Very cool, thanks for posting this! From a playability standpoint, there's not much difference between the three. I'm kind of surprised the 16MB TNT2 outscores the 32MB version as often as it does.

Yeah, I was surprised with the 16MB M64 also. I figured it would be slower than the 32MB card, at least with higher resolutions.

I ended up testing a few other cards in the system, to see how they compare with the M64 also. The cards I compared it with are a Matrox G450 32MB AGP and a Rage128GL 16MB AGP. The G450 is clocked at 120/150 MHz, somewhat lower than I have seen with other G450 cards. I figured it would be close to the M64 as it's the slowest Matrox G4x0 card, especially with these clocks.

here are the results:

Awesome thanks for this! I remember hearing the M64 was similar to the OG TNT but it is good to know.

M64 got a lot of hate but isn't bad if the resolution is low.

Vs the geforce 4 ti4200: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNFDYFBNd-4
Overclocked at 640 x 480 in rally trophy (2001): high details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUkFi3OxXto, low details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhj37jnZdH4.

The capture's a bit crap, but the low details rally trophy one looks retro as.

Thanks for doing these tests! This is great stuff! I think I'm actually going to bookmark your recent benchmark posts for future reference. 😀

There is also an Anandtech review which compares the M64 to the proper TNT2.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/393

I just stumbled across this post while doing a Google search and wanted to thank the OP for it, amazingly informative. I was dumbfounded to see the original TNT performing close to a G450 at 16bit, but at 32bit at least the gap becomes meaningful.

appiah4 wrote:

I just stumbled across this post while doing a Google search and wanted to thank the OP for it, amazingly informative.

Thanks.

I was dumbfounded to see the original TNT performing close to a G450 at 16bit, but at 32bit at least the gap becomes meaningful.

Yeah the G450 is a bit odd, I think. It ends up being slower than you might expect just looking at the specs of the card (compared to the other G400 cards). In Quake2 at 640x480x16 the G400Max is 50% faster than the G450. I'll post the graphs with the G400Max later.

I actually did a comparison with a reg TNT2 (125/150) that I was going to post in this thread but forgot. So here it is:

The results here for the M64 cards was all retested. I mainly did that to make sure my original results were correct.

Thanks for the benchmarks.

I replaced a TNT for a TNT2 M64 32MB back in 1999. This was mostly to get the extra RAM.

Seeing these benchmarks the upgrade only made sense at settings that I would consider unplayable.Maybe less micro-stuttering in some games with 32MB.

Good thing I got it for free.

Well that settles that, for my Celeron 333 a TNT2 M64 is fine