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So as you can see the scores for the Viper V550 are actually slower than the TNT based Spectra 2500, which isn't actually anything to worry about. After all the Spectra 2500's graphics clock was clocked at 100MHz- some 10MHz higher than Diamond's Viper V550. Then again, the Spectra 2500 was too unstable at that speed and is now shipping at 90Mhz anyway, which would bring the scores much closer together. Once again you can see that the TNT does not outperform a Voodoo2 on any system. The Twin Texel based units sound great on a spec sheet but they don't touch the Voodoo2 in most instances. Online deathmatching requires sheer speed and Voodoo2 owners (SLI especially) will be a good few fps ahead of a TNT user everytime. Where the TNT starts to catch-up somewhat is on my high-end Pentium II 400MHz. Especially at higher resolutions such as 800x600 and 1024x768. But it's still a long way off from being a Voodoo2 SLI killer- in Quake2 especially. Although the Viper V550 harbors nVida's TNT TwiN Texel processors for single-pass multitexturing and high-quality rendering, it still can't match the two TMUs of the Voodoo2 for sheer speed. But having said that, if you stack it up against the Voodoo2 in terms of image quality then a TNT based Viper V550 will indeed deliver the goods and look the part. The 24-bit z-buffer with 8-bit stencil and per-pixel precision surpasses anything that a Voodoo2 can do. And although there aren't too many games that support 32-bit rendering, the option is there when owning a TNT based Viper V550, whilst it won't be for any Voodoo2 owners.
The TNT starts too look much more undesirable on entry level/mid-range systems such as the K6-2 300MHz and the Pentium II 300Mhz. It just doesn't scale well at all on slower paced CPUs, and is outperformed by the Voodoo Banshee (a mid-range 3D card) in many instances. The D3D performance of the Viper V550 should be close to the Spectra 2500 but as with the Monster Fusion, it seems something isn't quite right with Diamond's D3D drivers when benchmarking Incoming. Because I got scores that were too low for the card according to Diamond and according to my previous TNT test results. Incoming does give out erratic scores now and again on some boards and so do bear this in mind. The TNT is also fully optimised for DirectX6.0 so expect it to fair well in D3D based games that hit the shelves this Xmas.
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