March 1999

This is the horse that started winning the war. nvidia played a dangerous game here, including 32-bit graphics and AGP support where 3DFX was steadfastly set on PCI and 16-bit graphics. The TNT2 also had better resolution, running at 2048x1536 max when the Voodoo 2 was stuck at 800x600. Of course, playable games were run at 640x480 most of the time, but numbers are always more impressive. It was a dangerous play and, had the market not responded favorably, it could have spelled the end for nvidia. But the results were there : between the TNT2 and the Voodoo 2 and even 3, the winner was the card on the AGP port. I had the chance to test that myself, at the time. When I configured my sister's brand-new PII 266 with an on-board Intel graphics chip using AGP. I had my Pentium 200 at the time, with Voodoo 2. Her computer blasted away at twice my framerate, although I was convinced my video card was way better !

Tech Sheet

Transistor count (millions) 8
Technology 0.25 micron
Frequency 175 Mhz
Onboard RAM 32 MB
Texel fill rate MTexels
Triangle count (millions)
Render pipes 2
Pixel per Clock (per pipe) 1
Z-buffer 24 bit

The TNT The GeForce 256