azuanlabs
04-12-1999, 04:21 AM
i am a proud owner of Riva TnT...
recently i read on article on the upcoming
Riva TnT2...sure it's better & faster with
32MB SDRAM!...though i was hoping for
SGRAM...
compare with Voodoo3, Riva truely outperforms
3dfx technology...Voodoo3 is slightly better
than its previous Voodoo2.
i can see now single 2D/3D card has become
trend in current market...anyway on 17th
April, Voodoo3 will be launch in Malaysia..
i know it's quite late compared to other countries. feel free to send your feedback..
& please visit my website...you'll love it.
chad174
04-12-1999, 10:50 PM
yeah i won a riva tnt too, and the tnt2 ultra with its 32 megs and 183 mhz bus speed is gonna and does waste the v3 3500 or possibly v3 4000 so bad...
Leo V
04-13-1999, 12:13 AM
You guys are such fanatics! In your zeal for supporting nVidia you seem to completely ignore objectivity and especially the latest facts about Voodoo3/TNT2:
http://agn3d.com/html/agn3d-news.cfm?date=4/11/1999#10059
As you can see, the actual shipping Voodoo3 3000 (mid-range) overclocked a little is much faster than a TNT2 ULTRA, aka the 183MHz TNT2, the top-of-the-line TNT2. Voodoo3, BTW, is running at a lower clock speed; had they used a real V3 3500 @ 183Mhz it would be faster still. And as it turns out, TNT2 takes much bigger performance losses in 32-bit color than does, say, ATI Rage128. A 25% framerate loss is very significant in gameplay.
Finally, regarding the image quality, many recent comparisons blatantly ignored the fact that V3 applies a filter to the finished frame buffer before it goes out to the monitor; when 3dfx released HyperSnap, a screenshot-grabbing utility that emulates the filtering (thus resembling actual monitor output), it turns out that its 22-bit color is quite up to par with TNT2's true color, and better than TNT2's 16-bit color. Here is the link:
http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/22bitfu2/
BTW other places are starting to confirm this also. They still have a bug in the drivers where the filtering is disabled by default (thus initially giving worse image quality that it should be).
Both TNT2 and Voodoo3 are great products and have their advantages and disadvantages -- TNT2 has AGP texturing, true color would help with alpha blending/multipass texturing, it doesn't have the 256x256 texture bottleneck, and it allows 32MB of memory. But the V3 is very cheap (esp. V3 2000 for $105 which overclocks to 166MHz and is already faster than TNT2), and has Glide (which is still important for stuff like the N64 emulator or Unreal-based games like Duke Nukem 4ever). So we have to present both sides of the argument and not just go crying "Riva, Riva" or "3dfx 3dfx". 3dfx may have taken a lot of criticism (some of it deserved) but it turns out that Voodoo3 is actually quite a solid competitor.
[This message has been edited by Leo V (edited 04-12-99).]
[This message has been edited by Leo V (edited 04-12-99).]