Improvements over the original TNT:
The most significant improvement over the original RivaTNT chip is the increase of the
clockspeed to 125Mhz (there are lots of speculations of even higher speeds such as 143Mhz
or 166Mhz, however Creative couldn’t say anything about this yet) which brings the
TNT2’s 3D performance up to that of the original TNT specs.
Further improvements includes a full 32Mb’s of onboard SDRAM wich according to
Creative is going to become a de-facto standard during 1999, and they are probably right
if you consider the increased amounts of textures we are going to see this year.
I asked Creatives representatives if the TNT2 would support hardware DVD playback and I
got the response that the motion compensation has been greatly improved.
Another new feature is the support of AGP 4x and sideband, this is perhaps going to
give the use of larger textures even greater support upon the release of Intel’s 4x
AGP chipset (currently in development under the codename "Camino") during Q3-4
this year.
Computers R Us will hopefully have a full review of the 3D Blaster TNT2 with benchmarks
and all of the usual stuff up by then end of March!
We also discussed Metabytes PGC technology (offering the option of running virtually
any card in "SLI"), and Creative said that the TNT2 or the Savage4 3D Blasters
will NOT support anything this, not at the time they are launched and
probably not in the future either, but we might see something like this in future Creative
releases.
I believe that the impact of 32bit rendering compared to 16bit rendering also has been
lowered making 32bit rendering a truly viable option.
The 3D Blaster TNT2 will have an estimated street price of $199 upon release.
