For the past few months there has been a bitter battle between 3dfx and Nvidia over various image quality vs. performance issues. Most of the fighting has been in the arena of 16bit vs 32 bit color. Which of the two is really better? While this battle has merit, it is not nearly as important as the battle that should be fought between texture resolutions. Texture resolution in my opinion is a far more noticeable feature, then say 32bit color is over 16bit color.

The texture resolution in most of today's games does not go very high. Most only travel upward to about 256x256, 3dfx's maximum texture size possible with their processors. With new games like Quake 3: Arena on the horizon supporting 512x512 textures, 3dfx's limitations are going to become far more apparent. This is where Nvidia and most other graphics chip makers come in, most their chips support texture resolutions all the way up to 2048x2048. While a texture of that size would be far more then today's graphics chips could handle, it is better to support that option then not have it at all.

Next >>