Planet Savage articles

Diamond Viper 2 Z200 Review by Louie

To the reader:

I'm sure that you have read countless reviews of the Savage2000. If you have been following the news rather closely, do not expect to read anything new here. I'll try not to be redundant as possible but in the same time provide enough information for the few who are still unaware of the capabilites of the S2K. E-mail all queries or comments to zeon@hotmail.com. I'll be glad to accept any constructive criticisms you may give so that in the future I would be more effective in conducting a review.

INSTALLATION

Upon seeing the FedEx box in my room, I greedily took it with both of my hands and ripped out the Viper 2 from the package. Installing the card was fairly easy. I followed the instructions on the Viper 2 reviewer's guide to the letter. First, I uninstalled my Savage4 drivers then disconnected my old card. I then restarted with a PCI Video card (Virge to be exact). I installed the SVGA adapter that Windows uses by default. Then, I popped in the Viper 2 noting that it had 6ns ram (Samsung if I read it right). I inserted the drivers cd into one of my cd-rom drives and started Windows. I installed the display adapter using the display settings at the control panel. I restarted the computer once more and I was greeted by a new system tray logo from S3tweak (nice job S3 Planet people!) and one from Diamond Incontrol Tools.

Features

The Savage2000 has lots and lots of features as did the Savage3D and the Savage4 but the sad truth is that not all of these features really work. Missing are DX7 drivers, T&L implementation and some features like Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing and Anisotrophic Filtering. The current driver set has the T&L (not the final version) which could be turned on with a simple registry string. The Savage2000 also fails to do 'true trilinear filtering' and equally missing is the free trilinear.

Diamond Incontrol Tools

Let me start off with saying that this app is inferior to S3tweak in most aspects (though the AVIs look cool the first time you look at them but become a pain afterwards). Incontrol doesn't even give much control. All it offers is a simple toggle for v-sync, triple-buffer, w-buffer and a few others. The good thing about it is that you can customize settings for different games though it would have been better if the Incontrol Tools came with suggested settings for each game. My recommendation? Use S3tweak instead. Not only does it give you more options, it's easier to overclock with.

2D Quality

I immediately came to the conclusion that S3 did little or nothing to improve on the Virge 2D. The same 2D is used for the previous Savage cards. I don't get any of the font problems that some Savage4 drivers possess. No problems with Windows either. I don't have anything to complain about here.

3D Quality

Image quality looks a lot more like a TNT2 than a Savage4. Gone is the free and true trilinear filtering that we have come to love. The Savage2000 uses mip-banding akin to the TNT2. Overall, the image quality is inferior to the Savage4 (even the Geforce pales in comparison to the S4). But that doesn't mean that the visuals are bad (or in other terms, Voodoo-like...). If you're used to looking at TNTs and TNT2s or for some reason you don't turn on trilinear filtering with the Savage3d or Savage4, you won't notice the difference. The improvement that I could readily see with the Savage2000, however, is the complete loss of visual tearing. It is however noted from Sharkyextreme's S2K In Depth Article that the Savage2000 has ugly sawtooths in 3D. But from what I've been seeing, the sawtooths look nice. Overall, I'd say that the visuals are ok (since most people don't go around looking at walls or textures when fragging or racing or whatso).

S3TC

It's been said once, twice, thrice and many times, but I'll say it again. Nothing looks as good as S3TC. Period. Microsoft even incorporated a type of S3TC called DXTC in DirectX. Look for the screenshots at the end of this article. They speak for themselves.

SoftDVD

I wasn't able to test the SoftDVD capabilities of this card. I didn't bother to do it because of time constraints. It is common fact that S3 DVD implementation is only second to ATI though. The performance varies with the Software player, though.

Drivers

To make this part short, OpenGL drivers are fast and D3D is slow and buggy. The Metal drivers are in a similar position with its Savage4 counterpart. It works for some but not all. S3 needs to concentrate more on D3D in my humble opinion. A bad API doesn't give anyone the right to make bad drivers (not trying to start a flame war from Microsoft lovers out there...). Like the Savage3D and the Savage4, the Savage2000 falls under the 'promising with better drivers' department.

A quick note on the latest driver set: D3D is worse in the new driver set so if you're not planning on turning on T&L just yet, I don't recommend using it.

