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Diamond Viper II Review

We tested the graphics card on Savage2000 chipset from S3. As you remember, S3 announced its Savage2000 beforeNVIDIA its GeForce 256. Nevertheless, graphics cards based on Savage2000 chipset have appeared only now, and weimmediately put our hands on it.

Well, the year 2000 has finally come. By this time, we have already reviewed almost all the graphics cards ofthe '99 generation and now we look forward to new cards "of the spring draft". However, there is one more chipleft, which we haven't yet tested - S3 Savage2000. It is remarkable that S3 Company had announced its Savage2000chip one day before NVIDIA launched its GPU GeForce 256, but Viper II graphics cards based on Savage2000 appearednot so long ago.<%BANNER[article]%>

Today we are going to make a thorough analysis of S3 Savage2000 chip against the background of graphics cards basedon GPU NVIDIA GeForce 256 successfully selling all over the world. Let's find out if Diamond Viper II Z200 can competewith them especially taking into account their price.

First, let's take a look at the sample we got for testing. This is a graphics card with AGP 2x/4x interface, 32MB 6nslocal graphics memory (SDRAM) located in 4 64Mbit modules (2 microchips on each PCB side).

You can clearly see that Diamond Multimedia keeps sticking carefully to its habit of economizing in everything. Herewe mean the passive cooling implemented on the card - a heatsink without a fan stuck to the chip. Frankly speaking, we can'tunderstand what guides the company, which grudges $1-2 for an active cooler, while the graphics card heats quite significantlyeven working at nominal frequencies (125/143MHz - graphics core and graphics memory frequencies).

We would like to point out that only two graphics cards manufacturers Diamond Multimedia and Creative Labs disregard theproblem of overheating and equip most of their graphics cards only with heatsinks without fans. Strange, isn't it? Especiallytaking into account that these are the largest companies, the most well-known brands among the graphics cards manufacturers.Frankly speaking, it's a pity to see such neglect of the users' needs and concerns.

Anyway, let's return to our Diamond Viper II Z200. The card is provided with a chip responsible for TV-out with twoexternal connectors: S-Video and Composite (RCA). Besides, the card also has two jumpers, with which you can change theAGP bus mode (2x or 4x). The graphics card goes together with a CD with the drivers, two CDs with games, a user's manualand a small package with jumper caps.

At first sight the graphics card doesn't seem to have any specific distinguishing peculiarities with the only exceptionof S3 Savage2000 graphics processor. Here is a long list of the potentially available features of this chip:

Unfortunately, as usual, far not all the things promised in the specs were put into practice. For example, the realchipset frequency is only 125MHz and not something close to 150MHz. The memory frequency also leaves much to be desired:it is only 143MHz. However, the situation with the memory is really puzzling. We have already mentioned several times inour reviews that SDR SDRAM working at low frequencies turns out one of the major factors restricting the performance ofthe 3D accelerator.

However, the most interesting peculiarity of S3 Savage2000 chip is the geometric coprocessor. That is why like NVIDIAGeForce 256, S3 Savage2000 can be also called GPU (Graphics Processor Unit). Especially, since S3 Savage2000 had beenannounced a day prior to NVIDIA GeForce 256, which gives us every right to consider S3 a pioneer in this field. However,we would like to stress once again that unfortunately we are reviewing this pioneer in the last place, while new GPUs areabout to appear...

When S3 announced its Savage2000, they said that there would be two versions of this chip (like NVIDIA Riva TNT2 andRivaTNT2 Ultra):

Graphics cards on S3 Savage2000+ are already announced and are expected to appear in the market in Q1 this year.

