I remember upgrading my P2-450 Dell with a Voodoo2 and 128ZX, to just the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2, in 99. With that much difference in GLQuake, Glide was dead to me. Exhilarating times. Love the video.
Great video! :) I actually went from a Riva 128 to a TNT myself, back around when the card was first released. This was on a P2-300mhz and Half Life got much noticeably nicer when the Riva 128 was replaced with the TNT. The 128 was great though.. I still remember being in awe when the driver with OpenGL support was released and I could change Quake 2 from software rendering to faster 3D with all the fancy lighting :D
I so regret throwing out all my old hardware and computers as a kid..... Had an amazing collection but didn't know better and got rid of it because we needed some space..
@@QuadTubeChannel Yes, it is a common mistake. Many people that doesnt know (that in future they start to be entertaining by retro hardware), just thinks is garbage and junk, that take up space, and try to sell it as fast as possible, and cheap, otherwise they have to throw it out. Now this is a chance for some retro collectors to take the stuff cheap. But it's harder and harder, as these things was mostly thrown away in past 10-15 years.
Actually if you needed the space to be honest selling or throwing out these hardware may not have been an unwise choice. Nobody knows which hardware might be valuable 20 years down the road. Not everybody has the luxury of hoarding on to 20 years of retro hardware and hoping it will be monetised someday. Especially if you don't do this for a living. I have sold hundreds of computers parts for the past 20 years and have no regrets even if they become valuable some day. That's because I want a clutter free home and don't have the luxury of hoarding stuff. And I don't do this for a living. Just enjoying these videos online is good enough. Priority of life choices. :) My 2c.
The TNT has also had its reputation as mainboard killer at the time. Back in 99, I've had some strange BAT/ATX hybrid fomat slot 1 board with both ATX and BAT power connectors, running a 300Mhz Mendocino@450. When I plugged in the TNT and switched it on, the linear regulator providing 3.3V to the AGP port exploded. Since I was using an ATX power supply already, I was able to fix it with a patch wire to the ATX connectors 3.3V pins. These were exciting times back then, with each new hardware release exploring new frontiers...
Oh my, this brought me back. I bought my first modern PC back in 1996, a Pentium 133 with some kind of crappy graphics card with 1 MB of EDO RAM. A Diamond Viper 330 (Riva 128 with 4MB RAM) brought a world of difference. Not only in games, but being able to jump from 1024x768 at 16 bit color and 60 Hz to 1280x1024 at 32 bit color and 85 Hz made a world of difference at normal usage. It cost me what I thought was a fortune back then but I still consider it one of my best computer purchases ever. But I also remember lusting like crazy over the TNT when it came.
Awesome video. I like how you went through the details of what you got when you upgraded. Nice idea. Keep them coming. At the time, I stuck with Voodoo from Voodoo Rush to Voodoo 3 3000 then 3500. I didn't jump over until the Geforce 3.
It's more than I want to spend right now. I lean more toward modern gaming. My last pickup was a Sound Blaster X AE-5 by I pump my retro PC through it along with the MIDI>Roland>USB pass-through.
I love these videos, from the time I was also keeping up with many videocards specs and moved from an 3dfx voodoo to entry level nvidia geforce2mx card , still a big upgrade lol.
Great video xD I had the Riva 128 ZX PCI version with 4 MB vRAM. I still have it somewhere. I paid £25 for this thing, which also came with the full version of Interstate '76, as well as a football game and motorbike racing game I can't remember. I have very fonder memories of this car; in particular Interstate '76 and GLQuake. I actually liked that slightly rough look. At the time I was running a Cyrix MII 333+ (75 MHz FSB and 225 MHz core clock) , and let's just say that this CPU's floating-point performance left a lot to be desired - it was way behind AMD and Intel. So playing Quake in software mode sucked if you wanted 640 x 480 or higher. Inserted the 128 ZX and a tiny little file and Quake instantly turned into something that blew me off my chair..the difference was like chalk and cheese. It would only do 640 x 480 but that was good enough for me. Rented some add-on packs for Quake and just literally disappeared into my room for days lol. Interstate '76 was another game I absolutely adored: the wild, open desert; the groovy 70's theme; the incredible sound; varied missions. The slightly rough-looking polygons seem to enhance the surrealism. The only let-down was that Cyrix chip, as it just couldn't handle 'busy' battle scenes very well. I did try to over-clock this card but it didn't bode well, especially as the GPU only had a tiny little passive cooler glued onto it. I later ripped out the Cyrix chip as a relative had upgraded their rig and had a spare AMD K6-2 300. The graphics card seem to scale extremely well with this more powerful CPU. I will always remember the Riva 128 ZX as being a card that, despite it's limitations, did what it was supposed to do well and that was mostly running Direct-X games with minimal fuss. It also seemed to handle emulators surprisingly well (e.g. N64, PS1, Mame..oh God those old arcades machines on your PC..bloody awesome!!) I must admit, I didn't take to the Riva TNT 2 Vanta the same way, maybe it was because the Vanta was a stripped-down card. It also ran rather hot.. It all seems a world away now doesn't it..reading magazines, obsessing over benchmarks to the nth degree. But I also think it was an excellent learning exercise. Well thanks for reading this. Hope it brings back some happy memories for you too xD
The ATi Rage 128 is so much better than the TNT series in my opinion. Much more reliable across a wider range of applications. They also run significantly cooler which means the surviving cards are more likely to work. I've had so many dead or faulty TNT cards and I think it's because they bake themselves to death.
Hi Phil, nice video, i totally agree with your final comments that "back then we were always upgrading". My first PC was a Commodore PC10 ( PC clone 512m meg ) it came with a 3 in one graphics card, set to Hercules with the original green screen, unlike today the card had dip switches on the pcb and you changed then to go to TTL and then CGA. I added CGA monitor and while it worked fine in 4 colour games , on spreadsheet and word processor i got "CGA Snow". SO after 3 months we got some new PC's at work and they had the same issue, the dealer send out a tech and he said it was fine and nothing wrong, my boss sad i did not pay @ $3000 each for 6 PC to have then flicker and snow its driving my staff crazy, so they upgraded the cards, plus 1 spare that was given to me as a freeby - it helped but remember the monitors back then were 15hz. Price at the time is @ $150-$200 for a new card The trick was to find CGA or EGA with the composite out, this way you use the monitor for sharpness on text and the CGA 4 colour games were 16 colours when played back on a TV Eventually i went to EGA, that was fantastic 16 colours on screen not ugly 4 pukey colours in games, most games you had to get the EGA version, if you did not it auto switched back to CGA mode. This was a big price jump , about $300 for EGA monitor and card, but most people were able to sell their CGA setup or screen to some one who still had just a green screen Early cards were 8bit in the day eventually 16bit came out late 80's and popular by early 90's . I went through 3 or 4 EGA cards as i hang on to EGA in all dos versions and even in Window 3 & 3.1, at that stage there was a big $$$ jump in card and monitor if you wanted VGA. Still each EGA card was a upgrade, mainly to extra ram on board 32K 64K 128K, so often we would talk and say " hey the video card has more memory that my early PC" For most people VGA was to expensive to purchase and offered very little value for money , early games were the same, text was the same so no need, Win 3.1 was not that different EGA to VGA, but for gamers there was a reason , Wolf3d available only in VGA, well this the most influential reason why people now either upgraded video or bought a new pc, really about 1 in 5 people would see wolf3d and be amazed and would go and upgrade their setup or by a new pc just for 1 game. The upgrade just kept going , i went again into the cycle of 6 month upgrade , it was mainly in games and basically refreshed the screen faster or you did not notice the redraw. I stuck with the 3 main suppliers S3 card , Paradise , Tseng Lab but always upgraded within. The biggest 3 factors in speed was Bus type ( 8bit 16bit 24/VLB ) chipset , onboard memory, they all helped conforming with Vesa Even in wolf3d you can see staggering or the computer pauses as you approach a corner or guards activate ( for the staggering approaching a corner if a new video card did not fix it then you needed a faster hard drive or more memory or both - actually if you had 4meg pc memory and dos 5 , you could use 512k or 1 meg for the smartdrive, a few people set up RAM drive 2meg, you copied the files to the ram drive, that left 2meg for memory to run the game, due to the speed or the ram drive the 486 would run fast, with VLB video if would scream Just like today, find the bottleneck, PC / Ram / HDD / Video and spend money to fix the slowest one Today we wonder if our PC will last 3 to 5 years because after that it will not run the latest releases or AAA games, well that has been the case since day 1. In some respect the C64 and Amiga were some of the few machines that had a all in one set up and ran the same hardware for years - the games just got better
When CPU speeds doubled like every year or so. When your "brand new" system was so outdated after 18 months that no new released game was even remotely playable. (Later) When we saw more than 20% growth of performance per year, compared to todays
First benchmark: Woah, wasn't expecting that! Second benchmark: Yep, that's more like it... I had one of the 128ZX, your video pretty much sums up my experience with it Tried a Matrox m3D with it, as long as you we're playing the ridiculously short list of game compatible with the powerVR chip you we're fine... lol thanks for the upload, brought back a lot of memories... some I would have preferred to stay forgotten though :P
I got my first computer pretty late - at 13 years of age. It was the year 2000 and the first game I launched on it was Shogo Mobile Armor Division. I ran it on some better Celeron, I do not remember the video card, sadly.
