Drivers
Nvidia's driver development with TNT was the beginning of their notably aggressive efforts to maintain the best set of drivers possible. TNT received the first branded driver within the industry, called Detonator.
These drivers were a huge success. While the TNT had always performed well on Intel based systems, it previously lagged behind in terms of performance on then current AMD based systems. At the time, Quake2 was the benchmark for performance and the 3dfx-made Voodoo2 enjoyed a large performance difference over the TNT because it had 3DNow! optimizations that negated the performance penalty of the weak, unpipelined FPU on then current AMD processors. The Detonator drivers included 3DNow! optimizations and the TNT's Quake2 performance jumped 30%. In fact, all OpenGL and DirectX applications benefitted from such optimizations. This made the TNT a much more attractive 3D accelerator for AMD owners than previously.
The Detonator drivers also fixed compatibility issues with motherboards of the time, and improved overall software compatibility.
Read more about this topic: RIVA TNT