For a comprehensive look at the TNT2 technology take a look back at
our overview to the UltraTNT2 chip set (from a couple of months ago)- otherwise read on. The RIVA TNT2 3D pipeline sustains a high vertex, Z-buffer, and texture filtering throughput to achieve its 3D offerings:
- 100% hardware triangle setup
- TwiN-Texel (TNT2) 32-bit graphics pipeline: Single pass multi-texturing support, square and non-square texture support
- Texture Blend support examples: Multi-texture - bump map Texture modulation - light maps Reflection maps - detail textures Environmental maps - procedural textures Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear and 8-tap Anisotropic filtering (better than trilinear MIP mapping)
- Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping: fog, light, MIP mapping
- 24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer (floating point or integer)
- 8-bit stencil buffer
- Anti-aliasing: full scene, order independent
The TNT2 has AGP 4X listed on its spec sheet. If you ask NVIDIA, they'll be the first to tell you that, although TNT2 is based on the AGP 2X TNT chip (and contrary to information we had been given previously), the TNT2 chipset had its AGP module 'ripped out' and replaced with a module designed specifically around AGP 4X. They'll also tell you that Intel will corroborate this information. Matrox also says that their G400 part is designed around AGP 4X. And if you ask Intel, they'll tell you that Camino isn't out yet and we won't likely be seeing it for a few months until a good enough temporary fix for RAMBUS is found. So don't expect to see Camino based motherboards till October/November. So even though AGP 4X will be an important step forward, until 4X support can be tested, we'll take the above with a pinch of salt and a tequila slammer. As soon as we get access to a Camino board, we will put every 'AGP 4X' board to the test and give you the results. We'll leave you with this thought though- when AGP 4X does come into the equation, an ELSA ERAOR III will be able to support full sideband addressing with peak performance of 900MegaBytes/sec.