This exact card Diamond Viper V550 was my first 3D accelerator card. I still remember the thrill of runing Quake II in 32bit color. I feel old and happy at the same time :D thanks for that.
2:35 - THIS IS IT! This was the benchmark I remembered from my childhood PC, the Celeron 300A build that my brother put together! I was looking for this in the past couple of months and after I gave up I just stumbled uppon it while watching some of your old videos. Awesome! I just recently started to watch your channel. So it's Final Reality by Remedy. Thank you!
I didn't know about the Nvidia Riva graphics cards (it was part of the system requirements of some late 90's games) until I've seen this video. Also, I was playing Incoming earlier and when this video came out, I noticed that you tried Incoming too (but only for benchmarking reasons).
I remember the TNT card fondly (although I had a PCI-variant instead of AGP). It was completely bottlenecked by my 166MHz Pentium CPU and the PCI-interface, but I did manage to play a lot of early GPU accelerated games decently. I think Quake II was the real showcase for me really, but I can imagine that the fps dipped below 30 at some scenes. :)
Great video! You should consider making a TNT vs TNT2M64 comparison. Those comparisons are really hard to come by. Having double the memory but half the memory bandwidth (the M64) makes the card very interesting. Here's why..: Up until certain specs (around 300-450Mhz P2/3-ish) both cards do perform quite the same, with the M64 due to having more memory being a tad ahead in higher resolutions. The more CPU power you have the more do these performances drift apart. But I would like to know how far they can actually go. The bay is awash with M64s as noone want to have them and everyone just says: Go for TNT2 Ultra instead. Even going TNT1 is supposedly better. But I have come to the conclusion that even with slower systems, the M64 gives more leeway. Also DOS compatibility should be the same for both. I would love to see an in depth comparison of these two cards to see "how similar" they actually are. Ppl say that when tangenting 1000 Mhz, the M64 gets way better. I would like to know when those differences kick in. As an M64 seems like to be a good solution when you're aiming for a TNT1 and cant find one for offer. And the M64s are also cheap as hell.
I'd also love to see a comparison with the Vanta. I've got one (which oddly enough runs at 135/135) and its at the very least cooler than the TNT (though the thermal adhesive is dead). Because the Vanta was supposed to provide better than TNT performance dirt cheap (the Vanta LT was the really terrible version).
My first experience of a TNT was at a LAN party. Pretty much everyone had VooDoo's. One of my friends showed up with a the Quake III Test (very early alpha featuring the first map Q3DM1) and we were checking it out. I noticed how much cleaner the graphics were on his machine compared to ours, and how much faster it ran. Asked what card he had, it was a new 16MB Riva TNT. 2D and 3D on a single card again! Later I played some Aliens vs Predator on his machine and I was sold. Got rid of my VooDoo 1 card to a friend and bought a TNT.
I bought a Creative Labs TNT 16 MB in late 1998 out of curiosity and replaced my old Matrox Millennium II with it. That was the first time I thought 3dfx was in trouble. The TNT was fast enough to play games in 1024x768 pixels and 32 bit color depth. My two Voodoo2 in SLI mode were also able to do that, but only in 16 bit and with a much blurrier picture and washed out 256x256 textures. Graphics on the TNT were so much sharper and crispier. Later in 1999 I swapped the TNT and the two Voodoo2 cards against a Voodoo3 3500 AGP but the 3dfx magic was gone. 3dfx had lost the lead and the only thing speaking for a 3dfx card in 99 was the glide support that many older games relied on. 3dfx managed to regain some of the lost ground with the Voodoo 5 5500 but it was too late, all that 50k catering food that employees digested each month had eaten away all the financial resources and 3dfx went into bankruptcy and Nvidia was able to buy them. Okay, maybe buying STB Systems also played a part, but I think the major part of the bankruptcy came from the catering costs. ^^
Could you maybe do a video of Nvidia's Riva TNT vs 3dfx Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee? I could barely find any articles about them online and the ones that have benchmarks use weak processors. A video of that would be much appreciated 😃
Very nostalgic video. The first PC that I bought with my own money was a custom-built PII-450 with the same exact Diamond Viper V550 TNT1, later upgraded to a PIII-550 w/Geforce 2 MX. All my friends/relatives had AMD K62-380 type machines with awful VIA AGP chipsets and 3dfx cards. My machine smoked everyone else's in any game that wasn't optimized for Glide over Direct3D/OpenGL (Unreal was a notable game that had issues on my computer when I first tried it, but they resolved things over time).
Those were the days... I had the Riva TNT and a AMD K6 2 400 back in late 1998 and a mate of mine had the ELSA Victory Riva 128... man was he jealous :)
I still have my diamond viper v 330, with the riva 128zx, what a great card! I still use it from time to time. I have the PCI version which allows to use system ram as video memory, just like the AGP version.
My first video card was a Diamond Viper V550 (Riva TNT) :D I got my first PC for free back in 2006 and I used it as my main PC until December 2009. I still use it to play some older games Specs: Intel Celeron 333MHz 384mb ram (I think it had 64mb when I first got it) Diamond Micronics C400 Diamond Viper V550 Windows 98, later upgraded to Windows ME
Until 2009? Now that's some dedication. I actually replaced my shity Pentium 4 (2.66) GHz with a Core 2 in late 2008, and that platform kept running until 2013 when I built my curent rig (except for some minor changes and upgrades here and there)
After that Celeron I used a netbook with an Atom N270 and 1gb ram until 2011 when I bought a Pentium 4 3.0GHz PC. And late 2012 I bought a Core2 Duo E6300 PC and after that in june 2013 I bought a Xeon W3520 system. And now I have: Intel Xeon X5670 @ 4.32GHz 16gb DDR3 Asus P6X58D-E Asus GTX 960 Turbo OC
The Riva TNT was my first 3d Accelerator card back then after I moved from consoles to PC gaming. I was in awe when I first played SW Rogue Squadron and I saw that fog.. I told myself that was reality and there wouldn't be anything closer to reality than that.. LMAO. Fast forward decades into the future.. LOL. I cannot imagine going back in time to the 90s and showing someone the games from 2023. I wonder if that impression will be like someone from 2099 traveling back to 2022 and showing us what they game on. Talk about perspectives! : D
I had a Voodoo 2 - 12 GB on a P200 MMX@225 MHz(OC) back in 98. Did not care for the Riva 128. 3D performance was not up with the V2. But the TNT was the first interesting 2D/3D cards I remember. Still... My first Nvidia card was a GF 2 MX in 2000 :)
Riva cards never was a hit...Geforce 256 was a future proof card for the day and the rise of Nvidia. Along with the much higher Voodoo Brand awareness that is the reason these cards did not sell well. But 3dfx made some serious mistakes...like the 16bit choice..so now we have Nvidia and ATI and no 3dfx
Did you do a benchmark vid on this? I don't remem, sorry =( Also, you should do a graphics comparision between a ATI card and a nvidia card, I remember that you could see different color quality between the two(right away, in the bios screen for example) Great vids man, keep it up!