When we discussed NVIDIA GeForce 256 chip we wrote about the functions of the geometric coprocessor. Let's revise thembriefly. There are several stages, which should be carried out to create 3D scenes, and most of them are usually entrustedto the CPU. Such as the calculation of triangle vertex coordinates and lighting, for instance. When 3D scene is created, each3D object is split into triangles (polygons) and then all the manipulations are carried out with the vertexes of these triangles,which have their own coordinates as any other object in the space. However, the coordinate systems are absolutely different in 2Dand 3D. The conversion of all vertexes' coordinates into 2D as well as clipping are made taking into account the user's viewingangle (perspective correction or transformation). All these operations are usually in charge of the system CPU.

If you have ever worked with 3D-modeling software, then you should be aware that one of the most important stages in3D-scene development is the placing of light sources and scene lighting calculation plus such lighting effects as:highlights, light halos, etc. Therefore, the color shades of every object, of every polygon should be transformedtaking into account the lighting. Usually in computer games it is the system CPU that is responsible for these operations.Besides, it is also possible to imitate lighting calculation in 3D scenes with the help of lightmaps, which has become verypopular and widely spread today. In multitexturing one texturing engine usually lays a texture over a pixel, and the otherengine - a special map prepared in advance, which changes the texture color and hence creates a roundish light spot on theobject. This method of lighting calculation is quite simple and does not require huge CPU resources. However, this method israther rough and cannot provide realistic light emitted by a dynamic light source. This method allows creating only staticlight halos, which won't change if the shape and intensity of light source changes. Take for instance a torch. In this casethe highlights on the walls should be constantly changing. It is impossible to stuff the program with so many lightmaps, sothat to use a new lightmap every time the flame transforms. That is why we can get most correct and realistic lighting onlywith the help of vertex lighting method, which requires considerable computing capacities.

In fact, if both these power consuming processes - coordinates transformation and lighting - could be transferred fromthe system CPU into the special geometric coprocessor, the central processing unit could have more unoccupied resources atits disposal. These resources could be used for some other important tasks, such as calculating the physics of the objectmoving or AI. This special geometric coprocessor is included into Savage2000 chipset from S3 and GeForce 256 from NVIDIA.In Savage2000 this coprocessor is called S3TL. And a set of operations we have just discussed is called Transformation andLighting (T&L). If you come across "Hardware T&L" it means that there is a geometric coprocessor on board, which is used tocarry out these operations. And if you see "Software T&L", it will denote a traditional method with the help of the systemCPU resources and a gaming or a standard API engine, such as Direct3D 7.0, for instance. Just if you forgot: Hardware T&L ofthe today's GPUs allows calculating up to 8 light sources at a time for a single scene.

	Savage2000	Savage2000+
Memory bus interface	128bit	128bit
Memory bandwidth	Up to 2.6GB/sec	Up to 3.2GB/sec
Memory bus working frequency	Up to 166MHz	Up to 200MHz
Graphics core working frequency	Up to 150MHz	Up to 200MHz
Fillrate	Up to 300 million pixels per second	Up to 400 million pixels per second
Texturing rate	Up to 600 million texels per second	Up to 800 million texels per second

The use of GPU, which frees the CPU resources,also allows spitting objects into a greater number of polygons (tessellation). This lets us draw the main conclusion: the gameprofits from using Hardware T&L. Of course, it seems to be a better thing to develop games with dynamic tessellation,especially since there are both types of the graphics cards: with GPU and without it. In other words, with Hardware T&Lthe objects would be divided into more polygons, vertex lighting would be used, the enemies would become cleverer, etc.Unfortunately, we can only dream of games like that, although they could be just perfect to demonstrate all the advantageof the GPU. The screenshot above was taken from MadOnion 3D Mark 2000.

