I was recently looking to purchase video cards to upgrade my computers. Since I was going to purchase more than one video card, cost was a concern. I read a lot of pre/reviews on gaming hardware websites and settled on the Diamond Viper II, using the Savage 2000 chipset. Unfortunately, most of the reviewers were more concerned with synthetic benchmarks than real-world performance.

The Diamond Viper II, S3 Savage 2000, looked to be a full featured card at a budget price. Most of the benchmark numbers showed the card falling somewhere in between the TNT2 Ultra and GeForce chipsets. The card did perform well in several "standard" benchmark tests. But, in the case of gameplay, the benchmarks were rather misleading.

As an old school (read: long time) gamer, I like to pride myself on being able to get hardware and games to run well. But, with this card, I was only able to get about half the games I usually play to even run. The card was geared to run Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament well. Since those games happen to be hot right now, that seemed a smart direction to focus on. It just seems someone forgot to include a lot of other games people want play (both old and new).

D3D performance of the card is still hit or miss. Some games have been supported while others run the gambit from not running at all to having graphic glitches and artifacts. The drivers provided by S3 just don't measure up. The card/chipset has been out approximately six months and features that are listed on the retail box are still not usable.

Many of the features that are usable, are not stable. It took S3 until last month (April, 2000) to come out with a set of drivers that finally smoothed out the 2D desktop performance to a level equal to that of my old 2D card purchased back in 1996. I have since removed the Viper II/Savage 2000 cards from my computers and gone back to my old cards...until I can find a decent replacement.

If you are on a budget and start to look toward the Viper II/Savage 2000, keep looking. As the saying goes, if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is...



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