Yea I did a sound card roundup, but on Super Socket 7. Could be interesting doing something like that again with a Pentium II or III. Regardless of speed, the Live! is THE Windows 98 sound card IMO. And also the Vortex 2, but that one is more specialised IMO for A3D and headphones.
My first videocard was Creative Riva TNT 16MB. I still keep that one somewhere around. It was cheaper than Voodoo, that's the reason I bought it, also it had 2D and 3D acceleration in one... with Voodoo you needed another card for 2D.
What drivers are you using for the Riva TNT? I'm in the middle of figuring out a Windows 98 retro build and I'm having issues with mine. I have the AGP Viper V550 and an ECS K7S5A motherboard, Athlon XP 2400+ and a single stick of 512MB DDR RAM. The system boots into Windows 98 fine, but when I install either the OG Diamond driver or any of the nvidia drivers for the riva TNT, I get a black screen when trying to set a resolution or bit depth higher than 640x480 16 colors. Could my card be broken? I installed the SiS AGP drivers, but could there be something wrong with the motherboard?
my first pc was a pentium 200mhz MMX with an ati rage 2+ in 1998. that ati was more of a 3d "deccelerator" and lacked many features, so gaming was mostly in software mode. i was 12 and really got interested in hard and software. my parents agreed to upgrade that system to a K6-2 350mhz with a riva TNT a year later. man, that was a difference! that said i never really noticed the 16bit dithering back in the days (only when actively watching for it), but its really obvious here. guess the run-of-the-mil crt "helped" ;)
Nvidia may have been making a big deal about 32bit colours, but 3DFX did manage to get almost 32bit quality despite the 16bit colour limit (its difficult to tell the difference between the 128ZX, TNT and Voodoo2 on my 1024x768 85Hz LCD monitor). Pretty much they were to 16bit as Matrox were to 32bit.
Dabombinable Mi Agreed. In motion I can mostly see it in explosions or smoke. Quake 3 is a good test, but all these cards struggle in that game. In Incoming you can see it sometimes, but more clearly on a LCD, don't think it was as obvious on the softer looking CRTs.
Nice Video, I would like to ask for your advise with regards to Erazor ii 16mb pci,ELSA. What can i replace this with currently ? I would also like to replace a the board which is obselete. Celeron 2.0GHZ,FSB 800MHZ, 2GB RAM. Any help is appreciated.Thank you.
TNT + Pentium II 450 = my first ever PC (Dell XPS R450). Dell's barebone drivers had this thing unable to play Half-Life outside of software mode so we ended up adding a Voodoo 2 just a few months later. On the one hand I wish I knew about drivers (outside of the CD) but on the other having a TNT AND a 3dfx combo was awesome in 1998/1999.
I had originally bought the Viper V330 a few months before the TNT came to the scene, so I never did this particular upgrade, instead going for the Viper 770 Ultra. I am interested as to why the R128 scales so much in Final Reality bench. I never would have ever expected that. Must not be using any but the very most basic features of the chips I guess, clearly caring much more about CPU power. I will have to dl final reality I guess, if I don't already have it and give it a spin.
Nice I had exactly the same setup back in the days.. AOpen AX6BC and Diamond Viper V550.. overclocked the bus speed to 133mhz if i am not mistaken... the 440 chipset had some nice OC options.
I now that means no. because i cant im asking you to review it so i can decide do i want to buy it! and money isnt a strong point for me im only 12 years old!
Phil’s other video showing half-life running really well on a riva128. I had a friend with a riva128 / p266 and it ran Q2/HL just fine once the drivers matured, albeit with some minor glitches. Faster than the original voodoo. ruclips.net/video/uRzhypeifFY/видео.html
Think it had 64 bit ram, which was totally useless for performance, plus Nvidia's 16-bit quality was deliberately bad to force 32 bit, making it even more useless.
6 лет назад+2
My first vga was some pci cirrus logic one, second tnt2 that actually could play some games. Then radeon 9200 se came around that was fine as well for older titles back then. Until it died and I was stuck on integrted gpus on laptops until ryzen and rx580 sparked gaming back into me.
All the way through the horrible time of intel graphics "accelerators" Can only hope there were some proper integrated solutions form time.
6 лет назад
Well intel was not that bad I could play some strategy games; black and white, port royale and worms armagedon. And on my last laptop there was at amd gpu with gig of ram and it could manage shadow of mordor at lowest possible settings and rocket league at low 720p is playable in cinematic 24fps:)
ELSA Cards ... how well i remember Elsa ... Elsa Gladiac, i am still in love. Back in this days i switched from generation to generation between ELSA and Creative Labs
I just added a PCI TNT into my retro Socket 7 K6-266 system last week. The processor seems to be a big bottleneck. Just ordered an AT slot 1 board with a PII 350, hopefully this will fix some of that issue. I just hope Unreal Tournament will be playable now.
I suggest Open GL - In directx on a old win 95 (ME ?) if you go bellow 640x480 resolution the drivers might never be the same - what I mean is a performance drop whenever you change it afterward's - mening if they was fast you but wanted faster fps and went belllow 640x and wasnt satisfied then that the fps you got at 640x is longer there and never will unless you reinstall windows. ( Happened to me ) . And Ut99 might like that you change the cache ? from 4 mb? to to 40 mb?in the ini-file . Not shure by now..... Anyway TNT was faster thatGeforce 200mx in Open GL maybe software mode but not directx.
Whoa.. I had these exact two models of cards. I upgraded from the Elsa to the Diamond.. crazy The riva 128's output was ugly as hell. Best looking card i had back in the day was the verite 2200, it just wasn't very fast.
I would love to see you compare the Nvidia cards of the following year where there should be a DRASTIC bump in performance as a Graphics card was released which changed the core feature which all graphics cards still to this day feature and changed the way we upgraded our PCs: Do the Nvidia Riva TNT2 vs the Nvidia Geforce 256. The Geforce 256 being the card with what's considered the world's first GPU which we consider a GPU still to this day and which all graphics cards still have today and is the core feature. The TNT2 and Geforce were both released in 1999, only separated by 1/2 a year.. The TNT2 released in March 1999 and the Geforce in October 1999, So it should be neat to see the performance increase if someone with disposable income upgraded from a TNT 2 to a Geforce. I just wonder how much of a performance increase that GPU with it's graphical features and on-board processing to offload these things from the CPU did to improve performance compared to a TNT2 which still heavily relied on the CPU to process these same graphical features. Furthermore, the Geforce 256 (and all Geforce cards that followed) is the card responsible that changed the way the graphics market functioned; encouraging shorter graphics card lifetimes, and placing less emphasis on the CPU for gaming. Prior to the Geforce series, you could buy a graphics card and it would last you for years and you didn't feel the pressured or have the need to upgrade as a CPU upgrade was more important for performance, but after the Geforce 256 and the performance increases that each new GPU brought to the table with each generation, meant that if you didn't upgrade more frequently, you were missing out on leaps and bounds of performance increases, also without the need to upgrade your CPU, etc; GPUs caused CPUs to take a backseat to graphic cards for gamers, so now it's the otherway around, you can use the same CPU for years and years and just upgrade your graphics card for noticeable/significant performance increases in gaming... i.e. people who still have Gen 1 to Gen 4 core i5 or i7 cpus but with the latest GTX 1080 Ti and don't see much (if any) of a performance bottleneck in gaming caused by the older cpu.
