Skywell Magic MVGA-NVTNT2A 32MB AGP Review
Reviewed by Alan Kuik (26 August 99)

As Skywell lacked a specs sheet for this particular card, I figured that I could put out the specs as printed on the box. They are listed below:-

3D Features:

100% hardware triangle setup	Backbend blend
Twin texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline	32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha
2 texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock	Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear and 8-tap anistropic filtering
Single pass multi-texturing	Per pixel perspective correct texture alpha
Bump mapping	24-bit or 16-bit HW Z-buffer (fixed or floating point precision)
Texture modulation	Texture Blend support : procedural textures - 2048 x 2048
Light Maps	Full scene anti-aliasing

2D Features

High performance 128 bit 2D acceleration	DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing, 30fps full screen DVD playback
Hardware acceleration for all win GDI operation	Fast 32-bit VGA/SVGA support
Optimized for multiple color depths (32, 24, 16, 15, 8 bits per pixel)	Multi-buffering (up to quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback
True color hardware cusor, hardware color dithering

Back to top

The Good

The Video-Card Inspection section

Packed in a dark colored box, it is good to see that the box is more sturdy and thicker than normal video card packaging (who knows what might happen on the way home). Like a typical Taiwanese made card, the manufacturers scringe on package contents. Besides a meagre 10 page thin manual and a CD-ROM, there's nothing much more to look at in the box other than the card of course. Perhaps it's time they learned how to package a product to make it look more attractive then it actually is.

The card is huge in size. Much bigger than the other numerous TNT2 cards that I've reviewed. It gave me a shock when I ripped it out of the box. Packed with 8 pieces of SEC 7ns RAM, it didn't look like a great deal. However, its power lies uncovered. With an active cooling fan / heatsink combination, temperature during runtime is kept down to a warm level. TV-out is optional. A snapshot of the RAM is shown on the left.

The Installation, Driver features and Programs

Installation of today's modern graphic cards are chicken-feet to most of us since 90% of them come with almost automated installation or idiot-proof manuals. It wasn't much difference with the Magic's case. However, it was indeed a shame that besides the detonator drivers, the CD-ROM came with nothing else that was useful. There are no bundled softwares here. Driver installation was easy and simple though, with step by step instructions stated in the manual. There is not much to grasp about except for the performance of the card itself.

The lack of programs like Powerstrip , Incontrols99 (Diamond) or other similiar functionality programs discourage users from clocking the card to higher speeds easily. However, you'll notice that the Magic card itself is clocked at 150mhz, instead of Nvidia's recommended 125MHz. Memory was clocked at the normal 150MHz though.

Here's a screen capture that you will see after installation.

You'll notice that besides the Nvidia's icon on the deskop after installation, there's no other places for you to tweak the card.

3D Quality & Features

Have a look at the below selected screenshots taken by 3D-Mark99 test suite for comparisons (to view in full size, click on pictures) :

Magic TNT2	3DMark99 Reference Shots	Comments
		Game-1 Picture quality was near perfect reproduction. Graphics were smoother then the other normal TNT2 cards. (probably of the higher clock)
		Game-2 Not much noticable difference in picture reproduction compared to the reference picture.

Back to top

---

The Benchmarks

Benchmarking was of course done on Windows98.

Wintune 98 results :

Video(2D)	53.78163 MPixels/s
Direct3D	202.8639 MPixels/s
OpenGL	129.0188 MPixels/s

3D mark 99 Max results :

As you can see by the benchmark scores, OpenGL performance is high.

Test runs on Quake2, Half-Life ran along nicely as expected. Even at the higher resolutions of 1024 x 768 x 32bit there was nothing to complain about in terms of performance from any of these "MiniGL" titles. Of course, I tested the card on Quake 3 too. Of course I ran along happily without any hiccups. Overall performance was solid. Though not as fast as an UltraTNT2, the game remained playable with the highest detail settings in 32bit, even up to and beyond 1024 x 768. Direct 3D performance was also great, Expendable was actually quite playable at 1600 x 1200 at 16bit. With 32bit rendering enabled however the game wasn't quite as fluid. However, when we are playing games, we usually prefer speed and fluidity over resolution. I bet you can't really tell the difference between 24 and 32 bit when the enemy is just on your tail!

Back to top

---

The Bad

On the whole, the Skywell card is not a disappointment at all! With its performance and pricing, it could easily beat the other TNT2 cards in the market. Of course comparing it with the TNT2 Ultras would leave it in their shadows since it is of a lower clock. What I feel Skywell should do is package customized clocking utilities which are getting more and more common these days with the introduction of AOpen's new TNT2 Ultra card with their own set of utilities as well as Diamond's V770 Ultra also doing the same thing with InControls99.

Back to top

---

Back to top

Conclusion

Giving a mention on DVD Playback, it is becoming increasingly popular, partly due to the fact that these days you don't have to go out and buy an expensive decoder kit in order to get high-res DVD movies to play fluidly on your PC screen. While the TNT 2 chipset doesn't offer many features that aid DVD playback (it doesn't have motion compensation for example) it does do overlay rendering and video scaling quite efficiently so with a fast CPU and a good DVD player you can play movies just fine. Therefore, once you get this card, there you go! A DVD player on your computer! However, it is funny that Skywell took out the DVD player software that was originally bundled with Magic TNT.

The Skywell Magic TNT 2 is a nice board based on the TNT 2 chip that is ever so famous. The higher clocked core and memory clock for a non-Ultra board together with its low price of about S$250, it is definitely a good buy for those who do not want to invest in a TNT2 Ultra. If you're contented to buy a cheaper TNT2, minus all the frills of a pretty box and brand name, then the Skywell Magic TNT2 is solid as a rock.

Back to top

VIDEO CARD RATING

Any comments/remarks? Submit your views to this review here.

Copyright © 1999 by Singapore Hardware Zone. All rights reserved.

None of the above shall be reproduced, copied and/or
modified without the permission of the WebMaster.