Fall 1998: The RIVA TNT

Explosive

The financial success of the RIVA 128 may have made NVIDIA a bit giddy. In late March, one month after the RIVA 128ZX was announced, NVIDIA told the world of their next-generation part, the RIVA TNT. The TwiN Texel engine was a dual-pixel 32-bit color pipeline which allowed the TNT to apply two textures to a single pixel or process two pixels per clock cycle to bring the fill rate up to 250Mpixels/sec.

In addition to the new performance, the RIVA TNT also brought significant improvements to image quality. In addition to true color support and a 24-bit Z-buffer with 8-bit stencil support, the chip also supported anisotropic filtering and per-pixel MIP mapping. The maximum frame buffer was extended to 16 MB and the transistor count was on par with the Intel Pentium II.

Even with the success of the RIVA 128 and the early design wins (STB) for the RIVA TNT, many thought the RIVA TNT would be vaporware. In NVIDIA's excitement, the company had announced the product in late March even though boards were not expected to ship until the fall. Eventually, the TNT clock speed had to be scaled back to 90MHz, reducing the fill rate to 180Mpixels/sec.

When the chip was released, however, NVIDIA had proven to the world that high performance 3D was no longer the dominion of 3dfx. The TNT offered performance close to the Voodoo2 with additional image quality features, namely 32-bit color. By this time however, the Voodoo2 had already dominated the market, shipping at the same time the TNT was announced. The TNT still managed to earn design wins with major OEMs and even became the official 3D graphics technology for the Professional Gamers League (PGL).

Six months later…

In March 1999 at the Game Developer's Conference, NVIDIA launched two new products, the TNT2 and the budget Vanta. The TNT2 was original thought to be strictly a .25 micron variant of the TNT classic with a higher clock speed.

Hercules TNT2

The chip offered more than expected. Going from 8 million to 10.5 million transistors, the TNT to TNT2 development had a larger growth in complexity than the transition between the Pentium II and Pentium III. In addition to increasing the maximum frame buffer to 32MB, the TNT2 also featured Digital Flat Panel Support. In the TNT2 Ultra variant, NVIDIA promised a maximum fill rate of 300Mpixels/sec. Avoiding the same pre-announcement of the RIVA TNT, cards based on the TNT2 were ready two months later in May, just in time to go up against 3dfx's Voodoo 3.

The TNT2 was the turning point in NVIDIA's battle with 3dfx. While the Voodoo 3 may have been faster than the TNT2 in terms of pure frame rate, the performance difference wasn't very large, and many chose the TNT2 for its 32-bit color support. 3dfx's Glide advantage was also dying as most developers were switching to Direct3D and OpenGL.