Didn't the RIVA 128 have poor drivers at first with lots of bad screen tearing and that was fixed months later? Anyway I am surprised at the amazing performance of the TNT over the RIVA 128 quite impressive.
Yea that's the good thing with Retro PC Gaming, we can avoid all these issues and enjoy patched games, mature drivers and whatnot. The RIVA 128 for example, yea that card got much better with later drivers.
I had a pentium 2 350 and was Slot 1. It came on an entire daughter board that sat perpendicular to the motherboard. I didn't realise they made board mounted ones. Was it socketed or surface mount?
I completely agree with your final conclusion. Today in order to make a worthy upgrade you don't have to buy the exact next gen of the gpu you already own. Performance per dollar gains are much greater if you upgrade to a card 2 gens ahead e.g. from a gtx750ti to a gtx1050ti.
300a @ 450 on abit bh6 combined with a v550 and a 3dfx card from the previous build was probably the best way to spend a student loan. Food meh. IIRC the price of the tnt1 wasn't that crazy either. Certainly unlike the current high end cards which cost more than the other parts combined. All the spare time went to teamfortress and renegades mod for tribes.
Hey I got one of those riva 128 i think it is now you did it going to have to go dig it out and play some games on it P4 might let it breath and use all it's performance it what I got handy got a old diamond card don't recall what it is but I ran half-life in software mode and the colors were amazing then tried quake same thing was very bright colors it was different.
i have an old pentium 3 running at 1ghz with 1gb of ddr 400 ram, could to tell me an agp gpu to make use of it (for web browsing, some games (like robocraft), and watching videos in hq (720p-1080p) if possible)? (i'm running windows 7 ultimate 32 bit on it)
Hey Phil, i own an AGP GPU that i haven't used in years and i don't want it. Do you want me to send it to you and test it? I don't wanna throw it away. It was a beast during its time :)
What's the difference with having the heatsink on the chipset on a Slot 1 motherboard? Is it important? I have a Slot 1 motherboard in my retro PC that doesn't have the heatsink, but a lot of motherboards I've seen online with the same Intel BX chipset have one.
Every couple of months there was a brand new graphics company with their own brand new chipset... 3DFX was able to secure some major mind share and wins by having their chipset be used for actual arcade games even though it unfortunately ended up in bankruptcies for Atari Games because their 3d graphics arcade games were not so successful nor as good and needed sequels and polish as well as arcade centers in the U.S. needed support like they had in Japan. 3DFX got caught by Nvidia, Matrox, Videologic, 3DLabs and ATI with 32bit image quality and performance... so that statement from 3DFX just meant that their 32bit solution wasn't ready... it also meant that they made a mistake making a deal with Sega of America's staff for the next generation (premature and very costly generation jump) during 96 to 97 which iirc 3DFX press release or someone there claimed that was the reason why a next gen 32bit 3DFX chipset wasn't ready in 97 and 98... That is a similar message that ATI used to explain why they didn't have a GPU ready to challenge the Nvidia G80 or GeForce 8800 GTX in Direct X 10 but that was weird because Microsoft knew when Vista and DX 10 would be estimated to release so they should have waited and thus ATI would have had a more powerful GPU solution for say a 2007 launched Xbox instead of 2005 regardless of whatever architecture features their GPU had because by 2 year PC GPU performance nearly tripled in performance and features. I feel there is a need for someone to say have a specific PC armed with an Intel Pentium III 1Ghz FSB 133Mhz and IDE 66... or even add an IDE 133 controller card if feasible because 2000s IDE HDDs had larger caches and were much faster at loading up games (before the game code got bigger) so technically it's almost like an SSD effect where the Windows 98SE O.S. and games load up very quickly and when loading levels there is less waiting which is probably what you are missing here in the experience of back then... I could see a dramatic increase in how the game just loaded up using the same HDD on a PIII 1Ghz versus an AMD ATHLON 3200+ XP CPU and 256MB of RAM in dual channel mode (Quake III, Jedi Knight II, RtCW and others which happened to be early 2000s PC games... Great video... outside of not gaining framerate performance but maxing out the thruput it probably doesn't hurt to go 1GHz* *lmaooo
I have just bought a TNT2, can't wait to test it :D :D Great video! :)
I remember upgrading my P2-450 Dell with a Voodoo2 and 128ZX, to just the Diamond Viper V770 Ultra TNT2, in 99. With that much difference in GLQuake, Glide was dead to me. Exhilarating times. Love the video.
3dfx 3 with Glide and opengl was good in 2000
Yes it was. I loved my V1 and V2, so it wasn't an easy choice.
God damn my TNT2 back in the day was the shit
Great video! :) I actually went from a Riva 128 to a TNT myself, back around when the card was first released. This was on a P2-300mhz and Half Life got much noticeably nicer when the Riva 128 was replaced with the TNT. The 128 was great though.. I still remember being in awe when the driver with OpenGL support was released and I could change Quake 2 from software rendering to faster 3D with all the fancy lighting :D
I so regret throwing out all my old hardware and computers as a kid..... Had an amazing collection but didn't know better and got rid of it because we needed some space..
Same here mate. I was running out of space and figured it was all worthless. How wrong I was..
@@QuadTubeChannel Yes, it is a common mistake. Many people that doesnt know (that in future they start to be entertaining by retro hardware), just thinks is garbage and junk, that take up space, and try to sell it as fast as possible, and cheap, otherwise they have to throw it out. Now this is a chance for some retro collectors to take the stuff cheap. But it's harder and harder, as these things was mostly thrown away in past 10-15 years.
Actually if you needed the space to be honest selling or throwing out these hardware may not have been an unwise choice. Nobody knows which hardware might be valuable 20 years down the road. Not everybody has the luxury of hoarding on to 20 years of retro hardware and hoping it will be monetised someday. Especially if you don't do this for a living. I have sold hundreds of computers parts for the past 20 years and have no regrets even if they become valuable some day. That's because I want a clutter free home and don't have the luxury of hoarding stuff. And I don't do this for a living. Just enjoying these videos online is good enough. Priority of life choices. :)
My 2c.
The TNT has also had its reputation as mainboard killer at the time. Back in 99, I've had some strange BAT/ATX hybrid fomat slot 1 board with both ATX and BAT power connectors, running a 300Mhz Mendocino@450. When I plugged in the TNT and switched it on, the linear regulator providing 3.3V to the AGP port exploded. Since I was using an ATX power supply already, I was able to fix it with a patch wire to the ATX connectors 3.3V pins. These were exciting times back then, with each new hardware release exploring new frontiers...
SL2W8 crew!
Oh my, this brought me back. I bought my first modern PC back in 1996, a Pentium 133 with some kind of crappy graphics card with 1 MB of EDO RAM. A Diamond Viper 330 (Riva 128 with 4MB RAM) brought a world of difference. Not only in games, but being able to jump from 1024x768 at 16 bit color and 60 Hz to 1280x1024 at 32 bit color and 85 Hz made a world of difference at normal usage. It cost me what I thought was a fortune back then but I still consider it one of my best computer purchases ever. But I also remember lusting like crazy over the TNT when it came.
Awesome video. I like how you went through the details of what you got when you upgraded. Nice idea. Keep them coming.
At the time, I stuck with Voodoo from Voodoo Rush to Voodoo 3 3000 then 3500. I didn't jump over until the Geforce 3.
Voodoo 2 SLI & Geforce 3 should go well to gether and be able to run basically any game.
It's more than I want to spend right now. I lean more toward modern gaming. My last pickup was a Sound Blaster X AE-5 by I pump my retro PC through it along with the MIDI>Roland>USB pass-through.
