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Performance: TNT2 vs. GeForce2 MX on a cel 433

C

ctucker

Member
I reccommended that my cousin get a TNT2 for his cel 433. Should I have told him to get a GeForce2 MX instead, or did I make a good choice in the price vs. performance area? (TNT2 cost ~$50, and MX costs ~$100).

I just figured an MX wouldn't do that much for him without a faster computer. Btw, he won't be doing any heavy 3D gaming.. just EverQuest. I know the TNT2 would be great for regular EverQuest, but I'm worried that it might be slow in Kunark (that's an addon that has higher system specs than the original EQ).

Thanks.
 
the TNT2 comes in several flavours. $50 is very cheap. if you are recommending a Vanta or M64, that is a shame for him. the TNT2 was a fine card in its day but the M64 is crippled by a halved bandwidth 64 bit bus. the $50 extra over an M64 is worth it but for Everquest released in July 1999 a TNT2 pro or better is just fine.
 
Tell him get a MX. Even with Celeron433 MX is still a lot faster than TNT2 especially resolution above 800x600. MX is worth of the extra $50 plus that he will upgrade his CPU/mobo somday.
 
The MX will be faster in T&L enhanced games and in high resolution/high detail situations. Also it's very likely that your cousin will upgrade his/her CPU at some point. When that happens the MX will scale nicely while the TNT2 will bottleneck the system.
 
Definitely get the MX. I play EQ and it looks A LOT better with FSAA turned on, which is almost completely a function of the video card. He should be able to play 800by600 with FSAA on and have decent frame rates. The TNT2 would choke trying to do something like that...

JHutch
 
FSAA is Full Scene Anti Aliasing. Basically the video card internally renders the image a bigger size than the final output and then scales it down using pixel averaging. This helps remove the jaggies from the image. Although I prefer high resolutions to FSAA, some people prefer FSAA.
 


<< the M64 is crippled by a halved bandwidth 64 bit bus >>

I just looked at an AOpen TNT2-M64 today and wondered the same. I asked the sales rep. about it and he said it was just a designation; it's still 128 bit. I read the &quot;fine print&quot; on the box, and it read Model 64. Further down in the specs., it read 128 bit (in addition to 32 megs of memory).

I'm thinking it's just a marketing ploy to stretch out TNT-2 sales to the bitter end, by making the &quot;just unaware enough to be dangerous&quot; think it has 64 megs. of memory.



 
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