September'2001 3Digest:
NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64
By Andrew
Worobyew
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.
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