While the 3D Prophet's D3D performance is still superior to the TNT2 Ultra's with one exception (P3 600 @ 1600 x 1200 x 32-bit), the Falcon SE board often comes close and even surpasses the 3D Prophet at high resolution in 32-bit on the Athlon and Pentium III.
Until proven otherwise, we continue to attribute this to the lack of DirectX 7 hardware T&L implementation in Expendable (where we agree that most of the performance gain is coming from in the OpenGL applications), the core and memory speed tradeoffs associated with the new architecture and possibly the early nature of the D3D drivers.
The chaotic nature of these results makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions, but here goes: The Athlon 650 shows fairly consistent increases in performance percentage from the 3D Prophet at both 16- and 32-bit. The P3 600 and Celeron show marked improvement at higher resolution in 16-bit but mixed results in 32-bit. The Celeron comes out tops in performance percentage increase at 32-bit while the P3 plummets to below the performance of the TNT2 Ultra by 7% at 1600 x 1200 x 32.
