| STB V4400 By Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson |
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| Test System:
I've had the STB V4400 for about three weeks, working with various driver revisions through that time. Initially I wasn't convinced that this board would be a viable option to other new boards hitting the streets by Matrox and S3 and even 3dfx, since speculation on the price point placed the initial offering well over $200 US. However, the STB V4400 has come in well under $200 US at around $169, and the board may prove 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 matures. 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. My installation of the board proved a bit problematic. I had some kind of hardware conflict, likely related to the number of video boards that I had previously installed and uninstalled on my system. The conflict was evidenced by a sticky mouse on my desktop and weak 3d performance. After some tinkering and removal of Matrox Powerdesk, the conflict was eliminated and I was ready to give the board a thorough run in.
My initial tests three 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 conflict eliminated, my frame rate in EAW DOUBLED over the MGA G200, and my frame rate in MS CFS and Falcon 4 beta was 50% higher than the same resolution with the Mystique (higher resolutions have a greater performance penalty on the V4400). Stop and consider that data for a moment. The V4400 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%. Most of us can't afford that investment, and in some cases it would also mean a motherboard upgrade - a much higher cost than adding a video board. The V4400 looks hot, especially at the lower introduction price. No one expected the initial offering to come in at $169 US! |
Image quality is indiscernible from 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 potentially a better option for D3d than Voodoo Banshee. Its true that the later Banshee will be a 2x AGP part, but not until early in 1999. If you insist on running Glide (as in Janes F15 or F22 TAW, which isn't that great under D3d) then Banshee may be your best option. You should be aware that reference board designs with this chip run at 95MHz compared to production versions running at 90MHz, so my benchmarks are slightly higher than production samples. Similarly, the reference board uses SGRam but you will see SDRam on most production boards, though this shouldn't impact frame rates.
In my testing I ran these simulations:
All these ran fine except Falcon 4 and Combat Flight Sim, which tended to lock up on me, requiring me to hit the RESET button. Its tough to say whether the issue is with the software or with the beta video drivers, though I suspect the latter since these beta sims were stable on my Matrox Mystique G200. Final video drivers for the V4400 are expected any day now.
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. The Velocity 4400 is one of the most promising boards I have ever had my hands on. Once drivers are final I will be in a better position to make a recommendation, but I suspect that STB has another winner on their hands!
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Last Updated September 9th, 1998 |
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