The debate of 16-bit Vs. 32-bit has been raging on for the best part of 9 months now. Back at Comdex 98, 3Dfx claimed that until 60 frames per second was achievable with 32-bit rendering, that 16-bit was the optimum way to play games. Nobody had really cracked the '32-bit rendering' argument till now. Well nVIDIA has taken that claim and instead propped up their design with 32MB and somehow manages to etch out incredibly fast 32-bit performance. 32-bit rendered D3D games have significantly less than the 50% 'performance hit' they used to have with the original TNT and in any case, the frame rates have gotten so high that Forsaken at 32-bit on a Pentium II 450MHz at 1024x768 is putting out 74fps on the Ultra TNT2, well over the "60fps minimum" for games.

You can bet your bottom dollar that any D3D game that has a 32-bit option (Accolade's Redline for example) will be just as playable and only some 25% slower in 32-bit at 800x600. So 32-bit gaming really has arrived now with the Ultra TNT2 and long may it continue. Improving the visual fidelity has until now taken a backseat with the race to have the 'fastest 3D Winbench' performer. And not only does the Ultra TNT2 give out wickedly fast frame rates but with its 24-bit z-buffer and 8-bit stencil buffer the Viper V770 is able to render pretty complex scenes without dropping any polygons (the Voodoo architecture is limited to a 16-bit Z buffer).