Stability

Besides my mid-end system, we tried the card in Jim's low-end system. We had no problems running it on his Celeron-based system. The card however fails to boot on a Bxcel motherboard. After many tries, I've come to the conclusion that the motherboard is to blame (or perhaps the AT case). It seems to me that the card just won't go into the AGP slot completely.

Unlike the Savage4, the Viper 2 doesn't suffer from a chronic case of locking sickness. I left my system running for a whole day running games and the card just kept chugging away (though I noticed that it became as hot as my ASUS V3100T Savage3D SGRAM after use).

Heat

Diamond still chose to use passive over active cooling. While the card is warm most of the time, overclocking the board and running it for several hours makes the heatsink as hot as that of the Savage3D (but still colder than the TNT1). This can be a problem for overclockers.

Overclocking

I was able to run the card for a while at 150/150 but it hung after a couple of hours. Placing a 486 fan over the heatsink would make it stable at overclock conditions. The ram on this board is rated at 166mhz (1000/ns) which gives plenty of room to overclock. By plenty of room, I do not mean that the card is sure to make 166/166 (though some people have gone to those speeds), most probably would be lucky to get past 150/150.

BENCHMARKS

As much as I would have wanted to test the card on a clean and freshly installed OS, I couldn't since I have real life to attend to. Other than that, using my present OS would simulate real world conditions (since most people won't be formatting HDDs every time they purchase new hardware). I used Quake 3 and Quake 2 for the OpenGL tests, Unreal Tournament (with S3TC textures) for the Metal test and 3DMark 99MaxPro and 3DMark2000 for D3D. I would have wanted to try Half-life and Incoming but I had far too less time to do so. Benchmarks where made on a mid-end system (see Dean's article on hardware to see his classifications).

System specs are as follows:

Intel Celeron 433 (Mendocino Core running at 6.5 x 66 and at default voltage)
Zida ZX98 Motherboard using Intel ZX chipset
2 x 64 mb PC100 SDRAM
8.4 GB Seagate Medalist Pro (running at UDMA-33)
Yamaha 192XG OEM
17" Viewsonic E70 Monitor
24x Matshita CD-ROM drive
2x write 6x read Mitsumi CD-Writer
1.44MB Floppy Drive
NE2000 Compatible ISA Lan Card
Windows 98 (patched with two Y2K patches and Service Pack 1)
DirectX 7a
Savage2000 9.01.21 Drivers for Quake 3 and Quake 2 tests, 9.00.23 Drivers for Unreal Tournament and 3DMark

Quake 3
9.01.21 driver

The following are turned on in S3tweak:
  Trilinear filtering
  Non-DX fog
  Use eye fog
  Triple buffer
  Use Fastdraw
  dbias 0.0
  Command DMA = 4MB buffer
  Auto mipmap
  Memory by app
  AGP Aperture size 40 MB
  AGP 2X
  AGP sideband

 

Game Options:

  Simple items: off
  Marks on walls: on
  Ejecting Brass: on
  Dynamic Lights: on
  Identify Target: on
  High Quality Sky: on
  Sync every frame: off
  Force player models: off
  Draw team overlay: off
*For some tests, T&L was turned on using ICDHWTL=ON in the registry

Video Settings

Option	Fastest	Fast	Normal	High Quality	Super Enhanced High Quality
Gl extensions:	on	on	on	on	on
Color depth:	16-bit	16-bit	Default	32-bit	32-bit
Fullscreen:	on	on	on	on	on
Lighting:	Vertex	Lightmap	Lightmap	Lightmap	Lightmap
Geometric Detail:	Low	Low	Medium	Medium	High
Texture Detail:	~33%	~33%	~66%	~66%	~100%
Texture Quality:	Default	Default	Default	32-bit	32-bit
*Texture Filter:	Bilinear	Bilinear	Bilinear	Trilinear	Trilinear

Note on texture filter: I am unsure if S3tweak's Trilinear filtering on option takes precedence over the game's video settings.

