RIVA TNT2 - Variants

Variants

Falcon Northwest, a veteran gaming PC company, and Guillemot, an international video card manufacturer, at one point cooperated to create the Falcon Northwest Special Edition Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 SE. It was a TNT2 Ultra card designed to operate at a record-breaking 195 MHz core and similarly impressive 235 MHz RAM. This was far and away the highest clocked TNT2 model released. The card used special extremely low latency (for the time) 4.3 ns SDRAM to achieve the high RAM clock speed. The regular Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 came with the core clocked at 175 MHz and memory at either 183 MHz or 195 MHz, depending on which RAM chips the board arrived with.

The Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra came clocked at the standard 150 MHz core and 183 MHz RAM. However, Creative included a unique software package that allowed the user to run software that used 3dfx's Glide. This wrapper, named Unified, was not as compatible with Glide games as real 3dfx hardware, but it was also the only card available other than a 3dfx card that could run Glide software. This Glide wrapper was very slow, not without issues, and was rather unstable. The main use of the wrapper was to allow 3D acceleration of games that only supported Glide 3D accelerators.

Hercules equipped their Dynamite TNT2 Ultra with faster-than-stock components, as well. The card came with a 175 MHz core clock and 200 MHz memory. The card lacked TV output, however.

ELSA's Erazor III came clocked at non-Ultra TNT2 rates but included "3D Revelator" shutter glasses. These glasses made games look as though they were coming out of the screen, and worked with both Direct3D and some OpenGL titles.