> > No way. By the time the Riva TNT hit the scene, Model 3 was obsolete.
>
> That seems slightly a stretch. I've used a Riva TNT (16MB PCI) before, to play
> UT, and ... it doesn't even seem in the same world as a Model3 arcade game, as far as the graphics go. No way. Enabling AA would make it far, far worse in
> terms of comparative performance.

agreed!. that seems very true, and that is in line with the general understanding out there that PC 3D accelerators (before GPUs such as GeForce) were not on-par with Model 3, even if their paper specs were several times higher than Model 3.

the thing about Model 3 is, it not only actually reach its claimed polygon performance of 1,000,000 sustained polygons could maintain that with every rendering feature applied. from texture mapping to trilinear filtering to anti-aliasing and everything else.

Ask a TNT or TNT2 Ultra to do that, and you will be nowhere NEAR Model 3 polygon performance and framerate (60fps locked)

> > Model 3 games definitely do not push around hundreds of thousands of polygons
> > per scene. Try a few thousand. I remember Ville once hooked up a polygon
> counter
> > to his D3D engine in Supermodel and in Sega Rally 2 there were around 9K polys
> > per frame. And note that these are being fetched from the Real 3D board's
> local
> > memory!
>
> Well, that's not surprising. I think UT pushes probably around 10K poly/scene
> too, roughly, except that Model3 can add all kinds of nice texture-filtering and
> full-screen AA effects too, without any noticable slowdown that I can see. Try
> doing that on an TNT - bad idea.
>
exactly.