A Brief History: Nvidia's 1999 Breakthrough Riva TNT 2 Graphics Card That Demolished the Competition
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- Опубликовано: 27 авг 2024
- A look back to 1999 when Nvidia's Riva TNT 2 hit the shelves and changed many PC gamers lives. Reliving the toe to toe battle with 3DFX and the Voodoo 3 chipset. The 3D graphics wars were hotting up!
We briefly touch upon the various versions of the TNT 2 card that Nvidia put out, some of the marketing tactics Nvidia used against 3DFX and finally what graphics cards ended its run at the top of the tree.
Hope you enjoy the memories!
Games played on my Pentium 3 and captured over an Elgato GameCapture HD:
- Soldier of Fortune
- Unreal Tournament
- Quake 3
- Typing of the Dead
Having just had my mind blown running cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing on my new RTX 4080...I just had to take a trip down memory lane to where it all started for me as well - the Riva TNT2! Thanks for this hit of nostalgia
it's amazing how far we've come. I have a 3080 but would love a 4080 at some point so I can max out VR performance :D
I recently put together a 98 machine with a 400 mhz Pentium II, a Sound Blaster 16 ISA card, and a Diamond Viper V770 32mb AGP card. It's a variant of the TNT2 but I'm not sure which one, but it is awesome! Runs everything I throw at it with no issues. Thanks for the video.
Thanks for sharing! Yes I remember back then I always wanted a Diamond Viper - probably because thats an awesome name for a product! So many good card technologies back then from so many companies - kind of a shame now its just a two horse race between Nvidia and AMD
hows star citizen ?
I just got one of these, ultra tnt2, for 18 bucks! I love Nvidia still has the drivers to download
holey moley - the ultra model is more sought after - thats a good price :)
I remember attending a lan party where I had just gotten the TNT 2 and everyone else was running Voodoo 2. Once everyone caught wind of what I had, they came over to check it out. I remember there was a conversation about how much better the image quality was on Unreal with the TNT 2
I find the picture quality of old 3D games and software rendering kind of nostalgic and beautiful in its own way; but the obvious dithering patterns in smoke sprites and such is not one of those things; transparencies always looked like ass in 16 bit.
I had a TNT M64 (half the memory bandwidth); the jump from M64 to a full 128 bit interface was about 1 resolution step (so 800x600 instead of 640x480) r like the difference between 16 bit and 32 bit. 16 bit on the TNT2 looked even worse than the 16 bit on the voodoo 2 because the dithering patterns were too simple and obvious. I played a lot of stuff in 640x480x32BPP instead of 800x600x16BPP; this would have run on your TNT2 at about the same speed as 800x600x32BPP.
The big jump in picture quality wasn't that, though, it was cheap anisotropic filtering. Straight bilinear filtering just looks so bad that I would even prefer nearest neighbor; with the crawling texture shimmering/aliasing in the distance and all. The first fix for this was to just crank the resolution to the moon, but this had bad side effects besides performance. Ever play Half-life in 1600x1200 or some stupid resolution like that? There aren't enough polygons there; the characters start looking like Kryten from red dwarf; the depth in the handpainted walls appears as atomically flat as they really are and it just breaks the illusion.
Bilinear was just too blurry and the mipmaps changes too obvious. My fondest memory of a GPU ever was the radeon 9700 pro. You could just set 16x AF (it didn't apply AF to surfaces that didn't need it); it had shaders that were fast enough and complex enough that you could actually use them for more than making water look like liquid mercury (e.g. see Morrowind) and bump maps with specular that look like more than surfaces slathered in vegetable oil.
The earliest 3D Accelerators felt more to me (who hated straight bilinear) as a necessary evil to get games running fast enough than a big jump in image quality.
Except it's a lie. Sure, on Quake 3 if you activate 32 bit it looks better than Voodoo2. But Unreal? It was made for Glide. Direct3D or OpenGL on Unreal was much slower, and it looked way worse. Even later, when I had a Geforce3 Ti200 128 MB I still kept a pair of Voodoo2 cards along it, just for Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
@@eugenb9017 whatever you say. I literally had people gawking at my screen
@@googlegamer4047 Probably, you had, but they were still lying :) TNT2 *can* look better than V2 on Unreal if you run it at higher resolution, V2 is limited to 800x600, with TNT2 you can run it at 1024x768, or even higher, up to 1920x1200 from what I remember, if you had a monitor that would support that resolution.