However, the geometric coprocessor is not the only distinguishing feature of S3 Savage2000. There is one more veryimportant peculiarity, particularly taking into account that very few games support Hardware T&L. It is a specialdual-pipeline 3D rendering architecture. This technology in S3 Savage2000 is called Single-Pass Quad-Texture engine.The matter is that this chipset contains 4 texturing modules and can provide 2 pixels per clock and cover them with 2textures each (for example, texture + lightmap, texture + alpha channel for semitransparent objects). A four-pipelineNVIDIA GeForce 256, which is capable of processing 4 pixels per clock in normal mode (compared to 2 pixels by Savage2000),also creates 2 pixels with 2 textures superposition in multitexturing. Besides, Savage2000 can also superpose 4 texturesover one pixel per clock, which is called quad-texturing. However, this method isn't yet supported in the software that'swhy further discussion of this matter doesn't make much sense. Nevertheless, we have to admit that the more gamessupporting multitexturing appear in the market, the more popular becomes S3 Savage2000 chip optimized for multitexturing.

Speaking about other worthy peculiarities of S3 Savage2000, we should mention 32bit Z-buffer and W-buffer support(it is an array of reciprocals to Z-coordinates, which help to specify the location of the object or of its vertexesif the object is situated too far away from the user). Unfortunately, S3 Savage2000 does not support such progressivemethods as Environmental Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) or Dot Produce Bump Mapping (DPBM). It supports only Embossing BumpMapping present in DirectX 6.0 and up, although almost no software developers really use it.

Of course, Savage2000 chip took the baton from its predecessor Savage4 and supported the company's brand texturecompression technology S3TC licensed by Microsoft and included into Direct3D as DXTC. Although ATI announced full softwareS3TC support in its ATI RAGE 128 PRO, S3TC for OpenGL still works normally only by S3 products.

Well, let's pass over to the performance and 3D graphics quality shown by Viper II on Savage2000 chip.

Both systems worked in Windows 98. Besides, we also used ViewSonic P810 (21") and Nokia 447Xav (17") monitors.

The tests were run with the drivers ver. 9.01.21. For Unreal Tournament 4.02 we used S3 MeTaL 2.003 driver version.Vsync was disabled. S3 MeTaL driver is supplied separately and is optimized only for Unreal Tournament.

The drivers installed without any problems. We didn't use any Diamond InControl Tools, because they couldn't boast anygraphics card settings. After all we got the following opportunities for 3D operation:

This properties page allows adjusting the graphics card for Direct3D. We would like to note that according to DiamondMultimedia traditions, the driver structure is made in a form of profiles for particular applications. That is why havinginstalled the drivers you can't make any settings changes before you start some application. By the way, we got into a veryfunny situation when the program referred Quake3 to Direct3D applications, and OpenGL menu on Diamond 3D properties pageremained inaccessible.

Auto MIP-mapping - the scene is automatically divided into MIP-levels (in fact all the games can do itthemselves, that is why this feature is also useless).

Fixes Top Texture Line enables the correction of upper texture lines during textures superposition, isn'tused in practice.

As you can see, here you can enable and disable Vsync and W-buffer for all applications.

Bearing in mind the TV-out, we think it is very important to take a look at the following page:

Although the TV-out of our hero doesn't differ that much from those of other graphics cards (800x600 at 60Hz),you can set image contrast and brightness and choose a signal type.

And now directly to the performance. As usual, let's start with 2D. S3 Savage2000 chipset has an integratedRAMDAC working at 350MHz frequency, which gives us every reason to expect high image quality. All our expectationscame true: only at 1600x1200 the image quality provided by S3 Savage2000 ceded slightly to NVIDIA GeForce 256, at allother resolutions the quality proved really high. However, as it comes to performance in 2D, everything is not sobeautiful, as we wish:

Well, the table shows that S3 Savage2000 has significantly fallen behind the competitors.

As for the performance of the graphics card in 3D, we resorted to the following testing tools:

We decided to compare the performance of Diamond Viper II Z200 with that shown by the graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce256 with SDR and DDR memory (ASUS AGP-V6600 and Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR) and by ATI RAGE FURY MAXX (two ATI RAGE128 PRO chips).

We find it useful to mention that when we tested Diamond Viper II Z200, S3TC (i.e. hardware T&L) was disabled in thedrivers. However, the driver ver. 9.01.21 allows enabling S3TC in OpenGL with the help of the following addition to theRegistry:

In Quake3 and Expendable charts we also provided the results achieved by Diamond Viper II Z200 overclockedto 150/166MHz.

