No wonder.
As far as no T&L is used, the TNT2 Ultra clearly should beat the GeForce 2 MX.

I mean, you compare a king of the hill from a not so far former generation with a low end graphics card!

Oh don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting the MX to be leagues ahead, but I wasn’t expecting it to be killed either.

I was never an MX owner back in the day, I went straight from a TNT2 Ultra to a GTS, but all the modern reviews I can find suggest that an MX or MX 400 is a good stand-in for a Geforce 256, which doesn’t get beaten by a TNT2 of any form usually.

I still feel something is amiss, the synthetic figures would suggest the MX should walk the game tests, but it doesn’t.

Other than a small amount of memory bandwidth the Geforce 2 MX should be a lot quicker. In higher resolutions e.g 1024x768 I can see the TNT2 keeping up/doing better (in non T&L games), but otherwise I'm not sure why.

It would be good to test some other games.

Test 'Expendable' if you want the TNT2 Ultra to look good. Test Quake III Arena if you want it to look bad.
3DMark99 runs at 640x480 in 16 bits color by default, that is not a resolution or color depth people used to game in at that time.

Could be something simple like the GeForce 2 MX drivers having V-Sync on by default, while the TNT2 Ultra drivers had it off.

But yeah, as others have said, try some games instead of just 3D Mark. Specifically, Quake 3 in higher resolutions like 1024x768 and above, using 32-bit color depth, should show better performance on the GeForce 2 MX.

Dorunkāku wrote on 2023-05-29, 10:51:

Test 'Expendable' if you want the TNT2 Ultra to look good. Test Quake III Arena if you want it to look bad.
3DMark99 runs at 640x480 in 16 bits color by default, that is not a resolution or color depth people used to game in at that time.

My 3DMark99 runs default at 800x600x16, pretty sure thats not just my install.

16-bit was definitely standard affair at the time, but I tended to play at 1024x768 where I could.

You haven't mentioned which drivers you used for each card. Also, are you sure the Dell OEM GF2 MX isn't using a narrower memory bus, say 64bit?

geforce 2 mx with 64bits SDR is very slow,
the ones with 128bits SDR should be better than tnt in general afaik.

Garrett W wrote on 2023-05-29, 13:28:

You haven't mentioned which drivers you used for each card. Also, are you sure the Dell OEM GF2 MX isn't using a narrower memory bus, say 64bit?

40.71 for both.

I don’t believe the Dell card is cut down, just plain jane in appearance.

Expendable has the "Hardware Texture Compression" setting in the graphic settings, so a GeForce2 MX should run and look better than a TNT2 Ultra in this game, also all Quake 3 based engine games. The Detonator 6.31 is a good driver for the GeForce 2 series, also with less CPU overhead.

The 1999 GeForce 256 SDR NV10 was the fist nvidia Chip with hardware texture compression support.

However, in the trilinear texturing test and the two “game” tests, the TNT2 pulls ahead. A 4% win for the TNT2 in trilinear texturing, a 15% lead in “game 1” and a 23% lead in “game 2” for the TNT2.

TNT2 can't do trilinear filtering. Well, it technically can, but you'll have to drop fillrate by half or multitexturing, so Nvidia disabled that feature, just like 3dfx did. TNT family can do trilinear approximation instead, which is also called mipmap dithering. It's faster, but uglier. GeForce 2 MX can do proper trilinear filtering and will suffer considerable penalty for that.

Here's how it looks on Voodoo 5 (courtesy of ixbt.com):

TNT has similar dithering pattern.

Note that on Quake III, there will be color banding issues (particularly the sky) when texture compression is enabled on early GeForce cards. Forcing DXT3 format with RivaTuner can mitigate it with some performance hit.

paradigital wrote on 2023-05-29, 16:09:

Garrett W wrote on 2023-05-29, 13:28:

You haven't mentioned which drivers you used for each card. Also, are you sure the Dell OEM GF2 MX isn't using a narrower memory bus, say 64bit?

40.71 for both.

I don’t believe the Dell card is cut down, just plain jane in appearance.

does it have 8 memory chips or just 4?

I tried going from a Voodoo 3 3000 to a Geforce2MX back in the day and it was a downgrade for me at that time.

SPBHM wrote on 2023-05-29, 19:29:

does it have 8 memory chips or just 4?

Four SDRAM chips can also do 128-bit bus.

I upgraded from a TNT 2 ultra to a GF2 MX 200 MX 400 back in the day and it definitely was a considerable upgrade... I remember how happy I was that a cheap card like that gave me a boost.

Oh no the MX 200 would not be an upgraded at all, a lot less memory bandwidth, only case it would be if you had a very slow CPU and low res.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-05-29, 17:28:

Note that on Quake III, there will be color banding issues (particularly the sky) when texture compression is enabled on early GeForce cards.

IIRC that was fixed around detonator 12.41. Quake3 tells OpenGL to load RGB textures in a S3TC format and nVidia's on-demand compression wasn't great. Note that Q3 lacks compressed textures to begin with so it's a quality loss to enable texture compression anyway (it's default on for Savages in mind with the hopes that no other vendor does it).

This, of course, has fed a few "3dFx Rulez!!!! VooDoo III > GForce 2!!! FUCK 32BIT SCAM" on the internet, where arguments for not supporting a feature equals better hardware.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2023-05-30, 03:23:

Oh no the MX 200 would not be an upgraded at all, a lot less memory bandwidth, only case it would be if you had a very slow CPU and low res.

maybe I'm misremembering things, but I thought it was a MX200, it was an ASUS V7100 and apparently that doesn't say much as there's been different versions.

...ok I looked into it more, apparently it was an "Asus V7100PRO/64M", so MX 400, sorry about that ^^