NVIDIA rocks the Boat with TNT2
The New Features Of TNT2
So what has Nvidia done? TNT2 is indeed the brother of TNT, shrunk down to .25 micron, but several other enhancements put TNT2 significantly apart from TNT. First of all, the rendering pipelines were improved, making the TNT2 some 10 - 17% faster than TNT at the same clock speed as shown in the graph below. The next difference is of course TNT2's ability to run at much higher clock speeds than TNT could, 175 MHz is so far the highest that I have seen, which is almost double the 90 MHz default clock speed of TNT. TNT2 supports AGP 4x, but that's not too important right now since Intel's Camino chipset with AGP 4x-support won't be out until mid 1999. TNT2 comes with a 300 MHz RAMDAC, offering resolutions of up to 2048x1536 at 60 Hz, it can display 1920x1200 at 32 bit color with a 85 Hz refresh rate. The frame buffer size of TNT2 will be 32 MB, double the amount of TNT or Voodoo3 and TNT2 will also have a digital flat panel interface. Those features make TNT2 a much more interesting product than I would have thought a few months ago and a much scarier product for 3Dfx than they would have anticipated.
For this comparison I ran TNT2 as well as TNT with the 0170 driver and 'underclocked' TNT2 down to the same clock frequencies as TNT, which are 90 MHz chip clock and 110 MHz memory clock. The improvement over TNT is 17% in Quake2 Crusher and 10% in Shogo Tomsdemo.
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