Introduction

The STB Velocity 4400 TNT 16Mb DRAM is the latest product of a long line of graphic card offered by STB. This new product is using the RIVA TNT graphic chipset developed by Nvidia. The Riva TNT architecture is the first integrated, 128-bit 3D Processor that processes 2 pixels-per-clock cycle which enables single-pass multi-texturing and delivers a mind-blowing 180 million pixels-per-second fill rate. RIVA TNT's (twin-texel) 32-bit color pipeline, 24-bit Z, 8-bit stencil buffer and per-pixel precision delivers unsurpassed quality and performance. The VELOCITY 4400 features up to 16MB of high-speed video memory and a powerful 250MHz RAMDAC. Let's see what is capable of this graphic card by having an indepth look at it with us through this review.

The below picture is offering a very good view of this board with interesting details of its architecture.

Installation

When we first tried to install this graphic card we were reported memory address conflicts because of a non working USB port and not correctly supported AGP port by Win95 OSR2. So, to get rid off of these problems we had to install Win98 instead of OSR2. After this has been accomplished, we installed the Velocity 4400 drivers and we began to run some tests. We soon realized that something was going wrong because we were experimenting some video problems when we were playing the Unreal Flyby demo while using the Direct 3D rendering. After we gathered information all over the WWW, we found that Nvidia has issued a new beta driver Build 0.48 for Win95/98 AGP, so, we downloaded it and ran some test using it to find that all the video problems we had with Unreal were solved while using D3D rendering. We also used to download the latest patch available for Unreal (2.20) and we installed it. The patch is supposed to support the OpenGL rendering but to our great disappointment is didn't worked with this graphic card as we found no substantial frame rate improvement and there were many visual effects missing. As we found that several other hardware web sites were also using drivers built 048 as their test drivers we decided to stick to these drivers for all our tests and we warmly recommend it to you.

The performances

All tests were performed with the following system setup:

Motherboard: Iwill BD100
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 128mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE UDMA ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: AOpen CD-936E UDMA
AGP slot: STB Velocity 4400 Riva TNT 16Mb AGP 2X
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win98 4.10
DirectX 6.0

The graphic cards drivers used were Build 0.48 for Win95/98.

All tests were performed with the VSYNC disabled.

The 2D results

Wintune97 Results

These results are the best Wintune97 performance to date on this Benchmark. The closest result to the Velocity 400 are those of the Matrox Mystique G200 which are lagging 16 points behind the Velocity 4400.

Winbench98 Direct Draw test

Here are the Ziff Davis Winbench98 Direct Draw tests results of the STB Velocity 4400 graphic card.

Winbench98 Business Graphic Winmark

The Ziff Davis Winbench98 Business Graphic Winmark tests results of this graphic card are far ahead of the Matrox Mystique G200 and as a fact they are the best results measured to date on this benchmark.

The 3D results

The Forsaken FPS tests were performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the one indicated in the above results. Here again, the Velocity 4400 is beating the Mystique G200 but this time the differences are favoring the Riva TNT based board by more than 50% !

All the tests have been performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the value indicated in the above table. The rendering used was the Quake2 default OpenGL. As we can see the Velocity 4400 graphic card is amazingly fast and we must admit that we were astonished by the speed at which the demos were playing as well as by the visual quality of the graphic images displayed.

Timedemo testing procedure used:

The computer has been rebooted for the next test.

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Unreal D3D + Intel PII-350mhz
Graphic card	640 X 480 - 75hz 16-bit	800 X 600 - 75hz 16-bit
STB Velocity 4400 16Mb AGP 2X	37.29 fps	29.46 fps

The Unreal Timedemo tests have been conducted after the latest Unreal patch available (2.20) has been installed. The rendering method used to test this card was Direct 3D and the D3D quality level chosen on the Riva TNT setting were: Vsync disabled, Antialisaing disabled, Mip-map detail level= High-performance. The benchmark used was the one included with this version of the patch. Unfortunately, this version of Unreal doesn't work correctly (at least with this graphic card) when using the OpenGL rendering method so we didn't compiled the results obtained.

Final Reality

The above values are the mean values obtained from 5 tests ran in a row by selecting the Advanced Benchmark option of Final Reality.

3D Winbench98

The Ziff Davis 3D Winbench98 test gives another incredible advantage to the Velocity 4400 compared to the Matrox Mystique G200. The Mystique G200 card reached a score of only 812 while the Velocity 4400 reached 1310, quite a difference isn't it !

Conclusions

The Velocity 4400 Riva TNT 16Mb AGP 2X is the fastest graphic card we've tested to date. Its stunning performances are absolutely unbelievable. The very high visual quality of the images displayed by this graphic card are making out of this card one of the most pleasant graphic card to use. Comparing the price of a 2D only graphic card combined with a 3D only graphic card, there are no question that the Velocity 4400 is far away more interesting by offering a 2D/3D solution in a single card. The price tag and the performance delivered by the Velocity 4400 is actually giving the best price/quality/performance ratio available on the market to our knowledge.

Click here for more information about the Riva TNT 2D/3D graphic chipset

Click here for more information about the STB Velocity 4400 16Mb AGP 2X graphic card

Visually stunning interactive 3D

Optimized Direct3D acceleration

Complete DX5 and DX6 support

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

Mainstream feature support

High performance 128-bit 2D Acceleration

Fast 32-bit VGA/SVGA support

16MB, 8MB and 4MB frame buffer configurations

Video Support

Video Acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-1/2 and Indeo®

NTSC and PAL TV output

CCIR-656 video capture port

Interfaces

Comprehensive AGP2X support (532MB/sec with side band addressing and pipelining)

Bus mastering DMA PCI interface

Designed to WHQL compatibility standards

Windows NT 3.5, 4.0 and 5.0 display drivers

Windows 95 and 98 Display Driver, DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectVideo, ActiveX

Windows 3.x display drivers

OpenGL ICD for Windows 95 and NT (passes compliance tests)

Performance and Statistics 128-bit wide graphics engine and frame buffer and TwiN-Texel architecture (2 pixels/clock) Massive 1.8GB/sec frame buffer bandwidth, 32-bit color, 24-bit z buffer architecture supporting up to 200MHz memory 180Mpixel/sec fill rate 6M million triangles/sec peak AGP2x 16MB SDRAM/SGRAM frame buffer 7M transistors Integrated 250MHz Palette-DAC supporting up to 1600x1200x24@85Hz 452 PBGA Complete DirectX 6.0 and OpenGL support