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32-bit rendering is a chapter in itself, it's the one feature everyone except 3Dfx seems to hail as a superb breakthrough in 3D graphics, promising much higher image quality and something that will finally get rid off ugly dithering. But does it make such a difference? Well, no - but a keen eye can make out the difference between true 32-bit and 16-bit rendering, especially when heavy alpha effects are in use, the speed penalty taken by most accelerators to render at 32-bit makes this feature less attractive though. The MagicTNT takes a penalty of somewhere between roughly 25 - 50% depending on resolution and application, in general it seems that the more pixels needs to be rendered the bigger the penalty.
There aren't many titles out right now that support 32-bit rendering at this time but there's a few, Incoming being one of the better known ones and Quake II is another. Upcoming games are the ones that will make best use of this new feature though, Quake III: Arena for example is said to reap great benefits with 32-bit rendering capabilities even if the end result may be dithered down to 16-bit. (Then there's no performance penalty as this is what the TNT usually does).
Many of the games we (at least I) love to play run under SGI's OpenGL, thankfully the MagicTNT comes with excellent OpenGL drivers out of the box, and we're not limited to a half-baked Mini-GL or Direct3D wrapper either. What we've got at our fingertips is a highly optimized full-featured OpenGL ICD. Now that we're somewhat in touch with the basic features and capabilities of the TNT by now I think we all expect it to provide us with some competitive Quake 2 scores and indeed it does, have a peek at these Quake 2 numbers (timedemo1.dm2):
Resolution: Voodoo2 Banshee TNT
640 x 480 83.4 fps 40.2 fps 77.4 fps
800 x 600 55.6 fps 32.9 fps 60.3 fps
1024 x 768 N/A 22.3 fps 38.6 fps
1280 x 960 N/A N/A 24.5 fps
1600 x 1200 N/A 10.5 fps 15.9 fps
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