Demo001

T&L off/ T&L on

Resolution	Fastest	Fast	Normal	HQ	SEHQ
512x384	57.2/68.1	51.6/60.4	51.3/60.1	50.6/59.3	48.1/56.6
640x480	57.6/67.7	51.9/60.3	50.3/59.8	51.3/58.8	48.0/56.7
800x600	57.4/68.0	51.7/59.3	50.7/58.3	49.7/57.2	47.3/56.4
1024x768	57.4/64.9	49.8/52.8	48.2/49.3	47.1/48.6	45.7/46.3
1280x1024	53.0/48.1	41.6/37.0	36.4/32.6	35.9/32.2	34.8/31.1

Demo002

T&L off/ T&L on

Resolution	Fastest	Fast	Normal	HQ	SEHQ
512x384	56.5/65.5	50.0/57.3	49.8/56.4	49.3/56.3	44.9/53.2
640x480	56.3/65.0	50.1/57.1	49.5/56.4	49.1/55.9	44.7/52.7
800x600	56.1/65.2	49.4/57.0	49.0/55.5	49.0/55.3	43.3/52.0
1024x768	55.9/63.7	49.3/52.8	47.7/49.7	47.5/48.8	43.3/45.9
1280x1024	53.7/50.4	42.9/39.3	37.6/34.1	36.5/33.5	34.9/31.9

Quake 2

All registry settings are the same as Quake 3

Game options:

Texture Quality 100%
8-bit textures no
Sync every frame no
CD Music disabled
Sound quality low
Sound compatibility max
Display depth at 32-bit

T&L off/T&L on

Resolution	Demo1	Demo2	Crusher	Massive1
512x384	79.7/81.6	66.2/80.1	33.5/40.8	51.5/61.3
640x480	80.0/81.8	62.0/78.9	32.8/41.2	48.8/61.3
800x600	80.2/80.9	56.8/80.1	30.7/40.8	45.0/61.2
1024x768	78.5/79.0	47.2/77.7	27.7/40.9	38.7/59.8

 

All benchmarks are cpu-limited. Notice as the benefits of T&L decrease with Quake 3 at high resolutions. The offloading feature appears to have an effect especially on the CPU hungry Crusher demo. With T&L on, the Savage2000 could outrun a Geforce SDR. Scaling to higher resolution gives a small performance hit. Keep in mind that these scores are only from a mid-end system. Using a Pentium III would definitely make the performance at lower resolutions pull away.

Unreal Tournament

Version 402
Patched with High Detailed Textures
S3 Metal Patch for Viper 2 (the first one)
Viper 2 9.00.23 Drivers (CD-Drivers)

PSABARR402.DEM

(demo using two bots and one player using Barricade map)
All tests using 32-bit color

Resolution	Ave	Max	Min
512x384	42.26	69.62	22.25
640x480	41.55	70.52	20.54
800x600	39.78	68.78	19.90
1024x768	31.81	50.19	18.74
1152x864	25.99	39.52	16.92
1280x1024	20.31	31.51	05.65

 

Performance dies starting at 1024x768. Notice that there is only a small difference between 800x600 and 512x384.

I was unable to use Warner Young's S3BARR402.DEM so I made myself a similar demo. All benchmark scores are CPU limited. It has also come to my attention that the Metal patch I used has a bug wherein Unreal only uses one multitexturing unit which in theory would impair performance. By now, a newer metal driver should have been released.

3DMark

9.01.09 Driver Set
Quake 3 Registry Settings
T&L off

Resolution	3DMark99	3DMark2000
640x480x16	3026	1380
640x480x32	3029	1378
800x600x16	3004	1364
800x600x32	3017	1361
1024x768x16	3025	1347
1024x768x32	3019	1329
1152x864x16	3040	not tested
1152x864x32	3024	not tested
1280x1024x16	3026	not tested
1280x1024x32	2752	not tested

As expected, the Viper 2 doesn't do well with the synthetic benchmarks. Too bad I couldn't get a hold of Incoming. Come to think of it, maybe I should have just used Unreal Tournament in D3D....

Game Tests:

Quake III Arena

The drivers are obviously tweaked for Quake 3. It's so much faster than my Savage4 and I gather that it's just as fast as a Geforce SDR. Image quality is great but not as good as the Savage4. No glitches seen. No hangs. No problems. Pretty good for S3 drivers :).

Unreal Tournament

Metal API is the best to use for this game. Coupling S3TC textures with Metal is the best way to go (and the only way for that matter). The game is smooth and the image quality is the best there is. I experience no problems except for a minor glitch with the vertical adjustment of player models (as they are shown when viewing enemy profiles before a match).

