Voodoo2. Take into consideration that your audience already owns 1 Voodoo2 card! Take into consideration that a large monitor is needed to appreciate resolutions higher than 1024x768. Take into consideration that Voodoo2 prices are dropping. Take into consideration that everyone already HAS a 2D card. In my eyes TNT already won the race as the best Quake 2 graphics card. Screen resolution plus image quality made me fall in love with it. I can't find any fault with this statement. Too bad lots of people think that Tom is an _objective_ hardware reviewer. (continued...)

To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (7966)	10/7/1998 3:47:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16960

More Issues with Tom: Referring to Unreal: Banshee does for some strange reason only run with patch 209, the original release wouldn't work with it, neither patch 216 or 217. This is the second place where my Banshee experience directly contradicts Tom's. I had zero problems running Unreal's 217 patch on my Raven. TNT has quite a problem with Unreal right now still. Decent game play is possible at 640x480 and that's it. Any higher resolution makes Unreal run that sluggish, that it's really no fun to play. The problem here is that the framerates that Tom reports as "sluggish" include 29fps (800x600 400Mhz) which is perfectly acceptable for Quake2 at the highest resolution. Where's the cut off point Tom? You will see that the 3Dfx products don't look as shiny when playing in the same ballpark as TNT, which is Direct3D. "Shiny"? Voodoo2 is one year older than TNT. What is this statement doing in an objective review of hardware? (continued... Tom's server is bogged now)

To: Michael G. Potter who wrote (7966)	10/7/1998 4:23:00 PM
From: Chip Anderson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16960

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