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We found the MagicTNT to be rock solid when it came to OpenGL performance in Quake 2 on a Pentium II-450Mhz machine. The results fell short of a single Voodoo2 at 640 x 480 which doesn't really matter so much. The TNT is quite capable of kicking out over 60 fps at 800 x 600 and around 40 fps at 1024 x 768, even 1280 x 960 is quite playable if you're not to picky about framerates. In terms of speed and visual quality, a single Voodoo2 is beaten at it's own favorite game, at least on the high-end machines (which is what the TNT is intended for). Going down to a Pentium II 300Mhz one would expect slightly different result in favor of the Voodoo2 of course. We've already seen how poorly the TNT scales. But you can't ignore the fact that the Voodoo2 is still lacking high-res support and to be honest the TNT actually produces far superior image quality even at the same resolution as the Voodoo2.
Other OpenGL titles ran nicely too, Half-Life hummed along at a pleasing pace at both 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 with pleasing graphics albeit with some dark colors (easily remedied by a bit of tweaking though). But OpenGL isn't all about games, even if we guess that's what most of us will use it for. From time to time I like to play around with 3D graphics and VRML browsers and here the MagicTNT shows another strong side of itself, thanks to the Full ICD applications like NewTek's Lightwave for example it can take advantage of hardware acceleration for detailed OpenGL previews which is useful. VRML truly comes to life with a TNT too, the Cosmo player from SGI ran nicely and with far superior performance from software rendered OpenGL as you'd expect.
The MagicTNT as a 2D/3D accelerator doesn't just cater for your 3D gaming needs but indeed also for Windows and DOS. With support for 2D resolutions all the way up to 1920 x 1200 with 32-bit color depth and a fast 250Mhz RAMDAC the TNT is a very capable 2D performer. Under DOS the excellent VESA 3 compliant core can easily handle any old DOS title you can throw at it and under Windows the TNT boast impressive performance. Video is another strong feature on the MagicTNT, with it you can enjoy playing MPEG or AVI video files full-screen at pretty much any resolution and best of all the TNT filters the upscaled movie which yields much improved visual quality.
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