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And the Viper strikes again...Oct 03 '00 Write an essay on this topic.As everyone should know S3 is moving out of the graphics card market for good. However, support and new drivers for existing product lines will continue, and the Viper II is being sold at a killer price! This should be good news to the ones who need power, but lack the funds... These are the features of the Viper II, in full: .S3 Savage2000 graphics chip .True 128-bit 2D, 3D and video engine .Full AGP2X/4X support .350 MHz RAMDAC .32 MB SDRAM memory (rated for 6.0 ns) .TV-out (both S-video and composite) .The world's first single-pass QuadTexture engine, being capable of applying four textures to a pixel in a single clock cycle .Integrated hardware S3TC texture compression .S3TL transformation and lighting .32-bit true color, 32-bit z-buffer with stencil buffer .2048x2048 texture maps .Hardware accelerated DVD playback .Third generation hardware motion compensation Furthermore, the Viper II box also lists the following 3D features: .8-bit stencil buffer .32-bit z-buffer .(enhanced) Alpha blending .Anisotropic filtering .Atmospheric effects .Backface culling .Bilinear and trilinear filtering .Hardware bump mapping .Full scene anti-aliasing .Gouraud shading .MPEG2 video textures .Per-pixel, range-based, vertex and table fog .Perspective correction .Procedural textures .Reflection mapping .Shadows .Single cycle trilinear filtering .Single pass quad texture engine .Specular highlighting and diffuse shading .Sprite anti aliasing .Strips and fans .Sub-pixel accuracy .Up to 8 independent light sources .Texture mapping .Transparency .Triangle setup engine As you can see, all the features are there, plus the marketing hype on the packaging. Also, it seems that the Viper II will deliver some remarkable performance. And it did! It totally trashed ATi's Rage Fury MAXX, and the gaming power is at near-Geforce levels. Indeed you are getting a lot of bang for your buck... However, there will many features that are unavilable in the retail drivers, including: .Hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting) .Bump-mapping .Anisotropic filtering .Full-screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) OpenGL T&L support should be available soon, but it's not so certain when it comes to Direct3D. Conclusion: Overall there will be some bugs in certain games, but hopefully they will get ironed out in future drivers. Also, the price cannot be beat and thus it will probably be a sound investment if you want to upgrade your existing TNT2 or Voodoo 3. Also, it should be noted that even this cheap little card beats the ATi Rage Fury MAXX in many benchmarks. Only the Radeon can save ATi's honour in the 3D arena vs nVidia...  |
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