Getting back to the ramifications of the STB/3Dfx merger, many companies instantly turned to fabless chip manufacturer nVidia with an aggressive "What have you got?" attitude towards acquiring a new product line. Metabyte was no different, and the result is the production of their new TNT based video accelerator.
Metabyte chose to outfit their new TNT card with the standard allotment of qualifications that readers have come to expect from just about any TNT-based card:
Maximum 3D resolution w/16bit ZBuffer: 1920x1200x16bpp
Maximum 2D resolution: 1920x1200x32bpp
Metabyte TNT AGP and PCI Board Features
- 100MHz Clock Speed = 200 M/pixels per second
- 100% hardware triangle setup engine
- 250MHz RAMDAC
- AGP 2X Support
- Twin texel/pixel 32-bit graphics pipeline
- 16/32 bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha
- 16/24 bit z-buffering, 8-bit stencil buffer
- Ultra-high resolution up to 1920x1200 in true color
- Game color correction
- Anisotropic filtering
- Texture blend support
- Backend blend
- Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping
- Anti-aliasing: full scene, order independent
- Advanced support for DirectX6.0
- OpenGL ICD Support
- Hardware color space conversion(YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Multi-tap X and Y filtering
- Support scaled field inter-framing for reduced motion artifacts
- Per pixel color key
- Planar YUV12(4:2:0) to/from packed(4:2:2) conversion for s/w MPEG acceleration
- Accelerated playback of standard codec including MPEG-1/2
In addition, Metabyte opted for 16MB of SDRAM for their first TNT card, along with the regular assortment of Metabyte's usual goodies.
Fans of Metabyte's previous video products remember well the skill with which they applied their fantastic driversets. These proprietary drivers allowed standard Voodoo2 cards to exceed their maximum resolution limits, along with adding stereoscopic 3D LCD glasses support for an easy and effective 3D gaming experience.
For their TNT card, Sharky Extreme has learned that Metabyte has retained all of the advanced features that the Voodoo2 drivers included, and they're now working to offer full stereoscopic 3D LCD glasses support for the new TNT products as well.
