Manufacturer: Canopus Corp. Tech: AGP based nVidia RIVA TNT board with 16Mb 115Mhz SDRAM, Cooling fan, Reverse pass-thru and NTSC/PAL TV/S-video out Bundle: The Drivers and jack shit but who cares? Price: $199.99

What you are about to read is an honest account of one man and his TNT VS. a press release and marketing campaign. This week I received the TNT powered Canopus Spectra 2500. Unfortunately, the drivers provided by Canopus were unsuitable for fully-fledged testing and thus I've decided to call this a preview. And then there were rumors that the on-board memory wasn't actually certified by nVidia for use with the TNT chipset. Anything else? Oh yeah, the benchmarking and sales guys at nVidia were particularly nice chaps and very helpfully invited me in to their lab to test the card in question with their own reference drivers. It did run a little more stabily with their reference drivers but the 32-bit rendering bugs were just as apparent as they were with Canopus' drivers. I will do some more testing with nVidia's reference drivers and updated drivers from Canopus and just reserve final judgement till then.

These details aside, I want to comment on the habit of horribly overstated performance specs in press releases coming out many months before final products that promise the moon and leave a nasty taste in one's mouth. NVidia is particularly guilty of this with the TNT.

Andrew Logan
Director of Corporate Marketing
Tel: 408-617-3933
Email: alogan@nvidia.com

For Immediate Release

NVIDIA UNVEILS MAINSTREAM 3D PROCESSOR THAT PROVIDES FIRST MAJOR STEP TOWARDS INTERACTIVE PHOTOREALISM RIVA TNT First to Integrate True Color TwiN Texel Architecture Matched to Pentium® II and AGP Platform

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--March 23, 1998 - Continuing its commitment to deliver award-winning 3D technology to the mainstream PC market, NVIDIA™Corporation today unveiled its new flagship RIVA TNT™3D processor. Boasting an astonishing 250 million pixels-per-second fill rate, the RIVA TNT is the first single-chip 128-bit 3D processor that can process two pixels per clock cycle enabling true single-pass multi-texturing. Utilizing over 7 million transistors, comparable to the complexity of the Intel Pentium® II, NVIDIA's RIVA TNT delivers stunning 3D quality and performance.