Well, Diamond Viper II Z200 fell behind all its competitors. Only at low resolutions it managed to surpass ATIRAGE FURY MAXX and when overclocked it almost catches up with ASUS AGP-V6600.

Here Diamond Viper II Z200 strengthens its positions and the card performs almost equally with ASUS AGP-V6600. Itis probably due to drivers optimization for 3DNow!.

In this test Diamond Viper II Z200 improves the situation quite tangibly. Now it's ASUS AGP-V6600, which is laggingbehind. As we saw in case with ATI RAGE FURY MAXX, 32bit color is one of the things S3 Savage2000 can be proud of.

No one will dare deny the superiority of Diamond Viper II Z200 over the graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce 256 withSDR memory!

There is no difference from the similar test carried out in Normal mode. Again Diamond Viper II Z200 is almostthe last.

Diamond Viper II Z200 defeated not only ASUS AGP-V6600 but even Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR at lowerresolutions!

So, as we see, the drivers of Diamond Viper II Z200 are very well optimized for 3DNow!, and hence in Quake3 run on thesystem with AMD Athlon CPU this graphics card appeared in the same row with the cards on NVIDIA GeForce 256 with SDR memory.Besides, we would like to point out that in Athlon based system Diamond Viper II Z200 drivers enable AGP 2x while the graphicscards on NVIDIA chips use only 1x mode.

As for the system on Intel Pentium III CPU, Diamond Viper II Z200 card proved worthy only in 32bit color. However, even withhigher clock frequency (125MHz against 120MHz of NVIDIA GeForce 256) S3 Savage2000 still failed to catch up with the cards onGeForce 256.

What can we say here? Nothing, actually. Diamond Viper II Z200 performed poorly everywhere.

So, Diamond Viper II Z200 turned out a total failure in Expendable. The gap between Viper and its competitors is so hugethat we can hardly say anything positive concerning the performance of S3 Savage2000 in Direct3D with multitexturing.

Besides, if you start Expendable with Vsync disabled you will notice an awful lag, i.e. the scene changing won'tcatch up with the player's actions. You can play only with Vsync enabled, which slows down the average card's performance.Moreover, we were really puzzled when Viper II refused point-blank to work at 1600x1200x32bpp and said that ithad "not enough memory" although AGP-texturing was enabled.

According to this test we considered the dependence of the graphics card's performance on that of the system CPU,which is also known as scalability. Besides, we would also like to show you the performance of this graphics card insystems with slower processors.

As you have probably noticed the drivers of S3 Savage2000 are a bit optimized for SSE since Expendable uses SSE and3DNow! technology. Despite a small frequencies difference (50MHz) the performance gain achieved on Pentium III 600 ismuch higher compared to Celeron 550. And the low level of fps, shown in a system with 366MHz CPU, is just anotherargument for our opinion: a modern graphics accelerator is worth buying only if you have a modern CPU.

Here we decided not to comment on every test separately, because there is actually nothing to say. Diamond Viper II Z200suffered a total defeat! The only exception is the test carried out on Athlon based system in 32-bit color, where Viper IImanaged to approach its rivals at least slightly. Of course, at the resolution equal to 800x600 the performance seemed tobe quite OK, however, what's the use of buying an expensive graphics accelerator for 800x600x16bpp? Note that we usedSoftware T&L for our tests, because Test Drive 6 works in DirectX, where hardware T&L isn't yet supported by Savage2000drivers.

