NVIDIA Riva TNT2

Here's where the debate begins and the flames start to sizzle, the age-old image quality debate (ok, so it's not that old). The TNT2, without a doubt, provides for better image quality than any 3dfx product on the market, even when rendering in 16-bit color. This point cannot be argued, however the extent of the quality improvement of the TNT2 over the Voodoo3 can be debated.

The TNT2 supports textures in resolutions up to 2048 x 2048 (2K x 2K), this is the highest resolution any desktop 3D accelerator provides support for currently. On the reverse side of things, 3dfx only supports textures up to 256 x 256 in size.

This is what the texture looks like on a TNT2

This is what the texture looks like on a 3dfx accelerator

So is the TNT2 noticeably superior to the Voodoo3 in terms of 3D image quality? As of now, not entirely. There aren't any games currently available that truly take advantage of what the TNT2 has to offer, however both idSoftware's Quake3 Arena and GT Interactive's Unreal Tournament will make use of texture resolutions greater than 256 x 256 bytes. While you may not notice a huge difference in image quality today, the most popular games are yet to come; the discussion of 3D image quality will be continued more accurately once either of those two titles is released, then we'll be able to truly decide what the advantages/disadvantages are.

In addition to support for larger texture sizes, the TNT2 also supports 32-bit rendering, a feature that has never been present in a 3dfx accelerator. The TNT2, unlike the original TNT, can perform 32-bit rendering with much less than a 50% performance hit. The performance drop this time around is, on average, around 10 - 25% depending on the situation. In most cases, playing in 32-bit color is an extremely viable option. Keep in mind that higher resolutions will experience a more noticeable drop in performance when rendering in 32-bit color, even to the point that 1600 x 1200 is completely unplayable on a Pentium III 500 in 32-bit color, while it is playable under 16-bit color.