Erazor III features

Clock Speed Woes

The TNT2 specs has added some features to the original TNT. First, the TNT2's manufacturing process was shrunk down to .25 micron. Like CPUs, smaller parts allows for higher clock speeds and yields so the TNT2 is able to consistently clock higher than it's larger, hotter brother. The default TNT core speed was 90 MHz, although this was tweakable by a number of different utilities provided by video card manufacturers and third-party video tweakers.

As you can see by the specs, the TNT2 has a decent core speed increase, although it was not as high as nVidia had originally hoped, planned, and announced. Like 3Dfx, nVidia seems to be plagued by the curse of low or unreliable yields at 175 MHz and faster. The original TNT was supposed to ship at 125 MHz. It seems that now nVidia is able to fill on that promise, since the reference TNT2 specs call for a 125 MHz clock. The TNT2 Ultra, however, is going to be clocked ~150 MHz, although this number was supposed to be ~175 MHz originally.

Pipelines

The TNT2 is based on two 32-bit graphics pipelines. This results in the name TNT, which stands for Twin Texel. nVidia was able to improve the twin rendering pipelines in a way that they have not widely revealed, which results in a performance boost over the original TNT.

What about 2D?

The 2D performance arena between the major competitors is pretty close for lower resolutions. You won't start noticing a real difference in 2D performance until you start hitting the higher resolutions of 1280x1024 or greater. The Erazor III, like the other reference TNT2 spec-based cards, has an optimized 8, 16, and 32 bit 2D pipeline.

Video support

The Erazor III, though based closely on reference specs, does not have digital flat panel support. For those power users who must have the latest digital flatscreens, you will have to look elsewhere. The 32 MB version is planned to have 1 S-video and 2 composite video inputs, and 1 S-video and 1 composite out, but still no immediate plans for DFP.