Sharky Extreme heeft eens een review van de Diamond Viper II gepost. In eerdere reviews hebben we al kunnen lezen dat S3 en Diamond weer eens niet zo netjes te werk zijn gegaan bij het schrijven van de Savage2000 drivers: OpenGL presteert prima, terwijl de Direct3D performance glashard faalt vergeleken met videochips als de nVidia GeForce en ATi Rage Fury MAXX. Naast de matige performance bleken de drivers in DirectX vreemde bijeffecten, zoals vliegende bomen, te fantaseren :
Emboss bump mapping also proved to be a problem for the Savage 2000. While in theory the hardware should be able to bump map in a single pass, the Viper II required three passes to correctly render the scene. However, none of this concerned us as much as our final issue.First, take a look at the following screenshots. Notice the floating trees and flooded dock. All shots were taken from the 3D Mark 2000 demo.
So who needs motion-blur effects when you can have flying trees? Also worth mentioning are the streets that run into walls. We feel this would be a safety hazard and takes away from the realism of the demo (sorry folks, couldn't help ourselves).
On a more serious note, the issues present in 3D Mark are indicative of drivers that aren't yet mature. Remember, this is a shipping product and, while it may be more common for redesigned hardware to include buggy drivers nowadays (think early Rage 128), we feel that consumers should not be paying for something that isn't really ready for shipping.
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