Review Date: November 18, 1998 Background Info: Ever since the release of the Voodoo2 chipset by 3DFX Interactive, people have been amazed at the performance it provided in 3D accelerated games like Quake II and Turok. It seemed like nothing would beat it for a long time, until NVIDIA announced its Riva TNT chipset. NVIDIA became very popular when it released the Riva 128 chipset which provided good 2D quality and speed and 3D which was supposed to be quite good. It turned out that the 3D performance was pretty good, but the the image quality was not up to par with that of the Voodoo chipset released quite some time before. Nevertheless, many cards were sold based on the Riva 128 and NVIDIA listened to its customers when they started creating their next chipset. The Riva TNT was supposed to correct everything that was flawed about the Riva 128 and push performance levels way past that of the Voodoo2 and even beat a Voodoo2 SLI configuration. The specs were amazing: 250 MPixels/s, 8 Million Triangles/s, 32-bit rendering, high resolutions, single-pass trilinear filtering, single-pass multitexturing and more. Well the day has come and boards based on the Riva TNT have flooded the market, but is it as good as it was promised to be? Well yes and no. NVIDIA delivered on everything except the phenomenal speed they promised. They ran into some manufacturing problems and they couldn't produce the 0.25µ chips as they had hoped so they had to switch to the 0.35µ process until they were ready. This translates into more heat and a bigger die size which meant that NVIDIA had to scale down the core speed from the planned 125MHz to 90MHz just so it would work stably. Considering the drop in core clock speed, the Riva TNT is still an amazing chip and manages to pump out a maximum of 180 MPixels/s and 6 million triangles/s and is a very good competitor to 3DFX's Voodoo2 (read on to see the benchmarks). As a side note, NVIDIA hopes to released the 0.25µ TNT shortly into 1999. STB Systems Inc. was the first one out of the blocks with a Riva TNT card. The card is called the Velocity 4400 and comes in 2 configurations: 16MB AGP and 16MB PCI. We will be putting the PCI version through its paces. Through other reviews, the AGP and PCI versions performed pretty much equally. If you have a motherboard which supports AGP 2X, it may be a good idea to go with the AGP version. Anyway, let's take a look at how well STB's Velocity 4400 PCI stacks up. Next Page: So what features does this baby
have?
The Hardware Pros are not
responsible from any damage resulting from overclocking. |
