TNT / Voodoo2 Quake & Quake II Benchmarks

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?"

What's New:

August 15
Did some more testing and added the Voodoo2 numbers to the PII 233 chart.

August 13, 1998
Got a new set of beta drivers from STB, and so I re-ran all the TNT numbers, many of which went up considerably from the previous set (still posted here). In response to popular demand (and a few threats), benchmarks on a PII 233 have been added. Only the TNT is reflected, I'll add the Voodoo2 numbers when I get a chance to run them.

I threatened to drop the masive1 for Quake II demo from the mix, but an intelligent argument was presented that it was probably more of a real world condition than the crusher demo which represents about as hairy a firefight as you are likely to see.

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.

PII-400

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

PII-233

Same as above, clocked down to 233 MHz

The Boards
The RIVA TNT board tested is an STB Velocity 4400 (AGP) that STB says 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 chipset is produced using a .35 micron process, with .25 micron chips (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 Voodoo2 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.

Notes
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.