The problem is that even at 1024x768 it would be too slow already, even on a very fast PIII.
I think that what really happened was that the rest of the people had Voodoo1, running Unreal at 640x480, in this case, yes, a TNT2 would be faster and better looking, you could run it at the same framerate at 1024x768, and that would more than compensate the fact that it runs in D3D or OpenGL - which look worse than Glide in Unreal at the same resolution.
@@eugenb9017 Why or how did it look worse? I've seen UT on at least Voodoo 2, Voodoo 3, TNT2 M64, geforce 4 MX440, geforce 4 Ti 4200, R9700 pro and modern graphics cards and in software; some of it quite recently.
There are some obvious differences; most voodoo 2 models had drivers that default to a gamma ramp that is pure ass and makes everything look too bright and washed out; this is easily fixed. The original D3D renderer was ass (and indeed, early D3D was ass generally). Easily fixed, use openGL. I don't remember if openGL supported detail textures, but I hate the way they look so I immediately turn them off anyway.
You can clearly see that the box filter thing done by voodoo 2 looks much better than 16-bit colors on other cards, but much worse than 32 bit color on smoke sprites and transparencies like water and such. On a weak CPU glide also runs faster than openGL due to being closer to the metal and specifically being coded for in Unreal/UT and other APIs being an afterthought. Next thing I notice is that everything looks so drastically better with anistropic filtering that it's not even funny.
Nvidia cheated a lot in their drivers and depending on driver version you may have fuckey color banding issues and similar. This is fixed by avoiding certain drivers, especially those around products launches.
32 bit rendering was *very* noticeable in games like quake 3 and unreal tournament where you had many translucent sprites; even on a real CRT and in motion.
I need to give this a test for myself for sure and do a proper side by side test I reckon!
@@ByteSizeThoughts
Ive got a test for ya.
@@ByteSizeThoughts
Funny how fond memories for you are different for me with my geforce "4" MX 440.
Yes! I just remembered upgrading from a voodoo2 and firing up quake 3 in 32 bit. The obvious gradient in rocket smoke, explosions, colored lighting was gone. Just beautiful
I remember drooling on this particular card... i have only a i740 back then and could'nt afford this card. I endend up getting a GF2 MX at christmas 2000
its still a cracker today if youre building an old pc - everyone wants a voodoo but the prices are sky high whilst TNT2 and GF2's have great performance but are much more affordable :D
I hear ya on the wishing I still had my first graphics card, it was a Power VR, Apocalypse 3Dx. They are near impossible to find now.
I never had a powerVR card back then. I've been watching a few vids about the Kyro's that didn't look too bad. A bit pricey on eBay so probably won't be able to try one out I don't expect
I have one right now in a Pentium 200 Mhz system alongside with a Orchid Righteous 3D (Voodoo 1) 3D accelerator card. The Apocalypse 3Dx was legendary in being able to run Tomb Raider in 1024 by 768 pixel resolution which was incredible back in 1997.
The 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card can only do 640 by 480 resolution accelerated in Tomb Raider.
It looks good but the 3Dx card looks so much better.
I have both in my vintage system as the Voodoo 1 card covers more games.
Just wait till you see " I remember my first GPU the 4090 TI man it was so small compared to today's cards I'd show you, but, I had to leave it behind, it wouldn't fit in our moving truck"
Yup. First proper GFX card was a TNT as well, but like you said - didn’t last long and soon I had a GF2MX. Things were moving so, so quickly back then.
Yep, leaps and bounds back then. Though I guess the latest graphics cards released last month have had a somewhat similar leap in performance (which is a shame since I bought a 2060 in June :D)
NVidia demolished the competitors by choosing the right strategy of being a mere chip maker. Their rivals, Matrox and ATi had been making cards by their own, 3dfx and S3 bought STB and Diamond respectively.
