nVIDIA's UltraTNT2 is also the only current board capable of doing everyone's favorite 'bump mapping' in hardware. Most other 3D chip manufacturers list bump mapping in their 'white papers' but the truth is that the feature is usually rendered due a to a software trick. Tri-linnear filtering and support for anistropic filtering is also featured on nVIDIA's box of tricks. Exactly when any game developer will take advantage of these features is unclear. Anistropic filtering could for example be used at a later date for Lucas Arts' next Star Wars game. At least for the intro scene where the text scrolls away in the distance (just like in the films).

Another important issue to address is (and it's a BIG one) that we're sure you'd like to know the clock speed of the memory chips and the graphics clock. When Diamond brought the first ever TNT2 Ultra based Viper V770 over to the lab they openly discussed the issue. They were very forthcoming and knew full well that by leaving the board with us that we would of course be able to check the speeds of both the graphics clock and the memory within the TNT2 Ultra's Windows Registry settings. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose this information to you our readers at this time. The truth is Creative, Guillemot, ELSA and any other nVIDIA OEM partner that chooses to produce a TNT2 Ultra would undoubtedly like to know the very same thing. Therefor we can sympathize with Diamond's sense for this secrecy. We also spoke with Derek Perez, Public Relations Manager at nVIDIA who gave us the official line on the whole clock speed issue,

"We have a suggested clock speed for all our TNT2 chips. Thus you'll see boards come into our OEM partners at up to 150MHz (graphics clock speed) and 183Mhz (memory) speeds. Therefor it's at the discretion of our card vendors to decide what clock setting to opt for when selling their respective products. The theoretical maximum clock speed are of course higher and you'll see certain OEM partners taking advantage of this."

What we can also tell you is that Diamond is indeed one of these 'certain' OEM partners and that Perez mentioned and that the pre-production Viper V770 board that we currently have is NOT running at the 'suggested' clock speed. In fact, the good news is that Diamond has already got the graphics clock set significantly higher and have also partnered with an 'unnamed' memory vendor that is having successful yields at speeds in excess of the '183MHz' mentioned by Perez. Bearing this in mind we were THOROUGHLY impressed with the way the board performed considering that both Sharky Extreme and Tom's Hardware Guide were the first two publications to be given an nVIDIA Ultra TNT2 based board. In three days of solid testing/benchmarking the board simply refused to crash. There were no heat-related issues or luck ups whatsoever, which can usually be caused by clock speeds that are in excess of a particular chipset's/memory brand's physical capabilities.