September'2001 3Digest:
NVIDIA Riva TNT

By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by Canopus Spectra 2500 16 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

• NVIDIA Riva TNT chip, 90 MHz clock rate, 128-bit engine;
• 16 MBytes SDRAM memory in eight Hyundai 10ns microchips, 110 MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 90 megapixels/sec and 180 megatexels/sec.

Videocard doesn't tweak over standard due to slow memory and the graphic core itself.

For the 20th of December'2000 the last driver version is NVIDIA - 6.49, 6.50.

You can see that 6.* drivers are better than 2.*, so you should use them and all later versions. By the way Unreal looks awful in 32-bit color with older drivers, so you should use 3.* and later versions, excluding 7.* versions. I want readers to note 7.* drivers, they are just "raw" and can't functions properly even on beta level. Quake3 and other OpenGL applications doesn't run at all, and D3D games show big speed fall, therefore all games were tested with 6.50 version.

There are not so many problems with 3D graphics. But trilinear approximation instead of true trilinear filtering lowers the card's rating. Below are shots taken on this card (to the left) and on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS (to the right).

Quake3:

Unreal:

Unreal Tournament:

No One Lives Forever:

Serious Sam:

Colin McRAE Rally2:

American McGee's Alice:

Mercedes Benz Truck Racing:

Sacrifice:

FAKK2:

Need For Speed 5 (Porshe 2000):

Real MYST:

This card has awful 2D quality. 800x600 gives you a chance of normal work, and there are strong "soaping" effects in higher resolutions. But 2D quality varies from card to card based on this chip. There are some cards that show rather good 2D quality.

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