I love these videos, from the time I was also keeping up with many videocards specs and moved from an 3dfx voodoo to entry level nvidia geforce2mx card , still a big upgrade lol.
Great video xD
I had the Riva 128 ZX PCI version with 4 MB vRAM. I still have it somewhere. I paid £25 for this thing, which also came with the full version of Interstate '76, as well as a football game and motorbike racing game I can't remember.
I have very fonder memories of this car; in particular Interstate '76 and GLQuake. I actually liked that slightly rough look. At the time I was running a Cyrix MII 333+ (75 MHz FSB and 225 MHz core clock) , and let's just say that this CPU's floating-point performance left a lot to be desired - it was way behind AMD and Intel. So playing Quake in software mode sucked if you wanted 640 x 480 or higher. Inserted the 128 ZX and a tiny little file and Quake instantly turned into something that blew me off my chair..the difference was like chalk and cheese. It would only do 640 x 480 but that was good enough for me. Rented some add-on packs for Quake and just literally disappeared into my room for days lol.
Interstate '76 was another game I absolutely adored: the wild, open desert; the groovy 70's theme; the incredible sound; varied missions. The slightly rough-looking polygons seem to enhance the surrealism. The only let-down was that Cyrix chip, as it just couldn't handle 'busy' battle scenes very well.
I did try to over-clock this card but it didn't bode well, especially as the GPU only had a tiny little passive cooler glued onto it.
I later ripped out the Cyrix chip as a relative had upgraded their rig and had a spare AMD K6-2 300. The graphics card seem to scale extremely well with this more powerful CPU. I will always remember the Riva 128 ZX as being a card that, despite it's limitations, did what it was supposed to do well and that was mostly running Direct-X games with minimal fuss. It also seemed to handle emulators surprisingly well (e.g. N64, PS1, Mame..oh God those old arcades machines on your PC..bloody awesome!!)
I must admit, I didn't take to the Riva TNT 2 Vanta the same way, maybe it was because the Vanta was a stripped-down card. It also ran rather hot..
It all seems a world away now doesn't it..reading magazines, obsessing over benchmarks to the nth degree. But I also think it was an excellent learning exercise.
Well thanks for reading this. Hope it brings back some happy memories for you too xD
The ATi Rage 128 is so much better than the TNT series in my opinion. Much more reliable across a wider range of applications. They also run significantly cooler which means the surviving cards are more likely to work. I've had so many dead or faulty TNT cards and I think it's because they bake themselves to death.
Hi Phil, nice video, i totally agree with your final comments that "back then we were always upgrading". My first PC was a Commodore PC10 ( PC clone 512m meg ) it came with a 3 in one graphics card, set to Hercules with the original green screen, unlike today the card had dip switches on the pcb and you changed then to go to TTL and then CGA.
I added CGA monitor and while it worked fine in 4 colour games , on spreadsheet and word processor i got "CGA Snow". SO after 3 months we got some new PC's at work and they had the same issue, the dealer send out a tech and he said it was fine and nothing wrong, my boss sad i did not pay @ $3000 each for 6 PC to have then flicker and snow its driving my staff crazy, so they upgraded the cards, plus 1 spare that was given to me as a freeby - it helped but remember the monitors back then were 15hz. Price at the time is @ $150-$200 for a new card
The trick was to find CGA or EGA with the composite out, this way you use the monitor for sharpness on text and the CGA 4 colour games were 16 colours when played back on a TV
Eventually i went to EGA, that was fantastic 16 colours on screen not ugly 4 pukey colours in games, most games you had to get the EGA version, if you did not it auto switched back to CGA mode. This was a big price jump , about $300 for EGA monitor and card, but most people were able to sell their CGA setup or screen to some one who still had just a green screen Early cards were 8bit in the day eventually 16bit came out late 80's and popular by early 90's . I went through 3 or 4 EGA cards as i hang on to EGA in all dos versions and even in Window 3 & 3.1, at that stage there was a big $$$ jump in card and monitor if you wanted VGA. Still each EGA card was a upgrade, mainly to extra ram on board 32K 64K 128K, so often we would talk and say " hey the video card has more memory that my early PC"
For most people VGA was to expensive to purchase and offered very little value for money , early games were the same, text was the same so no need, Win 3.1 was not that different EGA to VGA, but for gamers there was a reason , Wolf3d available only in VGA, well this the most influential reason why people now either upgraded video or bought a new pc, really about 1 in 5 people would see wolf3d and be amazed and would go and upgrade their setup or by a new pc just for 1 game.
The upgrade just kept going , i went again into the cycle of 6 month upgrade , it was mainly in games and basically refreshed the screen faster or you did not notice the redraw. I stuck with the 3 main suppliers S3 card , Paradise , Tseng Lab but always upgraded within.
The biggest 3 factors in speed was Bus type ( 8bit 16bit 24/VLB ) chipset , onboard memory, they all helped conforming with Vesa
Even in wolf3d you can see staggering or the computer pauses as you approach a corner or guards activate ( for the staggering approaching a corner if a new video card did not fix it then you needed a faster hard drive or more memory or both - actually if you had 4meg pc memory and dos 5 , you could use 512k or 1 meg for the smartdrive, a few people set up RAM drive 2meg, you copied the files to the ram drive, that left 2meg for memory to run the game, due to the speed or the ram drive the 486 would run fast, with VLB video if would scream
Just like today, find the bottleneck, PC / Ram / HDD / Video and spend money to fix the slowest one
Today we wonder if our PC will last 3 to 5 years because after that it will not run the latest releases or AAA games, well that has been the case since day 1. In some respect the C64 and Amiga were some of the few machines that had a all in one set up and ran the same hardware for years - the games just got better
Rare to see Tseng Labs mentioned. The ET6000 was my first graphics card, personally.
When CPU speeds doubled like every year or so.
When your "brand new" system was so outdated after 18 months that no new released game was even remotely playable.
(Later) When we saw more than 20% growth of performance per year, compared to todays
First benchmark: Woah, wasn't expecting that!
Second benchmark: Yep, that's more like it...
I had one of the 128ZX, your video pretty much sums up my experience with it
Tried a Matrox m3D with it, as long as you we're playing the ridiculously short list of game compatible with the powerVR chip you we're fine... lol
thanks for the upload, brought back a lot of memories... some I would have preferred to stay forgotten though :P
I'd like to forget everything about Matrox lol, especially the Millennium.
Fantastic video Phil!
I'm just 30 but i'm already feeling fucking old. I remember playing these games on realese wtf
I got my first computer pretty late - at 13 years of age. It was the year 2000 and the first game I launched on it was Shogo Mobile Armor Division. I ran it on some better Celeron, I do not remember the video card, sadly.
haha tell me about it
This exact card Diamond Viper V550 was my first 3D accelerator card. I still remember the thrill of runing Quake II in 32bit color. I feel old and happy at the same time :D thanks for that.
I had the TNT 1 , it was a upgrade from a Voodoo 1 with a 233mhz mmx to a Celeron 333mhz and TNT1
Great Video Phil, Nice to see the difference. I only have a 4mb V330, but they were awesome cards for their time.
2:35 - THIS IS IT! This was the benchmark I remembered from my childhood PC, the Celeron 300A build that my brother put together! I was looking for this in the past couple of months and after I gave up I just stumbled uppon it while watching some of your old videos. Awesome! I just recently started to watch your channel.
So it's Final Reality by Remedy. Thank you!
Awesome 😎
I didn't know about the Nvidia Riva graphics cards (it was part of the system requirements of some late 90's games) until I've seen this video. Also, I was playing Incoming earlier and when this video came out, I noticed that you tried Incoming too (but only for benchmarking reasons).
Just been given a Pentium 2 machine with a RIVA TNT in it! Super pleased. Got Unreal running on it so far, just need to get some more time to tinker.
