Gainward CARDEXpert TNT

Introduction

For too long, the DamageBox has suffered
with a decent but ungainly combination of video graphics adapters.  My PC's mix of an
nVidia Riva 128 card for 2D work and an 8MB Diamond Monster 3D II for 3D gaming has served
me well for a time.  In order to make the most of this arrangement, I have even used
the dual video inputs on my CTX PR710 monitor to bypass the video pass-through on the
Voodoo2 card, improving signal quality for the Riva 128 card.  Still, there were
quibbles.  The Riva 128's 2D video performance in 32-bit color mode is a bit on the
pokey side.  The Voodoo2 with 8MB is still very fast, but it's getting a little long
in the tooth.  The fancy-schmancy new 2D/3D combo cards sure were looking good, and
many of 'em offer 32-bit color 3D rendering capability, improved image quality, and other
assorted bells and whistles.

Thus, when the folks at Gainward offered Ars the chance to review their new CARDEXpert TNT, I jumped at the opportunity to see just how much greener the grass really was on the other side.  I'd played with some TNT and G200 cards before, but that was last fall, when neither chipset had really mature driver support. That said, I wasn't expecting too much out of Gainward--probably just a cheap reference design-based card.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.   In fact, I like my video cards to follow the chipset maker's reference design specs pretty closely.  Why?  Two words: reference drivers.  Ever since the launch of Win95, I've been running reference video drivers pretty much constantly.  Oh, yeah, I've strayed a time or two, but I have always paid for it.  Good, mature video drivers are extremely important to overall system stability in Windows operating systems, and the "value-add" features thrown in by STB, Diamond Multimedia, etc. have generally been, in my experience, not terribly necessary but very likely to consume memory, cause crashes, or introduce video corruption.  At the same time, the optimizations made by board manufacturers rarely offer enough of a performance boost to justify running a revision or two behind the reference drivers, which inevitably offer new features and superior optimizations of their own. The very best of the board and driver customizers--manufacturers like Canopus--have made some very nice, well-differentiated products that are, sadly, sometimes even incompatible with the chipset makers' reference drivers.  (Canopus's stunning lack of success in the U.S. hasn't exactly bolstered the case for custom board/driver implementations.)

The card

But back to Gainward.  Although it's very much compatible with nVidia's reference drivers, the CARDEXpert TNT isn't entirely a reference hardware design.  It's smaller than I remember the Creative and STB cards being, but my memory could be failing me.  However, unlike both of those cards, the Gainward has a pretty slick little cooling mech on the TNT chip.  It's a heat sink with an integrated fan, a la the popular Tennmax Lasagna coolers.  Here are the pictures, which tell it better than I can:

Pretty slick, eh?  I'm as conservative about overclocking my video cards as I am about which video drivers I use, but I have been able to run the Gainward TNT card through everyday use and through extensive benchmark testing without a hint of trouble at 100MHz for the TNT core and 115MHz for the video RAM. That's a bit above the respective defaults of 90MHz and 110MHz. I also used PowerStrip's "fast memory timing" setting without any negative repercussions.

As you can tell from the pictures above, the CARDEXpert TNT doesn't include a TV out port, which I don't miss since my monitor is nearly as large as my TV, anyhow.  (And you try moving an SC-750A downstairs to the living room every time you want to play Mario on UltraHLE.  Sheesh.)  The RAM chips you see in the picture are each 2MB SDRAM chips, for a total of 16MB of SDRAM on the card.  Note also that the BIOS chip is socketed, which could save you from having to throw out the card if you got a power blip while flashing the card's BIOS.  Most of this stuff is standard fare for a TNT card, but it's good to see Gainward didn't cut any important corners.

The bundle and more

The bundle

The card shipped to me with nVidia's reference drivers, an MPEG player, and a little tweaking utility called Expertool that sits in the Windows system tray and offers the ability to overclock the card's memory, throw it into a DPMS power-saving mode, and adjust the display's position on the monitor.   As handy as Expertool looks to be, I promptly ripped it out and installed Entech's PowerStrip, which is about three times as handy and allows for overclocking of the TNT chipset itself, not just the card's RAM.  Still, those who find themselves PowerStrip-deprived may find the Expertool useful.

Gainward claimed their software bundle
wasn't complete when they shipped me the card, but I don't care about software bundles,
anyhow.  So there.

Video signal quality

Many flames have been exchanged online about video signal quality on nVidia cards versus cards from traditional 2D leaders like Matrox, and perhaps justifiably so.  Complaints about signal quality generally come from those using really high resolutions, like 1280x1024 and 1600x1200.  I run my Riva 128 card at 1152x864 at 100Hz refresh on a 17" aperture grill-style display, and even using a five-pronged BNC input, the Riva's video output produces perceptible ghosting.  The Gainward TNT, however, is significantly better--not perfect, but close enough.  On virtually all of the latest-generation video chipsets, the RAMDAC, which produces the video signal, is integrated as part of a single-chip design.  Hence, video signal quality will vary less from one manufacturer's implementation to another than in the past.  Still, the Gainward implementation appears solid.

I can't tell you, however, whether or not the Gainward TNT's signal quality will be good enough to produce razor-sharp text at 1280x1024 or above; my monitor, though good, isn't capable of showing such resolutions with the proper clarity for me to be able to make that call.  At this point, however, I have to wonder aloud how many folks who complain about video signal quality aren't in the same boat.  I'm constantly amazed at how people will run 17" monitors at 1280x1024 or 19" monitors at 1600x1200 (often at a ridiculously low refresh rate) and then complain about signal quality from their video cards.  All I can think is, "the problem isn't video card, doof, it's the monitor!"  The fact that a monitor says it will do 1600x1200 at 85Hz doesn't mean it will do it well.  Then there are the folks running their video signals through a Voodoo card pass-through, even the best of which will "murkify" a high-res, high-refresh video signal.  A Matrox G200, one of the supposed video signal champs, wouldn't look any better when run through that particular video signal meat grinder.

