Sure... everybody was rushed because of the high fillrate numbers and tremendous specs nVidia released to the public for this chip. The TNT was supposed to be made in a 0.25 micron fabrication process and run at 125mhz but nVidia decided to go for 0.35 instead so that they could get to the market faster than ATI and other chip makers and compete with the Voodoo2 that was already released. But there was a problem, with a 0.35 micron fab. process, TNT chips would run way too hot and become unstable at 125mhz as originally intended so that's why TNT chips are clocked at 90mhz. Here are some specs for the TNT:

• Twin texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline
• Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping
• 24-bit or 16-bit HW Z buffer (floating point or integer)
• 8-bit stencil buffer
• Anti-aliasing: full scene, order independent
• 100% HW Triangle setup
• High performance 128-bit 2D Acceleration
• Fast 32-bit VGA/SVGA support
• 16MB, 8MB and 4MB frame buffer configurations
• NTSC and PAL TV output
• Comprehensive AGP2X support (532MB/sec with side band addressing and pipelining)
• Bus mastering DMA PCI interface

What about the out of the box experience?

We all know that installing a video card is no big deal... hmm... ok, ok I have had some problems sometimes but this was not the case for Viper V550. Installation was very simple, I popped the card in the AGP slot, booted up and installed the drivers, I'm very used to the Diamond drivers so there was nothing new. I've heard of people having trouble with other cards based on the TNT chip like STB ones but the Diamond installed flawlessly. I noticed that as in other Diamond cards there is no hard documentation, just a quick installation guide. The bundle isn't impressive but it's not bad at all either, the Viper came with Motorhead, a very nice arcade racing game, a software DVD player and a couple of more titles.

I didn't test 2D performance because I think that is irrelevant in this times, I can say that I liked my Mystique G200 more for 2D though, not for speed 'cause it seemed to perform identically but visual quality.

Now on 3D... As all TNT based cards the Diamond Viper V550 is a very fast card, yes, usually faster than a single Voodoo2. I'll try to explain this one briefly, in Direct3D games you'll almost always get higher frame-rates than a single Voodoo2, also you can play at higher resolutions, I tried 1024x768 in most of the games I ran and I had no problems, I mean, much better visual quality than in 640x480 and a respectable frame-rate, usually above 30fps.

In the other hand the TNT falls a bit behind the Voodoo2 in games that use OpenGL API such as Quake 2, SiN and Half-Life. It's also important to mention Unreal, as we know this game just supported Glide (3Dfx only) and PowerVR when it shipped and now there is available a beta OpenGL patch for cards like the TNT but it's performance isn't the best, Epic has announced that a new OpenGL driver will be included in the 221 patch that will make TNT cards perform as fast (or faster) as a Voodoo2.

Too bad that I couldn't test this card on my new Celeron @ 450, anyway... here's the specs of the system I used to test the Viper V550:

Pentium II 300
64mb SDRam
Diamond Viper V550 16mb AGP
WD 8.4Gb HD
SB PCI 128
20x CD-Rom

For the benchmarks I ran Quake 2 demo1 and 3Fingers Crusher, Forsaken and Incoming in both 16 and 32 bit

OpenGL benchmarks

No Voodoo2 killer you say?

In my opinion the TNT IS a Voodoo2 killer... why?

With a TNT card like the Viper V550 you get 2D/3D acceleration for the same cost, the TNT has got a much better visual quality (see the samples below), you can run at higher resolutions and last but not least you get 32bpp rendering

Finally... the Diamond Viper V550 is an excellent card, if you already own one of these beauties be sure you've one hell of a card or if you're looking for the best 2D/3D card out there, any TNT card will make you happy... now, if you can wait a couple of weeks more you should also consider an ATI Rage 128 based card, early tests have shown that it's as fast as a TNT in 16bit but much faster in 32bit color rendering.