When running the benchmarks on the Xentor 16MB we felt the urge to compare apples to apples instead of oranges. Meaning that we put a 'similar' spec board up against it- the Voodoo3 2000, which is priced similarly and targeted at the same 'type' of end user. The Quake 2 scores showed that the Xentor 16MB was exceptionally fast at 1024x768 in Quake 2. It beat the Voodoo3 2000 considerably in the more complex Massive1 and Crusher tests. Timedemo 1 was pretty much 'neck and neck' apart from at 800x600 where the Voodoo3 2000 was some 10fps faster.

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Ok so we said we were comparing apples to apples when pitting the Xentor 16MB against a Voodoo3 2000. Indeed we did the best we could. We used the EXACT same system (see below)- that goes without saying but unfortunately the drivers that Guillemot provided were NOT final. Therefor there could be some room for improvement and the TNT2 based Xentor 16MB may yet get that bit faster. Thus you could say we were comparing apples to oranges- the Voodoo3 2000 is out in stores and has RETAIL drivers whilst the Xentor 16MB is still a few weeks away from the shelves and without final drivers. Yeah a jolly fruit basket eh?

Guillemot isn't specifically pitching the Xentor 16MB to the 'serious' gamer. For that they've suggested (as we would) that you use their 32MB UltraTNT2 product instead. In any case, the Xentor 16MB was still pleasantly capable in gaming conditions under 32-bit. Expendable was fast, fluid and of course crisper than at 16-bit and playing the demo of KingPin resulted in respectable frame rates. The performance hit on the Xentor 16MB when switching from 16-bit to 32-bit color depths was slightly greater than it was on the Viper V770. But this is a result of the 16MB amount of SDRAM instead of the Viper's 32MB as well as the reduced clock speeds, which reduce the fill rate. The Forsaken benchmarks were plenty fast enough at 32-bit… Our advice is not to expect too much from a lower-end CPU when playing at 32-bit. The TNT2 is still pretty CPU dependant and scaling down to anything lower than a Pentium II 300MHz really isn't where it performs at its best. Having said that, 16-bit is still plenty fast enough on a lower-end system.

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Benchmarks conducted on:
Pentium III 500MHz w/128MB of PC100 RAM
Abit BH6 Motherboard
10.2 Gig Quantum Fireball HD
Monster Sound MX300
3COM PCI Network Card