Quake 2

I don't notice much of a difference as to when I play on a Savage4 except at high resolutions (>800x600). Nevertheless, the game runs faster and is smooth even at 1024x768. The game doesn't hang at all. No tearings seen.

Half-life

The game runs great! That is expected since it uses the Quake 2 engine. No visual problems whatsoever and no OpenGL lockups as was the case with the Savage4 (using earlier drivers).

Need for Speed 4

Even with the poor (or should I say crappy) D3D drivers, NFS4 is very much playable at 1024x768 with all (I mean all) graphics options turned on. Try doing that on a Savage4! The game hangs though as much as the other D3D games do. Hanging occurs more with the latest driver. It is best to wait for a newer reference (or tweaked) driver in order to play this.

Drakan Demo

Works well. It's not as fast as I want it to be. No complaints on graphics. I couldn't make screenshots though since the game disables keyboard shortcuts. 800x600 becoms a bit sluggish when flying with Arokh at high altitudes. No hangs, stable performance.

Soul Reaver

The game runs perfectly even with the poor D3D drivers. No problems whatsoever.

Slave Zero

No visual tearing noted. The game is playable at high resolutions though at times there are pauses. Nothing that a little tweaking couldn't solve.

NBA Live 2000

Visuals are great! 800x600 at high quality options seem to be the maximum for my system. The game becomes slow at resolutions higher than that. The game is stable all the way.

Heavy Gear 2

This is where the drivers need working. The game continually hangs as in NFS4. I even notice a loss of textures in the models. This game is not playable at all (unless you like to play with totally white gears....)

Bleem!

I tested Bust a Groove, Rival Schools and Bushido Blade 2. Bleem! is a real system hog. I couldn't play Rival Schools at anything higher than 640x480 at a decent speed. The same goes for Bushido Blade 2. I can play Bust a Groove (the dance game) at 1024x768 with all the visual settings on. All the problems with Bleem! are evident also.

Trickstyle

The Viper 2 came with this game and what can I say? It runs pretty well with the Viper 2 though I don't like the game itself. No visual problems whatsoever.

Final Fantasy 8 Demo

There are some problems with textures being left at the top and bottom of the screen. There are visual glitches seen (look at the FF8 logo). The game is fast. I am not sure if the problems are due to the demo state of the game or from the graphics card itself. It would be safe to conclude that it could be either or both.

Battlezone II

This is another game that I wouldn't have played if given the choice. No speed or visual problems whatsoever. No hangs either.

Nocturne Demo

The game is pretty slow even at low-res. This may be due to my system. I didn't notice any problems with the visuals. The game is rock stable too.

Odium

The game exits to windows when Battle Mode is initiated. The game has known issues with Savage-chipset based graphics cards. Too bad for me since I bought the game. It seems that Monolith has given up trying to solve the problems. This is one game that the Viper 2 will probably never run.

CONCLUSION

I've come up with several reasons for you to buy this card:

- Its price is similar to a TNT2U.
- Its performance is near Geforce.
- It will definitely have T&L coming.
- S3TC.
- MeTal for Unreal Tournament (and fast UT performance)
- Fast Quake 3 performance
- Great DVD (though I wasn't able to test it)
- Has TV-out (nothing special)

And here are reasons for not buying the card:

- Slow D3D
- Trilinear for a cost; Uses mip-banding rather than true trilinear (note that you could only determine the difference by using a Savage3d or Savage4)

- S3's not so good track record with drivers

- Geforce is still faster

- Doesn't come with a fan

- Incontrol tools have limited control

- Can't run Odium (though I doubt that many will miss this game)

- Visual glitches in D3D

I'd say that if used right, the Viper 2 would be a very viable solution for any system. I wouldn't recommend this card for Super7 users with obscure motherboards or problematic systems. I highly recommend this card for Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament fanatics and people who like watching DVD. But be warned, the Viper 2 entails risks. As with the other Savage cards, the Viper 2 has lots of potential still untapped. It would be entirely up to S3 if they are able to make use of it. I would not remain ambiguous in this matter, though. S3 has made progress these few months the start of which was the Ask S3 forum. I sincerely believe that S3 would get their act together on this one (MHO!) and to that effect I would go as far to say that I'll buy a Viper 2 as soon as possible.

Yum, eye-candy!