Now let's pass over to Unreal Tournament. We should mention that we tested Diamond Viper II Z200 via API S3 MeTaL(aka MTL) optimized for S3 Savage2000 chipset. For this purpose we installed an additional package of large texturesprovided on a separate CD disk with Unreal Tournament. All the other graphics cards were tested in Direct3D.Unfortunately, the game can't boast any internal benchmarks to take the performance via different API. As forthe demos we created when playing through this or that level, they worked only within one single API. That iswhy we had to complete the Barricade level (which uses a lot of large textures in API S3 MeTaL) in Direct3D andmake a demo called test3d.dem. And then we played on the same level in S3 MeTaL once again and made a demo -testmetal.dem. We did understand that it was not the most proper comparison. However, we couldn't think of anythingbetter to view the performance of Diamond Viper II Z200 in the most advantageous situation (and the most beautiful,too) and to compare it with the other graphics cards, for which Direct3D was a primary API.

Well, our patience is finally rewarded and we can say without any shade of doubt: Diamond Viper II Z200 threw everyoneand won! The performance is just impressive! Only at 1600x1200 the graphics card slightly fell behind the competitors.However, we would like to repeat once again that it used large textures while all the others didn't.

The success of S3 Savage2000 is beyond all doubts. In fact, it occurred to us that there could be a really good gift pack:Diamond Viper II Z200 + Unreal Tournament :-)

Yes, as we can see, S3 did its best in order to provide high quality API MeTaL support, which proved worth the effort: thegraphics card managed to show the best of its hidden potential. Especially, since the last version of this driver allowedprocessing two pixels per time step, according to S3. This told on the performance significantly: the gain was just incredible(in fact the previous driver appeared to have involved only one pipeline). However, there is that bad egg that spoils the wholebarrel: working at 1600x1200x32bpp you need 256MB system memory to load all the textures. In fact, it seems to be not that seriousbecause there are hardly so many users playing at such high resolutions. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as a signal to thoseusers who are currently having 64MB RAM, because we doubt that they will be able to play at high resolutions using largetextures with so little memory.

As we have already mentioned before, a new driver version for S3 Savage2000 (9.01.21) allows involving S3TC, namely tocarry out hardware T&L. Since we didn't have any gaming tests using hardware T&L in OpenGL, we resorted to NVIDIA TreeMarkto show the geometric coprocessor of S3 Savage2000 at work.

This diagram gives us to understand that the geometric coprocessor (S3TC) of Savage2000 does work, although its performanceis undoubtedly low. It is almost 50% weaker than that of NVIDIA GeForce 256. The most typical thing is the absence of theperformance gain although the resolutions get lower, which is a clear proof of the processor weakness. The processor hereis the main factor limiting the graphics card performance.

This figure shows the dependence of the GPU performance on the amount of polygons, i.e. on the scene complexity. Thegraphs for all the GPUs are very similar.

And this graph shows the dependence of the GPU performance drop on the amount of light sources used for the scene.Here GPU S3 Savage2000 proved just perfect. Although it lags far behind in terms of performance, the curve angle showsthat the increase of the amount of light sources used in a scene is not such a great problem for Savage2000.

Let's sum up our attempts to analyze the performance. Although Diamond Viper II Z200 disappointed us in Direct3Dand the competitors managed to leave it quite far behind, we still have to admit that S3 did a great job and thoroughlyworked on its ICD OpenGL, which of course told on the card's performance. And as for API S3 MeTaL, everything is justperfect! The graphics card simply "flies" although Unreal Tournament is quite a complicated game. However, it seemsrather silly to buy such an expensive card just to play one single game. API S3 MeTaL is hardly used anywhere else.Of course, Unreal engine also supports this API that is why S3 Savage2000 proves quite nice in games based on this engine.However, we will show further in our review that since S3 optimized its API only for Unreal Tournament, even in Unrealappeared some problems with the image quality.

Not so long ago the world welcomed a new demo program Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens, which has already managed toarouse general interest and to win the hearts of thousand users due to the beautiful and most realistic graphics. Thisprogram uses not only Hardware T&L but also Software T&L that is why the image quality provided by some graphics acceleratorsremains on a very high level (Matrox G400, NVIDIA Riva TNT2). However, on some graphics cards the textures aren't drawnproperly and there are some other artifacts (since the program uses quite large textures). What does it look like on S3Savage2000?

