By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by MS-8808 Vanta/Riva TNT2 M64 32 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

• NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 chip, 125 MHz clock rate;
• 32 MBytes SDRAM memory in four LG 7ns microchips, 143 MHz clock rate, 64-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 125 megapixels/sec and 250 megatexels/sec.

Tweaks up to 150/178 MHz (see summary diagrams).

For the 20th of February '2001 the latest drivers versions from NVIDIA are 6.53, 6.72, 7.52 and 10.50.

As you see old 2.* drivers work very good with this card. Pay attention to falloffs with 6.* (6.11, 6.16, 6.18, 6.20) versions. I talked about speed boost with 6.26 version drivers but there was just a bug in other versions. Now it's fixed. 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 falloff. 10.50 version turned out to be "raw" as well, as it showed the same speed falloffs. I chose 7.52 version for further testing, estimating of 3D-quality and also for calculating usability coefficients.

There are not so many problems with 3D graphics in old games, but new ones like Giants cause bunches of artefacts to show up:

And trilinear approximation instead of true trilinear filtering lowers the card's rating (you can see this approximation on the shots above - take a look at the sandy soil). 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

Blade of Darkness

Giants: Citizen Cabuto

This card has fair 2D quality. There are "soaping" effects in resolutions of and higher than 1280x1024, and it's rather good in 1024x768. But, as I said before, 2D quality varies from card to card based on this chip and also it depends on the monitor.