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After the initial release of the Riva 128 chipset it seemed as if the chipset itself was reason enough to leave nVidia out of the competition when it came to overall quality. Suffering from poor image quality, poor implementation of the AGP specification, an annoying 800 x 600 Z-Buffered resolution limitation, not to mention poor performance on slower systems. Luckily nVidia realised that the market needed much more than a Riva 128 with a new name, so it was back to the drawing boards for the nVidia engineers. The result? The nVidia Riva TNT, a chipset whose description on paper could have been the best graphics accelerator of 1998.
Directly from the source, nVidia claims to have a 0.25 micron shrink in the works for the TNT, however that conversion won't take place until sometime in 1999, meaning that the TNT will stay clocked at the 90 - 100 MHz range for at least a few more months, when it will most likely switch off to the 125 MHz clock setting it was supposed to be shipped at after receiving its 0.25 micron core. In spite of the fact that the public was blatantly lied to by nVidia about the potential of the TNT, technically nVidia never said when their TNT would be a Voodoo2-killer, so we can't really blame them now can we? You better believe we can
Cramming a total of 7 million transistors into the 0.35 micron package of the Riva TNT, nVidia managed to create an extremely hot chip that would require significant amounts of cooling to get it to operate at the original 125 MHz setting nVidia was claiming. While a TNT chip manufactured using a 0.25 micron process could easily be clocked at 125 MHz without too much added cooling necessary (a heat-sink would most likely do just fine), a 0.35 micron TNT is another question, which is why nVidia reduced the recommended clock speed to 90 MHz. As you can tell, this definitely decreases the performance of the TNT, but we'll talk about performance figures a little later.
If you're looking for a $200 card that can beat a Dual Voodoo2 SLI setup then you are better off dreaming for a little while longer, as the TNT isn't the chipset that will do that. While it may provide as a decent Voodoo2 alternative, it is definitely not something you'll want to consider a Voodoo2-killer, simply because of its current price/performance level.
So, Just what do you get with the Riva TNT?
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