Gigabyte GA-660 TNT2

With the 3dfx/STB and Diamond/S3 mergers, two of NVIDIA's biggest supporters are now out of the picture. Looking at it from the other perspective, that of a board manufacturer, the only big graphics manufacturer left that is offering up chips to board manufacturers is NVIDIA. This of course provides for a perfect setup for every graphics board OEM to jump into the fray and offer a variety of cards based on NVIDIA's latest chip, current the RIVA TNT2.

Gigabyte is one such company that is a fairly well known on the motherboard side of things and has quietly played the video card market in the past. As a motherboard manufacturer, they've proven their abilities in the AnandTech labs with rock solid motherboards that seemingly do no wrong. Although they've been in the graphics market for quite a while, the GA-660 TNT2 is AnandTech's first glimpse at a Gigabyte video card.

Specifications

(courtesy of Gigabyte)

ADVANCED 3D FEATURES

• Hardware triangle setup engine
• Optimized for Direct3D acceleration
• Complete DirectX 6.X support
• TwiN-Texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline
• 2 texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock
• Single pass multi-texturing
• Square and non-square texture support
• Texture blending support, including:
  • Multi-textures, bump maps, texture modulation, Light maps, reflection maps, environmental maps
    
  • Procedural textures
• Backend blending, including:
  • DirectX 6.X: 121 modes supported for source, destination and alpha blending
    
  • 32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha
    
  • Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering (better than trilinear mip-mapping)
• Per-pixel, perspective-correct, texture mapping, including fog, light, mip mapping
  
• 24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer and 8-bit stencil buffer
  
• Anti-aliasing (full scene and order independent)

2D ACCELERATION

• 128-bit graphics engine, optimized for single cycle operation
  
• Internal 256-bit data paths for high speed Windows acceleration
  
• Pipeline optimized for multiple color depths
  
• Execution of all 256 raster operations
  
• Multi-buffering (double, triple, and quad) for smooth animation
  
• True color hardware cursor

VIDEO ACCELERATION

• Acceleration of full-motion video playback, sustaining 30 frames per second with high quality color resolution
  
• Implements true bilinear filtering for scaled video
  
• Backend hardware video scaling for video conferencing and playback
  
• Hardware color space conversion and multi-tap X and Y filtering
  
• Support for scaled field interframing
  
• Per-pixel color keying
  
• Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
  
• Support for software MPEG acceleration and H.261 video conferencing
  
• DVD sub-picture alpha blending compositing
  
• Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo

DRIVER SUPPORT

• Windows 9X, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000
  
• DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectVideo, and ActiveX
  
• OpenGL ICD for Windows 95/98 and NT
  
• Standard 32-bit VGA and SVGA support

2D VIDEO MODES

AVAILABLE MODELS
GA-660: 32/16MB for standard monitor output
GA-660F: 32/16MB with support for both standard monitors and digital flat panels