We were also told that Canadian-based Guillemot will be doing a 32MB Ultra TNT based Xentor and then finally a VANTA (NVIDIA's OEM targeted TNT board). The board in question though, is based upon the TNT2 chipset and NOT the UltraTNT2 chipset (for that you'll have to wait till next time) and will be aimed at the 'mid-range' end user rather like the Voodoo3 2000 is. Now that we've put an Ultra TNT2 (a pre-production version of the Viper V770) up against 3dfx's high-end Voodoo3 product (the 3500 which is also not yet released) the time is right to pit NVIDIA's lower spec board against 3dfx 's. So how does this 'cheaper' and lower-clocked version of the TNT2 rack up then ? Let's find out…

The board is based upon NVIDIA's TNT2 reference design and looks almost identical to a TNT (no suprises there then). It sports an 8 x 2MB SDRAM layout of memory chips running at 166MHz, with the graphics clock set at 125MHz. Obviously with the clock speed set lower than for an Ultra TNT2, the fill rate is lower at 260 million texture-mapped pixels/sec (which still isn't too shabby). By comparison, the Voodoo3 2000 is capable of some 283MegaTexels per second (a 'Texel' refers to a bilinear textured pixel). And with its 16MB of 166MHz memory the Xentor 16MB also has a healthy 2.47GB/s data transfer rate- also comparable to the Voodoo3 2000's own proprietary DME transfer that 3dfx uses, which allows for up to 2.29GB/second local memory transfer capabilities for shifting textures.