Agreed - a very good perspective.
Enjoyed the video mate. The first card I bought with my own money was a TNT2 Ultra as well, the Xentor 32, clocked at 175/183. I wish I still had it and I'm in the same boat, they're expensive when they crop up. The box art was cool so I'd like to pick one up boxed, but I doubt that will ever happen as they hardly show up anyway. If I remember rightly it was in my Athlon 700 to begin with. Loved that card. 32bit looked great, and it ran games at the time very well. Moved onto a GF2 GTS Pro during college. I've just set that up in my Athlon 1.4 recently.
Good to hear from you! All boxed cards from back then have shot right up in price. There is a boxed voodoo 2 that I was looking at going for 150GBP which is pretty wild.
The last few weeks I have been messing around with a Packard Bell desktop which I've got running, which means I've been able to finally test out a voodoo banshee into my only AGP capable machine that I bought 3 years ago - so am now having to scour the internet for all the glide patches!
Sounds like youve been getting your retro machines up and running too. Hope the lock down doesnt last too long, tinkering with the computers will help the time pass
@@ByteSizeThoughts It's exercise I need most! I sit on a PC all day and not having any commitments I tend to sit at home too. My 166 is the only non-AGP system that I have up n running atm. Yeah, over the last 10 days or so, on and off, I've been trying differnt driver versions and configurations for my 1.4. I've formatted it 4 times so far. I have an Aureal 2 card in it and some drivers for that don't play well with DirectX over version 7a, and there's an ISA SB16 in it to so there's some manual IRQ / DMA assignments. Plus on some GF2 drivers the direct3D V-Sync option does't work, so yeah.. lot's of time trying and testing. It's sorted now, I just got to stop messing with it :)
I had fun a few weeks back getting my V2 running on the 166. I know it's way under powered for it but yeah, there's a few different drivers etc for that as well. I just couldn't get the 3DFX patch for Screamer 2 to work at all. It would just hang. I read somewhere's I can try an older driver but I just don't want to mess with it anymore. Not sure if I'll keep the V2 anyway really, it's not nostalgic or anything for me, I only wanted to try Screamer 2 lol. I'm hoping to build a PII so I'll whack it in that later maybe. I paid £120 for the Maxi Gamer 12MB version, fully boxed. Bit much but I'm a Maxi Gamer fanboy. If I decide to sell it let me know if you want it. I always sell stuff cheap to friends or other collectors.
Sorry, I tend to rant on. You'll have to let us know how you get on with your Packard Bell - your experiences with which drivers and games ect. I love hearing about other peoples PCs, and the nostalgia they have for different things.
hehe - you are definitely more patient than I am with the drivers. I tend to look on Vogons or Phils Computer Lab for the driver that they recommend and I put it in. However I now have 4 or 5 computers with different configurations so that if a game doesnt run particularly well on one, I will try it on another. However I have finally put in my Banshee card into my P3 build and some games dont seem to run all that great with the Gigabyte voodoo drivers - though it may just be how I am using it.
With the Screamer 2 game you need to just copy 2 of the glide files into the game directory and it should run right (phils computer lab website has the files and the instructions). I found that POD was the hardest to get running in glide mode until I got the 3dfx patch and ran it a couple of times. Still cant get Interstate 76 or Outlaws to run in glide mode - again probably because of my banshee drivers...
My very first graphics card.
TNT2 was an awesome chip. That was the generation when NVidia proved they were a legitimate equal of 3dfx, and 3dfx started to look like they were slipping as they weren't improving their cards nearly as fast as NVidia was. Sadly 3dfx couldn't get their act together before it was too late.
GeForce 256 was expensive, so most TNT2 models still had a place alongside that I think, except for maybe the Ultra.
The chip that really made the TNT2 obsolete was the Geforce2 MX.
The MX cards could match or beat the performance of any TNT2 and it was cheap enough to soon make TNT2 redundant. It also had lower power consumption which solved the power related issues that many early AGP motherboards had with TNT2 cards.
Because of this, even people with older motherboards running a slower CPU were better off buying an MX than a TNT2, because they wouldn't have to worry about those power issues.