I have a retro pc with a tnt2, great card and plenty fast for old games! Good video!
I remember the TNT card fondly (although I had a PCI-variant instead of AGP). It was completely bottlenecked by my 166MHz Pentium CPU and the PCI-interface, but I did manage to play a lot of early GPU accelerated games decently. I think Quake II was the real showcase for me really, but I can imagine that the fps dipped below 30 at some scenes. :)
Great video!
You should consider making a TNT vs TNT2M64 comparison. Those comparisons are really hard to come by. Having double the memory but half the memory bandwidth (the M64) makes the card very interesting. Here's why..:
Up until certain specs (around 300-450Mhz P2/3-ish) both cards do perform quite the same, with the M64 due to having more memory being a tad ahead in higher resolutions. The more CPU power you have the more do these performances drift apart. But I would like to know how far they can actually go.
The bay is awash with M64s as noone want to have them and everyone just says: Go for TNT2 Ultra instead. Even going TNT1 is supposedly better. But I have come to the conclusion that even with slower systems, the M64 gives more leeway.
Also DOS compatibility should be the same for both. I would love to see an in depth comparison of these two cards to see "how similar" they actually are. Ppl say that when tangenting 1000 Mhz, the M64 gets way better. I would like to know when those differences kick in. As an M64 seems like to be a good solution when you're aiming for a TNT1 and cant find one for offer. And the M64s are also cheap as hell.
And it's dirt cheap and flooding eBay. Looking for a "real" TNT2 is actually hard with all the M64 cards :D
64H the standard TNT2 M64 is ~10% faster than the TNT 1. They have very similar performance.
I'd also love to see a comparison with the Vanta. I've got one (which oddly enough runs at 135/135) and its at the very least cooler than the TNT (though the thermal adhesive is dead). Because the Vanta was supposed to provide better than TNT performance dirt cheap (the Vanta LT was the really terrible version).
Love your vidz keep em up happy aus day!!
My first experience of a TNT was at a LAN party. Pretty much everyone had VooDoo's. One of my friends showed up with a the Quake III Test (very early alpha featuring the first map Q3DM1) and we were checking it out. I noticed how much cleaner the graphics were on his machine compared to ours, and how much faster it ran. Asked what card he had, it was a new 16MB Riva TNT. 2D and 3D on a single card again!
Later I played some Aliens vs Predator on his machine and I was sold. Got rid of my VooDoo 1 card to a friend and bought a TNT.
I bought a Creative Labs TNT 16 MB in late 1998 out of curiosity and replaced my old Matrox Millennium II with it. That was the first time I thought 3dfx was in trouble. The TNT was fast enough to play games in 1024x768 pixels and 32 bit color depth. My two Voodoo2 in SLI mode were also able to do that, but only in 16 bit and with a much blurrier picture and washed out 256x256 textures. Graphics on the TNT were so much sharper and crispier. Later in 1999 I swapped the TNT and the two Voodoo2 cards against a Voodoo3 3500 AGP but the 3dfx magic was gone. 3dfx had lost the lead and the only thing speaking for a 3dfx card in 99 was the glide support that many older games relied on.
3dfx managed to regain some of the lost ground with the Voodoo 5 5500 but it was too late, all that 50k catering food that employees digested each month had eaten away all the financial resources and 3dfx went into bankruptcy and Nvidia was able to buy them. Okay, maybe buying STB Systems also played a part, but I think the major part of the bankruptcy came from the catering costs. ^^
Could you maybe do a video of Nvidia's Riva TNT vs 3dfx Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee? I could barely find any articles about them online and the ones that have benchmarks use weak processors. A video of that would be much appreciated 😃
Very nostalgic video. The first PC that I bought with my own money was a custom-built PII-450 with the same exact Diamond Viper V550 TNT1, later upgraded to a PIII-550 w/Geforce 2 MX. All my friends/relatives had AMD K62-380 type machines with awful VIA AGP chipsets and 3dfx cards. My machine smoked everyone else's in any game that wasn't optimized for Glide over Direct3D/OpenGL (Unreal was a notable game that had issues on my computer when I first tried it, but they resolved things over time).
Those were the days...
I had the Riva TNT and a AMD K6 2 400 back in late 1998 and a mate of mine had the ELSA Victory Riva 128... man was he jealous :)
nice to see you use the old but good everest software xD
Th3N3ll Great software!
I still have my diamond viper v 330, with the riva 128zx, what a great card! I still use it from time to time. I have the PCI version which allows to use system ram as video memory, just like the AGP version.
Oh man. I had a P][450, paid $450 for it, and the Celeron300a came out a couple weeks later. Also had a TNT, and a TNT2Ultra. Fun times.
Yeah. Had I known, I would have waited and bought a Celeron 300A instead.
My first video card was a Diamond Viper V550 (Riva TNT) :D I got my first PC for free back in 2006 and I used it as my main PC until December 2009. I still use it to play some older games
Specs:
Intel Celeron 333MHz
384mb ram (I think it had 64mb when I first got it)
Diamond Micronics C400
Diamond Viper V550
Windows 98, later upgraded to Windows ME
Until 2009?
Now that's some dedication. I actually replaced my shity Pentium 4 (2.66) GHz with a Core 2 in late 2008, and that platform kept running until 2013 when I built my curent rig (except for some minor changes and upgrades here and there)
After that Celeron I used a netbook with an Atom N270 and 1gb ram until 2011 when I bought a Pentium 4 3.0GHz PC. And late 2012 I bought a Core2 Duo E6300 PC and after that in june 2013 I bought a Xeon W3520 system.
And now I have:
Intel Xeon X5670 @ 4.32GHz
16gb DDR3
Asus P6X58D-E
Asus GTX 960 Turbo OC
nVidia Riva 128 and Riva TNT is a good gap for testing these videocards. Good choice for this video! :)
The Riva TNT was my first 3d Accelerator card back then after I moved from consoles to PC gaming. I was in awe when I first played SW Rogue Squadron and I saw that fog.. I told myself that was reality and there wouldn't be anything closer to reality than that.. LMAO. Fast forward decades into the future.. LOL. I cannot imagine going back in time to the 90s and showing someone the games from 2023. I wonder if that impression will be like someone from 2099 traveling back to 2022 and showing us what they game on. Talk about perspectives! : D
I had a Voodoo 2 - 12 GB on a P200 MMX@225 MHz(OC) back in 98.
Did not care for the Riva 128. 3D performance was not up with the V2. But the TNT was the first interesting 2D/3D cards I remember. Still... My first Nvidia card was a GF 2 MX in 2000 :)
You mean 12MB ;) (12GB on GF 1080Ti) . One letter and made such a big astronomicall difference :D
Hmm how about the tnt ultra? Or was there only an ultrs variant for tnt2? I like that you're testing these cards out!
I had a TNT, loved it. Back then i bought every GPU
Riva cards never was a hit...Geforce 256 was a future proof card for the day and the rise of Nvidia. Along with the much higher Voodoo Brand awareness that is the reason these cards did not sell well. But 3dfx made some serious mistakes...like the 16bit choice..so now we have Nvidia and ATI and no 3dfx
Good job!
I get that the Voodoo cars couldn't render games in 32 bit colour, but could they display the Windows desktop in 32 bit colour?
Yup that works just fine.
back in the day i upgraded from voodoo 1 to voodoo 2
My first computer ever, back in '98 when I was 17, had a Diamond Viper V550 alongside a Pentium 333. I was playing Half Life for nights... good times!
The tnt2 was pretty cheap in 1999. Leaps in performance were big, and it was easy to find these GPUs even in cheap computers.
I remember back in this time period, adding a sound blaster card would also give you 2-3 fps, no shit man.
^.^
Yes, the Live! was known to be the fastest one I believe.