The benchmarks are coming, but first...

A word about benchmarking methodology

All of the benchmarks included in this review were run under decidedly "real-world" test conditions.  That is, I slapped this card into my box, configured it, then went after the numbers.  You can get DamageBox specs here.  All tests were run with my Celeron 300A chugging along nicely at 464MHz on a 103MHz bus, with the default 2.0V CPU core voltage.  (Yes, it's 100% stable like that.)  Although the OS setup isn't pure and pristine, the numbers should provide a reasonable basis of comparison.  I didn't turn off the sound for the gaming tests, since I tend to play with sound.  I did, however, turn off vertical refresh sync (vsync) in 3D mode in order to keep the numbers independent of video refresh rates.

The TNT card was clocked consistently at 100MHz core, 115MHz RAM.  Yes, I could probably have taken it higher, but I didn't.   Cope.  I used version 0.48 of nVidia's TNT reference drivers for both Win98 and NT.  The Voodoo2 card was clocked at 92MHz, only 2MHz above stock, because the darned thing has no cooling, and it locked up in Unreal a couple of times at 95MHz.

I used my own autoexec.cfg Open GL settings in Quake 2, which are modified from 3Fingers' highest visual quality settings.  I pretty much turned up everything I could, image quality-wise, except trilinear filtering, which trips up 8MB Voodoo2 cards.  (If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.)

All benchmarks were run three times and averaged.  Yes, it did take a long time.

Application performance

Application performance

Performance in 2D applications is now considered, by many folks, pretty much a non-issue with the last few generations of video chips, since fairly snappy performance can be had with just about every solution.   Still, the speed at which a PC draws windows, pushes text around, and the like is critical to one's subjective impressions of the machine's overall performance.  On this front, the TNT doesn't disappoint.  Performance, especially in 32-bit color, is subjectively quite a bit snappier than the Riva 128.

Here are the 2D scores:

 

The subjective difference between 16- and 32-bit color modes isn't nearly as marked as the numbers above indicate.   I'm not sure how much of this discrepancy is due to the Wintune benchmark accenting some elements of 2D performance that aren't used commonly and how much of it is due to limitations of my own perception.  I imagine it's some mix of the two.   Regardless, 2D performance is excellent, even in Windows NT in 32-bit color, where the numbers are lowest.  (NT's video is always a bit slower than Win95/98, since NT4, though faster than NT 3.51, doesn't allow the same direct hardware access Win98 does.)   Although the TNT lacks a 24-bit packed-pixel video mode, even the most demanding users will have a hard time faulting it on this point, since 32-bit mode is plenty fast.

3D gaming in Windows 98

3D gaming performance in Windows 98

OK, here are the numbers you've all been waiting for.. 

The Quake numbers paint a pretty clear picture--and so does the gorgeous image quality of the TNT chipset.  Between performance and rendering fidelity, the TNT establishes itself as the ultimate Quake card.   Note that both 800x600 in 32-bit color and 1024x768 in 16-bit color are eminently playable video modes.  Still, speed is of the essence, so it's 800x600x16 for me.   The TNT puts the hurt on the Voodoo2 at my preferred resolution and looks better doing it.

This comparison is completely unfair--and it shows what an advantage Glide is to 3Dfx.  (The TNT image quality in GL Unreal blows chunks, as well, for what it's worth.)  I expect Unreal 221 to remedy this situation, though the D3D version is already better on the TNT, anyhow.  I guess I should have included that score here, but that'll have to wait for testing with nVidia's just released "Detonator" drivers for a proper comparison, anyhow.  (FYI, got over 35fps in my initial test with the Detonator drivers in Unreal D3D.)

In this Direct3D benchmark, the Riva TNT again shows its superiority over the Voodoo2.  3DMark includes testing for large texture sizes, where the extra RAM and DiME AGP implementation of the TNT proves valuable.

3D gaming in Win NT

3D gaming performance in Windows NT

NT is where I live, so benchmarking on my home turf is important.  Besides, once MS gets it together, we're all supposed to make the transition to the NT kernel--if we're not all running Linux first.

 

 

 

The story in NT is pretty much the same as it is in Win98.  In fact, the numbers are startlingly close together.  Kudos to both 3Dfx and nVidia for providing decent NT driver support.  Now, if Gates and co. would only get us Direct3D support..

A few tidbits and some conclusions

3D visual quality and Open GL app performance

Despite my best efforts, I can't consider 3D rendering quality an entirely subjective matter.  I think the TNT is, hands-down, a better renderer. The Voodoo2's obvious dithering artifacts make its output look kind of fuzzy next to the sharp outlines and smooth mip maps of the TNT.   Personally, I can tell the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit color rendering on the TNT, but 16-bit rendering is--at times, at least--so much better than the Voodoo2, the intense color-depth debate swirling around the upcoming Voodoo3 seems kind of silly.   As anyone who has seen a TNT or a Matrox G200 in action can tell you, a good rendering engine can make 16-bit color look absolutely stunning.

Where the quality rendering, 32-bit modes, robust Open GL support, and integrated 2D/3D capabilities of the TNT could really pay off is for use with high-end Open GL applications.  I'm no expert on this stuff, and from what I understand, the TNT drivers have a ways to go before this chipset is competitive in that arena.  Still, the hardware appears to be equal to the task, and nVidia has stated aspirations to capture some of this market.  I like the idea of my video card being capable enough to be useful as part of a GL workstation.  None of 3Dfx's current or announced hardware will be capable of competing in the GL workstation realm--something to consider.