TNT2 vs TNT2 Ultra vs GeForce SDR

The world of the hardware is probably the most similar thing to the jungle, and that of the videocards is the most dangerous of all this jungle. A delay of a few months in extracting a new model, a bad decision of design or a slightly successful commercial agreement can be enough to eliminate of the market a manufacturer, for big that it is.

Till not long ago more than one year, the graphic market was absolutely dominated for 3dfx, the company of the famous persons Voodoo. Nobody seemed to be able to face to them efficiently, but they took a pair of wrong decisions, had problems with his new chips... and luck they have of keeping on existing. Today the new king of the jungle is the manufacturer nVidia, with his TNT2 and GeForce... well, we already will see how much him lasts the title.

Material to examination and targets

This article is raised for two types of public:

• those who have a "simple" computer (in our case a Celeron 466) and they appear his graphic update;
• those who are going to buy a "powerful" computer (in our case an AMD Athlon 700) and they doubt on what nVidia chip it must take his card.

In step we will try to convince a few unyielding ones of the only truth of the world of the computers: that the important thing is not to have many, many MHz, but a computer with all his balanced components. Nobody puts an engine Porsche inside a Seat 600, but the case is that many people buy a PC to 800 MHz and put a graphic card of 5.000 ptas...

As for the cards to test, there are the following ones:

• GeForce256 with 32 MB of SDRAM (the Siluro GF256 of ABIT);
• TNT2 Ultra (the acquaintance Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32, with 32 MB);
• TNT2 (the Xentor with "underclocking");
• Intel 740 (without well-known mark, "of the heap", with 8 MB).

The election has come determined by many factors, between others the time limitation to do the tests (that I work and I still study... occasionally), but these four cards are sufficient to extract interesting conclusions. If someone looks comparative with 6 mikes, 10 graphic cards and 43 graphs, I recommend undoubtedly www.anandtech.com.

The "card of control" is based on the Intel 740, which is practically identical to the controler integrated to the chipsets i810 and i810E; it tries to represent (and I would say that it obtains it) what we can find in many PCs of low scale, PCs of mark "economic" or PCs with certain antiquity.

Attention: the TNT2 elected Ultra is authentically ULTRA, since it works to 175/183, 175 MHz his chip and 183 MHz his memory, when other Ultra goes to 150/183. To represent the TNT2 simply there has bent the speed of clock of the TNT2 Ultra up to 125/150, what shortens the tests process and neither introduces changes of size of memory nor marks.

As for Pro does not include the TNT2, it is due to the fact that it is little more than a minimally optimized "classic" TNT2. And we do not treat the TNT2 M64 and Vanta (of which the M64 is better, but worse than the TNT2) because although they offer an acceptable yield, they have not left a lot of life time on the market; at the end of summer his presence will be probably nominal.

As tests software we have used the Quake III, nothing of synthetic tests; after everything, if we buy to ourselves a quality card it is not precisely to do that the happy Office assistant appears more quickly...

The following ways of Quake III have been used:

• "Fastest", 512x384 to 16 color bits;
• "Normal", 640x480 to 16 color bits;
• "High Quality", 32 bits of color to 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024;
• 16 color bits to 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024.