S3 Diamond Viper II Review

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Benchmark Expectations

Looking at what the Viper II hardware is capable in theory, I would assume that in single textured 3D benchmarks the Viper II will probably not do so hot. I also think that in low-resolution modes that the card will probably lag behind the competition a bit as the drivers aren't very mature. When we first did a preview of the Viper II, the software engineer I was working with mentioned that S3 was very careful on how their drivers were geared to preserve memory bandwidth. If this is the case, we should see the Viper II do well under 32 bit testing.

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Hardware Information
CPU	PIII 550
Motherboard (BIOS rev.)	ABIT BX6 2.0 (BIOS date 7/13/99)
Memory	128 MB Viking PC100 CAS2
Network	Netgear FA310TX
Driver Information
Diamond Viper II	4.11.01.9001-9.01.10
Reference NVIDIA GeForce/TNT2 Ultra drivers	4.12.01.0353
3dfx Voodoo3 3500	4.11.01.1213
Matrox G400 MAX	4.11.01.1410 w/TurboGL 1.00.001
Environment Settings
OS Version	Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A
DirectX Version	7.0
Quake 3 Arena	Retail versioncommand line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0
Shogo	V2.14Advanced Settings = disable sound, disable music, disable movies, disable joysticks, enable optimized surfaces, enable triple buffering, enable single-pass multi-texturingHigh Detail Settings = enabledFortress Demo
Descent III	Retail versionSettings = -nosound -nomusic -nonetwork -timetest
3Dmark 2000	16 bit settings = 16 bit textures, 16 bit Z-buffer, triple buffering32 bit settings = 32 bit textures, 24 bit Z-buffer, triple buffering