S3 Diamond Viper II Review

3D Mark 2000 Fill Rate (quad Texture)

I was very upset that the Viper II failed this test as it would have provided some awesome data for analysis. Unfortunately, the drivers have once again held the card back from proving itself. I hope S3 can get these driver issues out of the way sooner than later for their own sake. No one wants to deal with performance problems due to sub-par drivers. Note how well the GeForce boards do by the way. They don't have a quad texture in a single pass but they seem to handle the situation just fine.

Even though we aren't getting information on the Viper II with the quad texture testing, we do make an interesting find. Note that we went to 32 bit color that the SDR GeForce dramatically dropped in performance as the DDR took a small hit and kept pushing onward.