Benchmarks for ATI's TRUFORM Technology?

SanLouBlues asks: "I'm slow and still deciding on what video card to get, but it's caused me to wonder what the performance of ATI's TRUFORM n-patching is like. I've heard plenty of subjective comments and seen the pictures, but despite my best efforts, no benchmarks. I would hope that similar benchmarks would be available for GeForce3s since I believe ATI claims that n-patching is part of DirectX."

ati warning

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an ati r128 card. For ages I put up with screen flicker and corruption, the tv-out not working (even worse, if you boot with tv cable connected x-windows wont run until you unplug and reboot). All the time ATI promise open, free drivers with top support. If you search on the net you'll find many people have this problem, and in fact the r128 drivers cant accelerate 2D and 3D at the same time! Setting some ladahCCA option helps but completely disables 2D acceleration! Sloooowwww.

Eventually I realised that ATI have no intention of fixing these problems, so I upgraded to the cheapest GeForce2+tvout I could find. (no RF out though.. bummer). Its a huge improvement! No more flicker, getting the closed drivers working is a small pain but worth it. For Redhat systems you just install an RPM but for debian you have to rebuild your kernel. Anyway, I'd really advise you not to get ATI. For 6 months after buying my new computer even the Windows drivers had bugs (flickering vertical lines in 32bpp mode). If they dont test a common configuration like that you can guess how they treat lesser used ones.