ATI Rage 128 Ultra vs NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 Vanta

Because two graphics cards have the same number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) and the ATI Rage 128 Ultra is clocked higher, its pixel fillrate is higher. Better maximum pixel fill rate means that the graphics card can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

Pixel fillrate is less important than texture fill rate in modern games. This parameter is calculated as the number of TMUs, multiplied by graphics clock. The Rage 128 Ultra has an upper hand here, as it runs at higher frequency, and both GPUs have the same number of Texture Mapping Units. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the Riva TNT2 M64 Vanta GPU comes with higher memory clock. Consequently, it has higher memory bandwidth.