Baoran wrote:I don't think you can compare clockspeeds with all those architecture differences that nvidia and ati have.
In any case M64 was the only TNT2 card with 64 memory bus, so other TNT2 cards don't have that problem.
There were certainly higher-end TNT2 cards that ran just fine, I'm sure. I'm not saying that the entire lineage of TNT2 cards is garbage, because I'm sure the TNT2 Pro and TNT2 Ultra variants are good cards. I'm specifically comparing the Rage 128 to my TNT2 card.
I do understand that architectural differences can make what should be a technically faster chip vastly inferior. A good example of this in the CPU world is of the early Pentium 4's versus the later Pentium III's- the Pentium III was a better architecture, by a long run. NetBurst was terribly inefficient, and to get an edge over the prior Pentium III line, the Pentium 4 had to use motherboards with faster RAM, and had to be clocked at higher frequencies because the performance per clock on the Pentium 4 was lower compared to that of the Pentium III. A Pentium 4 running at a similar or the same frequency as a Pentium III will be outperformed by the Pentium III, even with the Pentium 4 on an RDRAM motherboard.
So even though this GPU is technically faster, I know that there is still a chance that its performance could fall under that of my TNT2- but I don't think it will. I've been told that the Rage 128 has many advantages over the TNT2 M64, way back when I made a thread while trying to decide what GPU to get for my mid-1999 build initially- I had already purchased the ASUS TNT2 M64 card at this point:
Jasin Natael wrote:I personally think that the Rage 128/128 Pro is better choice by far then the TNT2 M64 card.... […]
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I personally think that the Rage 128/128 Pro is better choice by far then the TNT2 M64 card....
From my experience the rage cards get way more hate then they actually deserve. Perhaps back in 98-99 drivers were as bad of as mess as people say, but I don't actually remember having one of these cards back then.
However, nowadays with up to date drivers I just haven't had any real issues that people speak of.
Now in DOS that might be a different story, but for a Windows 98 gaming PC the 32bit color mode and other performance features outweigh the bad vs a TNT2M64.
It's also less of a headache compared to the Savage 4 but that's just a personal opinion.
YMMV
This was at this thread: Best Low-Price (today) AGP GPU from mid '98 to very early '99.
I don't plan on using DOS very much with this PC, except to play DOOM. I also don't play at very high resolutions- I watched the review that PhilsComputerLab did on the Rage Fury MAXX, and he provides tests for the Rage 128 Pro, as well as a few other cards- it becomes evident that once you start pushing higher resolutions on things like GLQuake, the performance will start going down. In a lot of situations here, he ends up getting 45+ FPS on games on 1024x768x32, something that I've personally never seen my TNT2 M64 be able to do. I end up playing most of my games at 640x480x16 (Quake II, Half-Life, GlQuake, etc.), so even a jump to 800x600x16 would be a large improvement over my TNT2 M64.