Some textures are simply absent (black objects), besides, there are some problems with lighting (it ispermanent, and the location of the person watching doesn't tell on the way the objects are lit).

In OpenGL, in Quake3 in particular, you can also see some artifacts, not so noticeable though.

However, we have to note that the awful distortions we saw on S3 Savage4 are finally eliminated.

In fact, most questions concerned compressed textures, i.e. S3TC. There has just appeared a demo versionof "Soldier of Fortune", which supports this technology. This is what we got:

As you can notice, the error, which could be either in Z-buffer realization or in clipping, let us see behind the wall :-)We have to stress that there were quite a lot of errors when we worked with S3TC. By the way, we didn't see any effect thistechnology made in Direct3D: the only game supporting S3TC, Expendable, showed nothing: no matter if S3TC was enabled or not.

Recently Diamond Multimedia released seven new levels for Quake3, which used S3TC technology and compressed textures.Unfortunately, Quake3 unpacks them in system memory that is why you need 256MB system memory to use high level of detailon almost all of these levels, and for one of them you will need even 384MB! Of course, you can work on a smaller levelof detail but we really didn't want to sacrifice the beautiful graphics, which could get lost in this case.

The idea of those levels is very nice, however, on S3 Savage2000 you may sometimes notice the following drawbacks:

Well, actually this "twinkling" of textures or polygons is sometimes very irritating, although you can get rid of it bysimply reducing the level of detail. Here are a couple of other screenshots without any artifacts this time:

Unfortunately, there are no games today, which could support S3TC and provide such beautiful scenes. This situationreminds us of EMBM introduced in Matrox G400. Although Matrox keeps sending out numerous announcements about EMBM supportin some games, it always turns out very restricted and only few selected objects in few selected scenes are really bumped.It's very disappointing actually that cool technologies like that are slowly dying undemanded...

And now let's take a look at the situation with MPEG2 video playback. Besides the card, the package also includes a DVD-playerfrom Zoran, which actually works just horrible with Savage2000. Diamond Viper II proved rather nice with a player fromCinemaster99 ver. 2.0.36, which utilized only 40% at the most of the system CPU. However, the best player, which used MPEG2decoding features of S3 Savage2000 most fully, turned out WinDVD2000. Together with excellent decoding quality, this programprovides the CPU utilization of only 30%!

Well, let's sum up. Diamond Viper II Z200 graphics card proved an up-to-date graphics accelerator with adequateperformance. S3 Savage2000 chipset really appeared a significant dash forward from S3 Savage4. However, that's allit can boast. The performance of NVIDIA GeForce 256 is still better although Savage2000 sometimes showed very closeresults. However, we have to admit that in the system on AMD Athlon processor Diamond Viper II Z200 performed very well dueto 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 withSDR 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 incompletenessand the failure of geometric coprocessor in Direct3D, which prevent Savage2000 from being a hundred percent success. Evensuper performance in Unreal Tournament cannot be a real threat to its competitors. We think that only a significant pricedifference between the cards on NVIDIA GeForce 256 and S3 Savage2000 could help the latter to take one of the leadingpositions in the market. Those users who are currently enjoying graphics cards on Savage2000 can only hope that it willsuddenly dawn upon S3 software developers and they will finally manage to write perfect drivers supporting all theannounced API and S3TC.

And if you are Epic Games lover (Unreal, Unreal Tournament, etc.), we can surely recommend this graphics card,because no other card will provide the same performance and quality there. All the others could probably wait a littlebit more and watch the price dynamics, new drivers and their development and adjustment, which could actually help todecide if a graphics card on Savage2000 is really worth buying.

	Business Graphics Winmark	High-End Graphics Winmark
ASUS AGP-V6600 (GeForce256 SDR)	194	659
Leadtek WinFast GeForce256 DDR	194	661
ATI RAGE FURY MAXX	183	610
Diamond Viper II (Savage2000)	160	452