Did you do a benchmark vid on this? I don't remem, sorry =(
Also, you should do a graphics comparision between a ATI card and a nvidia card, I remember that you could see different color quality between the two(right away, in the bios screen for example)
Great vids man, keep it up!
Yea I did a sound card roundup, but on Super Socket 7. Could be interesting doing something like that again with a Pentium II or III. Regardless of speed, the Live! is THE Windows 98 sound card IMO. And also the Vortex 2, but that one is more specialised IMO for A3D and headphones.
My first videocard was Creative Riva TNT 16MB. I still keep that one somewhere around. It was cheaper than Voodoo, that's the reason I bought it, also it had 2D and 3D acceleration in one... with Voodoo you needed another card for 2D.
What drivers are you using for the Riva TNT? I'm in the middle of figuring out a Windows 98 retro build and I'm having issues with mine. I have the AGP Viper V550 and an ECS K7S5A motherboard, Athlon XP 2400+ and a single stick of 512MB DDR RAM. The system boots into Windows 98 fine, but when I install either the OG Diamond driver or any of the nvidia drivers for the riva TNT, I get a black screen when trying to set a resolution or bit depth higher than 640x480 16 colors. Could my card be broken? I installed the SiS AGP drivers, but could there be something wrong with the motherboard?
Good old TNT2 was an amazing card when it came out, Half life ftw! :)
my first pc was a pentium 200mhz MMX with an ati rage 2+ in 1998. that ati was more of a 3d "deccelerator" and lacked many features, so gaming was mostly in software mode. i was 12 and really got interested in hard and software. my parents agreed to upgrade that system to a K6-2 350mhz with a riva TNT a year later. man, that was a difference!
that said i never really noticed the 16bit dithering back in the days (only when actively watching for it), but its really obvious here. guess the run-of-the-mil crt "helped" ;)
The dithering in alpha textures in Unreal made me buy a Voodoo2 back in the day, even though my PC already had a Riva 128 ZX.
Nvidia may have been making a big deal about 32bit colours, but 3DFX did manage to get almost 32bit quality despite the 16bit colour limit (its difficult to tell the difference between the 128ZX, TNT and Voodoo2 on my 1024x768 85Hz LCD monitor). Pretty much they were to 16bit as Matrox were to 32bit.
Dabombinable Mi Agreed. In motion I can mostly see it in explosions or smoke. Quake 3 is a good test, but all these cards struggle in that game. In Incoming you can see it sometimes, but more clearly on a LCD, don't think it was as obvious on the softer looking CRTs.
How was 16 bit better on the TNT?
I still have the Riva TNT2 in my Dell Dimension 4100.
absolutely on time
Hey there :D Do you have an idea about what floppy/ide like connector does on the riva 128 and tnt?
1998 bench is Quake2, not incoming or 3d mark. FYI: there also render option in Q2.
Thank you! 🙏
Nice Video, I would like to ask for your advise with regards to Erazor ii 16mb pci,ELSA. What can i replace this with currently ?
I would also like to replace a the board which is obselete. Celeron 2.0GHZ,FSB 800MHZ, 2GB RAM. Any help is appreciated.Thank you.
I have no Riva128. I do however have the Viper V550 in the PCI edition. It is an active cooled card. The vga signal quality is really great.
Another Linux Guy You need to get an old 1998'ish machine then. ;-) Like a P-II or K6-II machine.
Another Linux Guy I have had the TNT-v550 that I have, running on a P-III-933 when I tested it. Things do not allways have to be strict era correct. 😉
Riva TNT was my first 3D card. My big bro was disappointed in it though, because it did not run Glide games, and bought himself a Voodoo 3.
I feel old, and back then I could not afford anything
The stone age didnt have money...
Yes I just called you a boomer
And very very old
TNT + Pentium II 450 = my first ever PC (Dell XPS R450). Dell's barebone drivers had this thing unable to play Half-Life outside of software mode so we ended up adding a Voodoo 2 just a few months later. On the one hand I wish I knew about drivers (outside of the CD) but on the other having a TNT AND a 3dfx combo was awesome in 1998/1999.
I had originally bought the Viper V330 a few months before the TNT came to the scene, so I never did this particular upgrade, instead going for the Viper 770 Ultra. I am interested as to why the R128 scales so much in Final Reality bench. I never would have ever expected that. Must not be using any but the very most basic features of the chips I guess, clearly caring much more about CPU power. I will have to dl final reality I guess, if I don't already have it and give it a spin.
Yea 640x480x16 and very simple graphics I guess.
Nice I had exactly the same setup back in the days.. AOpen AX6BC and Diamond Viper V550.. overclocked the bus speed to 133mhz if i am not mistaken... the 440 chipset had some nice OC options.
Hi. Anyone know where can I find elsa riva tnt smd datasheet? Some smd's snapped off and I would like to fix it
That p2 450 was a powerhouse back in 99. I went to a p3 600 that year with v3 3000 & 256 ram I believe.
@PhilsComputerLab Can you test a chinese p55 motherboard with a X3440?
Can you send me one?
I now that means no. because i cant im asking you to review it so i can decide do i want to buy it! and money isnt a strong point for me im only 12 years old!
needs more half-life
Half Life was unplayable with the Riva 128zx
Phil’s other video showing half-life running really well on a riva128. I had a friend with a riva128 / p266 and it ran Q2/HL just fine once the drivers matured, albeit with some minor glitches. Faster than the original voodoo.
ruclips.net/video/uRzhypeifFY/видео.html
The tnt 2 m64 is comparable to Riva 128 or tnt in terms of perfomance?
Think it had 64 bit ram, which was totally useless for performance, plus Nvidia's 16-bit quality was deliberately bad to force 32 bit, making it even more useless.
My first vga was some pci cirrus logic one, second tnt2 that actually could play some games. Then radeon 9200 se came around that was fine as well for older titles back then. Until it died and I was stuck on integrted gpus on laptops until ryzen and rx580 sparked gaming back into me.
All the way through the horrible time of intel graphics "accelerators" Can only hope there were some proper integrated solutions form time.
Well intel was not that bad I could play some strategy games; black and white, port royale and worms armagedon. And on my last laptop there was at amd gpu with gig of ram and it could manage shadow of mordor at lowest possible settings and rocket league at low 720p is playable in cinematic 24fps:)
ELSA Cards ... how well i remember Elsa ... Elsa Gladiac, i am still in love. Back in this days i switched from generation to generation between ELSA and Creative Labs
I just added a PCI TNT into my retro Socket 7 K6-266 system last week. The processor seems to be a big bottleneck. Just ordered an AT slot 1 board with a PII 350, hopefully this will fix some of that issue. I just hope Unreal Tournament will be playable now.
Yea I can see that. Pentium II should work well for you.
I suggest Open GL - In directx on a old win 95 (ME ?) if you go bellow 640x480 resolution the drivers might never be the same - what I mean is a performance drop whenever you change it afterward's - mening if they was fast you but wanted faster fps and went belllow 640x and wasnt satisfied then that the fps you got at 640x is longer there and never will unless you reinstall windows. ( Happened to me ) . And Ut99 might like that you change the cache ? from 4 mb? to to 40 mb?in the ini-file . Not shure by now..... Anyway TNT was faster thatGeforce 200mx in Open GL maybe software mode but not directx.
I just found a RivaTNT for my PIII 500 Gateway
Wiki says that Riva 128 didn't support 32 bit color for 3D, but did it support 32 bit color for 2D/GUI/Windows?
Whoa.. I had these exact two models of cards. I upgraded from the Elsa to the Diamond.. crazy
The riva 128's output was ugly as hell. Best looking card i had back in the day was the verite 2200, it just wasn't very fast.
I would love to see you compare the Nvidia cards of the following year where there should be a DRASTIC bump in performance as a Graphics card was released which changed the core feature which all graphics cards still to this day feature and changed the way we upgraded our PCs: Do the Nvidia Riva TNT2 vs the Nvidia Geforce 256.
