Bij iXBT-Hardware is een errug uitgebreide review online gezet van de Diamond Viper II videokaart met S3's Savage 2000 chip. Zoals al bekend is deze kaart een vrij aardige performer onder Quake III en Unreal Tournament, waarin je ook nog eens kan genieten van de erg gedetailleerde S3TC textures.
Well, let's sum up. Diamond Viper II Z200 graphics card proved an up-to-date graphics accelerator with adequate performance. S3 Savage2000 chipset really appeared a significant dash forward from S3 Savage4. However, that's all it can boast. The performance of NVIDIA GeForce 256 is still better although Savage2000 sometimes showed very close results. However, we have to admit that in the system on AMD Athlon processor Diamond Viper II Z200 performed very well due to 3DNow! instructions support and good work in AGP 2x mode, unlike GeForce 256, which supports only AGP 1x mode.Nevertheless, Diamond Viper II Z200 graphics card costs somewhat less than the cards on NVIDIA GeForce 256 with SDR memory. Just compare: about $180 for Viper II and about $210 for a card on GeForce 256 with SDR memory. Therefore, Viper II deserves its existence. But! We shouldn't disregard complaints about image quality in 3D, drivers incompleteness and the failure of geometric coprocessor in Direct3D, which prevent Savage2000 from being a hundred percent success. Even super performance in Unreal Tournament cannot be a real threat to its competitors. We think that only a significant price difference between the cards on NVIDIA GeForce 256 and S3 Savage2000 could help the latter to take one of the leading positions in the market. Those users who are currently enjoying graphics cards on Savage2000 can only hope that it will suddenly dawn upon S3 software developers and they will finally manage to write perfect drivers supporting all the announced API and S3TC.
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