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The TNT has also been hyped due to the fact that it harbors two texel pipelines that enables dual-passes in a single cycle similar to the Voodoo2's two TMU story. The Quake 2 scores (see them on the benchmarks page later) didn't really thrill the life out of me. They weren't too much higher than the Voodoo Banshee, which only has one TMU, even though each of the TNT's texture units is, on paper (nVidia's claim), supposed to have a fill rate of 95 MPixels/ second. What's up with that? Times that by two and you get the figure of 190 MPixels as opposed to the original claim of 250Mpixels/ second. And even though each of the Voodoo2's TMU's is capable of 90 MPixels/ second, a single Voodoo2 with its fill rate of 'only' 90 MPixels/ second scores higher in Quake 2 than a TNT. Hmm… Still the idea that dual texture units can perform single pass multi texturing is a nice one- it just seems as though thus far nVidia hasn't done it quite up to scratch and that its been implemented better by 3Dfx with their Voodoo2. We also will have to wait until more games start to make use of dual TMUs. And until the cows come home. Although in all fairness, nVidia is known for its superb developer support within the games industry (they actually send email to developers announcing driver updates), so if anyone other than 3Dfx can start the ball rolling in terms of new features exploited in upcoming games, its them.
Ok enough about the negative stuff- so long as you don't expect the TNT to be a Voodoo2 killer then you'll at least be on the right track. What the TNT lacks in terms of sheer speed when compared to the Voodoo2 it does indeed make up for with image quality. Indeed the image quality shines through and is a class above the original nVidia Riva 128 chipset. Gone are the days of dithering and 'odd' black textures, there are still some mip-mapping errors with some games but on the whole it's safe to say that the TNT kicks out images that are on par with Matrox's G200. With its 32-bit rendering capabilities and higher resolution capability (1600x1200) it bypasses the Voodoo2's 24-bit rendering and 1024x768 resolution capabilities. So if it's image quality you want as opposed to sheer speed then the nVidia TNT starts looking more like something of interest. The 10GFLOP floating point geometry processor along with the 24-bit z-buffer with 8-bit stencil and per-pixel capabilities of the TNT ensure that the per-pixel texture correct texture mapping, anti-alaising and tri-linnear filtering all look the part.
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