The Geforce 256 being the card with what's considered the world's first GPU which we consider a GPU still to this day and which all graphics cards still have today and is the core feature.
The TNT2 and Geforce were both released in 1999, only separated by 1/2 a year.. The TNT2 released in March 1999 and the Geforce in October 1999, So it should be neat to see the performance increase if someone with disposable income upgraded from a TNT 2 to a Geforce. I just wonder how much of a performance increase that GPU with it's graphical features and on-board processing to offload these things from the CPU did to improve performance compared to a TNT2 which still heavily relied on the CPU to process these same graphical features.
Furthermore, the Geforce 256 (and all Geforce cards that followed) is the card responsible that changed the way the graphics market functioned; encouraging shorter graphics card lifetimes, and placing less emphasis on the CPU for gaming. Prior to the Geforce series, you could buy a graphics card and it would last you for years and you didn't feel the pressured or have the need to upgrade as a CPU upgrade was more important for performance, but after the Geforce 256 and the performance increases that each new GPU brought to the table with each generation, meant that if you didn't upgrade more frequently, you were missing out on leaps and bounds of performance increases, also without the need to upgrade your CPU, etc; GPUs caused CPUs to take a backseat to graphic cards for gamers, so now it's the otherway around, you can use the same CPU for years and years and just upgrade your graphics card for noticeable/significant performance increases in gaming... i.e. people who still have Gen 1 to Gen 4 core i5 or i7 cpus but with the latest GTX 1080 Ti and don't see much (if any) of a performance bottleneck in gaming caused by the older cpu.
Didn't the RIVA 128 have poor drivers at first with lots of bad screen tearing and that was fixed months later?
Anyway I am surprised at the amazing performance of the TNT over the RIVA 128 quite impressive.
Yea that's the good thing with Retro PC Gaming, we can avoid all these issues and enjoy patched games, mature drivers and whatnot. The RIVA 128 for example, yea that card got much better with later drivers.
TNT2 was my first ever graphics card :)
I had a pentium 2 350 and was Slot 1. It came on an entire daughter board that sat perpendicular to the motherboard.
I didn't realise they made board mounted ones. Was it socketed or surface mount?
I played stronghold crusader and CS 1.0 with those cards.
My first card was intel i740...
I completely agree with your final conclusion. Today in order to make a worthy upgrade you don't have to buy the exact next gen of the gpu you already own. Performance per dollar gains are much greater if you upgrade to a card 2 gens ahead e.g. from a gtx750ti to a gtx1050ti.
tnt my first graphic card :)
yes end me !!!
TNT2 was the graphics card in the first computer I bought myself.
Interesting, didn't know where was a discrete version of the Riva 128ZX, only new it as onboard graphics.
interesting video
300a @ 450 on abit bh6 combined with a v550 and a 3dfx card from the previous build was probably the best way to spend a student loan. Food meh. IIRC the price of the tnt1 wasn't that crazy either. Certainly unlike the current high end cards which cost more than the other parts combined. All the spare time went to teamfortress and renegades mod for tribes.
I just got the Riva 128, but found out its AGP 2x...is there any Pentium III mainboard that supports AGP2x?
Hey I got one of those riva 128 i think it is now you did it going to have to go dig it out and play some games on it P4 might let it breath and use all it's performance it what I got handy got a old diamond card don't recall what it is but I ran half-life in software mode and the colors were amazing then tried quake same thing was very bright colors it was different.
Ultimate bottleneck with a P4 :D But I like it.
i have an old pentium 3 running at 1ghz with 1gb of ddr 400 ram, could to tell me an agp gpu to make use of it (for web browsing, some games (like robocraft), and watching videos in hq (720p-1080p) if possible)? (i'm running windows 7 ultimate 32 bit on it)
Yea, not happening I'm afraid...
Core Duo for robocraft at least.
The Obsoletist i got the game to start and worked, very laggy but worked, i'm more interested in the other things tho.
I still have my old dell with a Pentium 2 and a Riva TNT 16gb, I really need to find a monitor and get that thing up and running.
Hey Phil, i own an AGP GPU that i haven't used in years and i don't want it. Do you want me to send it to you and test it? I don't wanna throw it away. It was a beast during its time :)
Do you know what GPU it is?
Yes it is the: ATI Radeon - HIS HD 3850 IceQ 3 Turbo 512MB (256bit) GDDR3 AGP
I'd love to have such a card. Would go well with a P4 EE or Athlon FX. Could you send me a message, either through YT or social media please?
sure!
in sent you a message via YT
I used to own a TNT, and had it paired with an AMD K6-2 333Mhz.
Would be nice to see the performance on a 2+Ghz CPU
Now use that same card
What do you think about the low-end Trident TGUI9440-1?
Can't be good? I don't think i have one.
Does PIII 1000 MHz really bottleneck those GPU's?!? I would've never guessed that!
I wanna see a comparison of similar products such as Riva TNT 16MB vs Vanta 16 MB
I wish I still had my V550 and V770. Got a good 10 years or so of fun out of them though.
If I ever come to Australia I would like to buy ya a beer m8 :)
(and donate a few old HW goodies to ya)
What's the difference with having the heatsink on the chipset on a Slot 1 motherboard? Is it important? I have a Slot 1 motherboard in my retro PC that doesn't have the heatsink, but a lot of motherboards I've seen online with the same Intel BX chipset have one.
The old one fell off, so I put a new one on.
Its not really needed for the 440BX chipset.....though that didn't stop Intel from using a giant one on their reference boards.
Every couple of months there was a brand new graphics company with their own brand new chipset... 3DFX was able to secure some major mind share and wins by having their chipset be used for actual arcade games even though it unfortunately ended up in bankruptcies for Atari Games because their 3d graphics arcade games were not so successful nor as good and needed sequels and polish as well as arcade centers in the U.S. needed support like they had in Japan.
3DFX got caught by Nvidia, Matrox, Videologic, 3DLabs and ATI with 32bit image quality and performance... so that statement from 3DFX just meant that their 32bit solution wasn't ready... it also meant that they made a mistake making a deal with Sega of America's staff for the next generation (premature and very costly generation jump) during 96 to 97 which iirc 3DFX press release or someone there claimed that was the reason why a next gen 32bit 3DFX chipset wasn't ready in 97 and 98...
That is a similar message that ATI used to explain why they didn't have a GPU ready to challenge the Nvidia G80 or GeForce 8800 GTX in Direct X 10 but that was weird because Microsoft knew when Vista and DX 10 would be estimated to release so they should have waited and thus ATI would have had a more powerful GPU solution for say a 2007 launched Xbox instead of 2005 regardless of whatever architecture features their GPU had because by 2 year PC GPU performance nearly tripled in performance and features.
I feel there is a need for someone to say have a specific PC armed with an Intel Pentium III 1Ghz FSB 133Mhz and IDE 66... or even add an IDE 133 controller card if feasible because 2000s IDE HDDs had larger caches and were much faster at loading up games (before the game code got bigger) so technically it's almost like an SSD effect where the Windows 98SE O.S. and games load up very quickly and when loading levels there is less waiting which is probably what you are missing here in the experience of back then...
I could see a dramatic increase in how the game just loaded up using the same HDD on a PIII 1Ghz versus an AMD ATHLON 3200+ XP CPU and 256MB of RAM in dual channel mode (Quake III, Jedi Knight II, RtCW and others which happened to be early 2000s PC games...
Great video... outside of not gaining framerate performance but maxing out the thruput it probably doesn't hurt to go 1GHz*
*lmaooo
REEEEEEEVA! (and yes Phil, it *does* matter) :P
Maybe in Soul Reaver, but not RIVA, which is spoken like River, just with an AH at the end instead of ER.