Benchmarks

TNT / Voodoo2 Quake & Quake II Benchmarks
Updated Wednesday, August 12, 1998 01:32 PM Eastern Daylight Time

These benchmarks are meant to aid in answering the one hardware question that comes into the Blue Tower more than any other: "What is the best video card for Quake and Quake II?"

This is only an attempt at gauging how these cards perform untweaked on a top-end system running certain demos. An attempt is made to use a system that presents the fewest possible bottlenecks as a gauge of state-of-the-art performance, and strong efforts have been made to ensure that these are reliable numbers, including running each demo three times (Quake, in particular has the habit of throwing in an odd low timedemo score). The demo1 and demo2 scores for Quake are included to correlate with both 3D GameGauge scores and conventional benchmarks (which often use demo2). the bigass, massive1, and new crusher scores, are all using demos available from 3 Fingers' Benchmarks page designed to represent heavy duty multiplayer play.

A future revision of this page will likely drop demo2 for Quake as redundant, and probably also drop massive1 for Quake II, as the crusher demo is a better stress test, and it takes a long time to run (being massive and all).

With the TNT board still using beta drivers, it's possible that performance will improve with future driver revisions, and these numbers will be updated to reflect the latest drivers for both cards if driver revisions cause them to change. Also, as other cards come into the Blue Lab that contend for the heavyweight title, those benchmarks will be added.

Quake II
demo1	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	65.3	84.6	91.3
800x600	58.2	59.7	88.2
1024x768	39.3	--	70.0
massive1	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	48.7	64.4	66.8
800x600	46.2	49.7	65.8
1024x768	35.9	--	57.8
crusher	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	33.0	41.2	41.3
800x600	32.8	35.2	41.2
1024x768	29.5	--	39.7

Quake
demo1	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	77.9	111.9	172.3
800x600	71.8	73.6	129.8
1024x768	49.1	--	84.8
demo2	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	80.8	107.9	174.0
800x600	70.1	71.2	127.5
1024x768	47.3	--	82.4
bigass1	TNT	Voodoo2	V2 SLI
640x480	50.1	90.2	102.2
800x600	49.3	62.3	96.8
1024x768	41.9	--	73.9

Test Machine: PII-400, 256 MB RAM, A3D audio, Win98, V-Sync Off, 16-bit textures off

The Boards
The RIVA TNT board tested is an STB board that they say is the exact equivalent of the final production board except the retail boards will be roughly a half-inch shorter. The core processor runs at 95 MHz, and the memory clock is at 112.5 MHz. The board is produced using a .35 micron process, with .25 micron boards (presumably at higher clock speeds) a possibility down the road. The Voodoo2 is a 12 MB Canopus Pure3D II running at 90 MHz

The Drivers
The Pure3D II used the latest 3Dfx reference drivers (DX5) with no tweaks or SST variables set at all. The reverence drivers were enabled on the Pure3D II in SLI mode by using a fix on Purified3D. The TNT drivers (DX6) were the most recent beta STB could provide.