I had a Voodoo3, can't remember the model number anymore, but my friend who had a TNT2 would often comment about how much worse the 3dfx's 16bit color looked vs the TNT2's 32bit. I could never tell a difference.
Voodoo 16bit was nicely dithered. TNT 16bit was ugly while 32bit looked good by sacrificing ~30-50% of performance.
Nvidia was very smart to advertise 16 bit performance _and_ 32bit quality at the same time :)
3dfx were stupid not to include token 32bit output option on Avenger chip (voodoo3). Every voodoo chip since first one has performed blending calculations in full precision and only dropped to dithered 16bit output to save on framebuffer ram, but that ram saving was meaningless by the time 16MB V3 released.
Nvidia was very smart to advertise 16 bit performance _and_ 32bit quality at the same time :)
3dfx were stupid not to include token 32bit output option on Avenger chip (voodoo3). Every voodoo chip since first one has performed blending calculations in full precision and only dropped to dithered 16bit output to save on framebuffer ram, but that ram saving was meaningless by the time 16MB V3 released.