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The reality is that what we we're now seeing is TNT cards being clocked at around 90Mhz or a bit higher at 100MHz as in the Spectra 2500's case. As a result the 250M/Pixels fill rate is much closer to being 200MPixels/ second (if that). Also I noticed that the TNT was very CPU dependant and that the benchmarks did indeed plummet on a lower spec machine- but more on that another time soon (watch this space). So with that in mind the all-important Quake 2 scores didn't quite blow me away but the Spectra 2500 did indeed beat the Voodoo Banshee by roughly 10fps in 640x480 and also the Matrox G200. It wasn't up to the Voodoo2 in terms of performance but it did indeed visually look the part. Image quality was better and the resolutions attainable on the Spectra 2500 are higher than the Voodoo2.
Visually, Quake 2 at 1600x1200 really could give a fully-fledged fragmeister a wet dream. In fact, the Spectra 2500 is the only RIVA TNT based board to offer a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1440 in 16-bit colour mode providing four full, correct aspect ratio, windows of 960x720 pixels on a 20" or above monitor. But looks aren't everything and playing at this resolution is not really an option in multiplayer. It just won't cope or be very playable in multiplayer when it only gets 16.3 fps in demo1.dm2. Still it's playable in single player- almost.
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