By now regular readers will have gotten used to the debate (which is still raging) on whether or not 32-bit is better than 16-bit (or 22-bits etc…). We won't bore you to death and should you need a dose of this argument, then feel free to look at the Viper V770 preview we did last month. Needless to say the TNT2 chipset supports gameplay at 32-bit color depths and is also capable of handling texture sizes up to 2048x2048 as opposed to the Voodoo3's more limited 256x256. The Xentor 16MB also takes advantage of the fact that TNT2 is able to shift these larger textures with its full support for AGP texturing (the Voodoo3 doesn't support this feature and uses its own proprietary DME). Not only is this the case for AGP 2X but it will also supports AGP 4X and will thus take full advantage of Intel's forthcoming Camino chipset, where as the current Voodoo3 3500 does not (3Dfx has stated that their Voodoo3 4000 will support AGP 4X bus speeds).

Other than the 'by now standard' single pass multi-texturing done by NVIDIA's (or 3dfx's depending on which company you ask) Twin texel 32-bit graphics pipeline, the Xentor 16MB is capable of a whole lot more. The NVIDIA bump-mapping demo (provided with the CD) looks superb and displays the ripples on a pond well enough via bump mapping of 'some sort'. But for those of you that like to cross your Ps and Qs the TNT2 does NOT do true hardware bump mapping. Although the TNT2 spec sheet does list the feature, the method used is embossing and not true hardware environmental bump mapping like the Matrox G400 (using a per pixel combination of three separate texture maps, including a special 'bump map'). If you live and die by bump maps and are absolutely sure that you can't live without the real thing (not very likely) then you might want to hold on for Matrox's G400MAX (choices eh?). On the other hand, the embossing looks pretty sharp and does the job fairly well. We've yet to see any really good use of anistropic filtering but as soon as we do we promise you'll be the first to know- rendering your sleepless nights a thing of the past of course. The same thing can be said of full-scene anti-aliasing, no game developer worth their weight in pixels has pursued this feature yet. The performance hit is currently way way too hard (if that's your thing try a $3000 Mercury card instead)…

The TNT2 also harbors a 24-bit Z-buffer with an 8-bit stencil buffer (mind your use of Gs eh?). This feature enhances scene quality and clarity by creating more special effects while saving the graphics engine unnecessary rendering. For example, the 8-bit stencil buffering can be used for effects such as dissolves and transitions or better still for rendering plain and volumetric shadows, silhouettes et. al. We could go on and on but…