I have a Diamond Viper V770 but sadly it's dead. Recently I bought another TNT2 from eBay that should be working so I'm looking forward to playing with it.
Thanks for watching and sharing. I think that in my first year of university I bought a cheapish Innovision Geforce 2MX that gave a modest upgrade over my Tnt2 ultra for unreal tournament. It was more performance for half the price if I recall correctly.
amazing times 😪😪
TNT 2 Ultra IS MY DREAM PC IN SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL.BUT IT IS TOO EXPENSIVE
tnt2 was a lifesaver after an s3 virge card on celeron 266.
yep - rock solid performer back in the day
I got my old 2003 pc which i ran XP On i powered it on again and it ran it have a nvidia rivatnt2 and pentium 4
I had a Diamond Viper V770 (Riva TNT2) in my first Pentium 3 machine back in 1999, what a card it was! i had cards after that which didnt feel anywhere near as slick..
Thanks for sharing! I loved the naming of card back then - the Diamond Viper - such an awesome name hey and you know it had to have some good graphics capability to back it up!
First AGP card Asus V3800 TnT2, many memories with that card i still own it in my collection.
Paired with BX440 AT motherboard and Pentium II Katmai 330MHZ.
Q2, UT99, Q3 and 56k modem endless fun
I remember Q2 on my 56k modem :) - I think I was using the MSN Zone maybe back then too? Either way my internet was so slow I had a real hard time against all the other players, my ping was through the roof
@@ByteSizeThoughts
I was lucky if i connected at 56k, most time connection was, 33.6k. Sound of redial and modem connection will be engraved in my head till i die.
TnT2 served me well but when GeForce DDR arrived i knew the days of TnT2 are over.
On my local market nowdays running across Slot 7, Slot 1 or even 370 socket system is nearly impossible.
But just couple years ago they were everywhere.
But you could still find TnT2 m64 :)
Thanks for pinup
In the last 4 years of looking I've picked up a handful of machines but they are getting rarer. P4's are available but I think in a few years maybe even these might start becoming more uncommon (and I've seen more people building P4 retro rigs/ultimate XP rigs as time goes on
@@ByteSizeThoughts
Yeah and rare parts will be especially hard to find.
Just last month my Athlon XP system motherboard died for no reason.
So people don't throw away systems :)
my first gaming card was a tnt2 vanta 16mb
Great video explaining these cards. I just bought a brand new Riva TNT 2 Ultra. Any idea what it's value maybe in USD? I can't find any sealed ones online.
Is it complete in box? If it is and if its sealed then it could be worth some good money. Also depends on the brand and model - really you're relying on finding someone with the nostalgia for that particular card. Myself I am looking for the Creative TnT2 Ultra model :) If you have that then let me know!
@@ByteSizeThoughts Thanks for getting back to me. Yes it is factory sealed. It is the Creative 3DB6815 3D Blaster nVidia RIVA TNT2 Ultra 32MB AGP BUS 1999. I just listed it on eBay on auction so we'll see how it does. Started it $150 so who knows lol.
good luck with sale!
@@ByteSizeThoughts Thank you I appreciate it. It just got a bid!
Idk why but in bios my video mem. Says 64mb is it 64 though i think rivatnt2 have 32mb?
32bit color was a gimmick for the life span of the TNT2. Voodoo 3 cards were much better since most games still supported Glide.
Had, probably still have, a TNT2 Vanta PCI
Nice, its a solid performer for the time and very compatible with tonnes of games
1999 my tnt 2pro
Life ad Times of a 90s Rockstar Bv /
I had this, Gta3 did not run well on it. :D
buys riva tnt1 ultra
woah woah 1:20 assembled in the USA ?nice joke
Idk what video card my moms work PC had but I still have PTSD from the immutable anxiety fulfilling screech of dialing up AOL at 2am trying to play some StarCraft ... Its a shame parents don't enforce their children to integrate slowly into the technology ... It's a sad stat of affairs... Id make my kids use dial up for years.. they ain't stealing my bandwidth 56k is plenty to do homework we had to use a gosh darn wall of encyclopedias which is likely more difficult to just find what your looking for than today's woke of a joke education