The old Velocity has served me well the past year and a half. I've slowly lost the ability to play games in high resolutions, and the FPS keep dropping. It was on its last legs and I knew it. I went to several stores to look for the new NV10 card (GeForce 256 is probably the least appealing name a chipset has ever had. I'm guessing that no one entered nVidia's contest by that entry being the winner. Also, note that from this point on I will not speak that name again. I will call it the NV10, GeSpot, GeFarce, GeWally, GeWhiz, and even more degrading names, but not it's own.) The stores didn't contain any of the NV10 based cards, they were all sold out for that dreaded holiday called Christmas. They had plenty of Savage2000 based Viper II Z200 cards though.

I thought about it: Slightly slower in Quake III Arena in lower resolutions than the NV10; Slightly faster in higher resolutions and color depths; Somewhat shaky D3D performance; TV out; Some visual glitches; Hardware DVD capabilities; Immature drivers; $40 cheaper than the NV10 based cards; It was in the store. My calculations put it a point up.

Which one made the decision for me, I'm not sure, (the money) but I decided to buy the card. Worst comes to worst, I could always take it back, and even so, I could give it a good immature and vulgar thrashing that only we at TAGOR can get away with.

The 2D of this card is fairly typical of cards these days: fast enough. I've noticed the occasional slow update to graphics when swapping between multiple browser windows, some bad pointer flicker in Poser 4, and sometimes in Paintshop Pro my outlined box doesn't outline right. It's still a box, and it still works, it just doesn't trail like it used to. The card does it's job on the desktop, just some minor bugs that only occur after the system has been running for extended amounts of time while doing multiple tasks.

The colors, the colors! The textures like to flicker different colors, most of them are quite vivid, and no I wasn't on drugs (Unless you count Jolt -ED).

Moving on to Driver things are not as bad. During the night scenes, the smoke changes colors, but turning off the 8-bit texture support fixes this. During the day scenes I noticed the cars cycle through what colors are available to them the closer you get (They do that in real life, too, though -ED).

In Expendable there is some jaggedness where the water meets the shore, but that is about it. Homeworld in D3D has only one minor glitch and that is that some textures on some of the ship flicker. It is more noticeable on some than others.

Loading up TA: Kingdoms reveals that the Cavedog Movie in the beginning doesn't work right, also selecting things from the menu tends to leave it's image on the screen. Playing the game isn't too bad, but the fog doesn't fade and it looks blocky. Total Annihilation plays just fine. Which is good, if it didn't this card would be taken back to the store today. Re-Volt show up with some more flickering textures. The games from Fiendish Entertainment that ships with the card played fine, which they should since they are S3 versions. The others, namely Slave Zero and Trickstyle show the typical D3D problems. In Slave Zero some of the signs don't look right. In Trickstyle, the polygons don't seem to meet up together too well.

The system also has all the typical things as well, modem, zip drive, floppy, CD-ROM, etc. This is my day to day system not a test bed. I'm not picking on the old TNT, it is just a point of reference, and things make more sense when you know where you're standing.

This looks exactly how it should. Starting in Q3A Normal mode the Viper II takes the lead just like a card with its statistics is supposed too. Bump Q3A up to High Quality mode and the TNT runs into its fill rate barrier, and reasonable playing speed. However, the Viper only drops off 2.2 FPS, respectable. Kick the resolution up to 1024x768 and we'll let the TNT rest, the Viper II grabs another nice score. I didn't feel like charting above that, but the Viper can pull off 29.7 FPS in 1280x1024. That last score might be slightly off because I'm currently online talking to Fuse! while I've got 2 browser windows open, an e-mail program running, and other typical programs, not bad. Hey, that is just what life is like on my computer. What, no 1600x1200? Nope. Hell, my monitor can't do that, and if it could I probably wouldn't even use it for my desktop let alone play games in it. Besides, at 1280x1024 it looks like my processor has hit it's playable limit, unless I turn off the sound or something. But what fun would a game be if your neighbors don't start pounding on the wall of the apartment when you're busy unloading your Plasma Gun? Last thing of note is that Chloe is about 48 FPS tall in this chart. This means nothing.

Switching to Direct3D, things are not as pretty for the Viper. For these tests, I used Rage's Expendable. It's a nice change from First Person Shooters, and it shows a nice range of scores, not just the usual Average Frames Per Second.

Starting in 640x480x16, the TNT takes a clear lead. It has both a better Lowest FPS score and Average FPS score. The Viper still wins the Highest FPS Score though. This doesn't make much sense since the Viper is running 35mhz faster, has 16mb more memory (all of which is running faster), and a possibility of pulling off 320 more megapixels a second. So, why is the old TNT doing so well? First off, it has the advantage of mature drivers. Secondly, since the Riva 128 nVidia chips have been know for being the best at D3D. I would like to mention that this should not be an excuse. One odd note is that the Savage chip jumped up a FPS when going into 32-bit color. This should be a performance hit, not a boost.

Moving on down the chart you see the TNT running into it's fill rate barrier, but between 640x480x16 and 1024x768x32 the Savage2000 has only lost 1 Average FPS, and while the highest FPS has dropped, the lowest has only lost 2 FPS. If you keep bumping up the resolution nothing changes, the Savage performs about the same, and the TNT gets slower. It is hard to name a winner here for that reason. Ponder this for a second, in 1280x1024x32 the Viper II has an average FPS of 30.0, a low of 14, and a high of 44. 1280x1024 has over four times more screen area to cover than 640x480 (307,200 pixels to fill vs. 1,310,720 pixels) so why doesn't the Viper win in 640x480? It obviously has the ability to.

The Viper II has a ton of untapped potential, which is one of the most frustrating things about it. Now I know how my mother felt when my 3rd Grade Teacher kept saying "He has a lot of potential." For the most part, I think it is a keeper. It smokes in Q3A, and in most D3D games things are noticeably smoother, and hopefully with better drivers things will improve. Is this the card for you? Maybe, the old TNT wasn't doing too shabby at lower resolutions and if that is all you play games at, it might still be enough. You'll probably need a lot of patience if you get a Viper II. I've heard S3 isn't the best as far as fixing drivers goes. Also, new cards are right around the corner from 3dfx and nVidia. Who wants to make wagers on what comes out first: Fixed Savage2000 drivers or the new Voodoo4 and 5 cards?