NVIDIA vs. 3Dfx - TNT vs. the Voodoos

Incoming Benchmark Results

Incoming is a well-known DirectX 5 game with a lot of fancy graphical features. It's also not exactly independent from the CPU performance, but still a lot less hungry than Expendable. You will see that Incoming allows the graphic chip to be the delimiter of the frame rate, at least when using a fast CPU at high resolutions.

At 640x480 it's obviously not the fill rate that limits the frame rate, because otherwise TNT wouldn't be as fast as Voodoo2 SLI. It's still interesting however, that TNT is the fastest 3D chip for the K6-2 in this comparison.

The story looks different at 1024x768. The huge fill rate of Voodoo2 SLI is blowing the competitors away. TNT is obviously at it's fill rate limit, regardless which CPU is used. The K6-2 is even faster than the Celeron 300 A, which shows that the TNT driver must have some 3Dnow! optimization. It's surprising to see that Banshee isn't faster than TNT, although it has the higher fill rate.

The much more important lowest frame rate shows an edge of TNT at 640x480. It also shows that Banshee is a fair amount faster than a single Voodoo2 card. Incoming doesn't use multi-texturing, so that the second texture unit is completely unimportant in this game, making single Voodoo2 fall behind.

Again Voodoo2 in SLI is by far the most powerful 3D chip at 1024x768 in a game that doesn't push the CPU too hard. As already mentioned, it's a pure fill rate issue here and Voodoo2's brute force makes it win this comparison.

  • Pure nostalgia. Tom's Hardware is awesome for keeping 14 year old articles around, I read the whole thing and it brought back memories.
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  • xkm1948
    Ahh now this brings back some old memories.
    Reply