| STB Velocity 4400 PCI By Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
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| Test System:
The STB V4400 is proving to be the muscle car of D3d this year. The new Riva TNT chip has TWIN texel units (texture processing) and will produce up to 250 million pixels/sec fill rate by the time it reaches maturity. Design specs for the TNT are similar to the No.9 Revolution IV except that the floating point processor on the TNT is almost twice as powerful as that on the Revolution IV. Installation of the release boards went smoothly for both the AGP and PCI versions. The driver version is currently at 1.31 and both 2d and 3d are extremely fast. To my delight, there was no performance difference between PCI and AGP versions in Falcon 4 at resolutions up to 1152x864.
My initial tests four weeks ago placed the STB 4400 at 25% faster than the Matrox MGA G200, and about equivalent in D3d to a single V2 board. However, with later drivers and the earlier conflict eliminated, my frame rate in EAW DOUBLED over the MGA G200, and my frame rate in MS CFS was 50% higher than the same resolution with the Mystique. This rate was approximately 30% higher than my Wicked 3d-2 Voodoo 2 based 12 meg board running Glide. Stop and consider that data for a moment. The STB compared the to new Mystique G200 was minimum 50% faster under D3d. This means that it is equivalent to taking your CPU and increasing the clock rating by 50% at a much lower cost. Not only that, but in the F4 alpha results are even more striking... But first lets talk hardware. Image quality is comparable to the new Mystique, and with none of the artifacts associated with the original Riva chip. In fact, recent press releases have pointed out that nVidia actually assisted Microsoft with the DX6 specification, so obviously compatability will not be an issue this time around. The TNT pipeline is a full 32 bits color so that image quality where supported by software will be better than 3dfx V2 (although current drivers are slow at that color depth). Furthermore, the STB V4400 is a true AGP 2x part, so as a single board solution is a better option for D3d than Voodoo Banshee, unless you prefer to run Glide, the 3dfx specific interface. (Its true that the later Banshee will be a 2x AGP part, but not until early in 1999, and the V4400 also does OpenGL with great speed). By the way, STBs tweak control panel is a utility up there with the best of them. Modeled after the RIVA Tweak utility that was released by nVidia last year, this control panel lets you customize a variety of settings for both OpenGL and Direct3D. For example, changing from "Enable Optimal DX6 Functionality" to "Disable DX6 functionality" will increase the frame rate in some games, and eliminate problems with others.
Not only this, but you can save individual configurations for specific games. This has become necessary because some DX5 games don't like DX6, and will actually run slower. No problem. You simply create a configuration with "Disable DX6 functionality" and maybe "Disable Auto Mip-Mapping" and save it with the name of the game for quick selection prior to launching your sim of choice. The biggest surprise for me was that 3dfx Voodoo2 is no longer in the lead. Running EAW or running the Falcon 4.0 alpha, I was getting an improved frame rate on the V4400. Equally important, image quality and color depth was superior. |
I know, not everyone who reads this will believe it. I've been playing with STBs V4400 for well over a month now, and the most recent driver release of 1.31 allowed me to get a fix on a comparison to my Wicked3d-2, running Metabytes latest driver revision of 2.6.
To my delight, the STBV4400 with Riva TNT was now 20% faster than V2 in F4. However, it was 20% faster at higher resolution! I ran my V2 (12 meg) board at 800x600, the highest currently allowed for a single V2 board in Falcon 4. I ran the TNT (16 meg) at 1024x768 which looks FANTASTIC in Falcon 4.
Frame rate in the F4 alpha, D3d on TNT vs. my 12 meg Voodoo2 board is up 75%. Incredible! Running under Glide a single V2 board does much better and TNT is only 30% faster. This is at a resolution of 800x600. The more startling fact is that TNT doesn't take virtually any performance hit when moving to 1024x768. Moving up the next jump, to 1152x864, frame rate dropped 10%, now only slightly higher than a single 12 meg Voodoo2 board. This board is hot, especially at the street price of $159 US! What about Banshee, which is about 20% stronger than V2 in some applications? Results coming in now place TNT even stronger than Banshee. Is there a place for 3dfx Banshee in the 3d gaming scene? Yes! If you have anything less than a PII system you will benefit more from Banshee than those running PII 266 and up. On a Pentium 233 MMX system TNT will score close to the same as 3dfx Banshee. Now what about the image itself? What is going on here? Colors are richer and textures seem clearer. The terrain somehow appears more solid. At first I thought this was due to the use of anisotropic filtering, a new technique more advanced than trilinear filtering. But more likely its just due to the processing of the image at greater color depth and the higher frame rate. I suspect Banshee will improve this situation since it has a 24 bit color pipeline compared to V2's 16 bit pipeline. As for general features, the STB V4400 has a TV out that works fine. I tried it on my 29" set and it was comparable to the TV output of the Matrox MGA G200. The RAMDAC on the V4400 is 250MHz, so you can run your refresh rate to the roof without any difficulty. I run Microsoft CFS beta at 1024x768 and 100Mhz.. a solid and gorgeous image! Summary If you don't have the advantage of an AGP slot but still want the power of TNT, the STB Velocity 4400 PCI presents a fantastic option. AGP is the way to go if you can, but not everyone has an LX or BX mainboard. Here's a entry perfect for the huge installed base of TX and older mainboards.
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Last Updated October 3rd, 1998 |
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