Specifications

The Specs

128-bit 2D/3D Engine
0.18 micron manufacturing process
125Mhz core clock speed
155MHz memory clock speed
2 multi-textured pixels/clock
Single-pass Quad Texturing Engine
32MB SDRAM
AGP 1X/2X/4X support
Hardware S3TC texture compression engine
Hardware Triangle Setup Engine
S3TL Transformation & Lighting
32-bit true color 3D rendering
32-bit Z/stencil buffer
350MHz RAMDAC
3rd generation motion compensation technology with hardware accelerated DVD
16 tap X and Y filtering, color space conversion, and scaling
TV-out, S-Video and Composite
Resolutions up to 2048 x 1536
Alpha-Blending
Anisotropic Filtering
Aliasing
Bilinear Filtering
Bump Mapping (Dot Product and Emboss)
Fogging
Gouraud Shading
Specular Highlights
Trilinear Filtering
DirectX 6.1, OpenGL ICD API Support
Windows 95/98, NT4.0

Notes

We've already mentioned that the new core clock speed is 125MHz. S3 encountered early yield problems with the Savage 2000 chips and had to lower the clock speed to keep the Viper II card stable. From what we hear, speeds much higher than 125MHz are very possible with newer chips.

Where did the 125MHz number come from anyway? S3 needed to finalize the Viper II specifications for marketing purposes. 125MHz was a nice safe number that gave the Savage2000 a 500Mtexels/s fill rate, which is slightly higher than the GeForce's 480Mtexels/s. Great material for those comparison charts!

Software Bundle

The software bundle includes a full version of Acclaim's TrickStyle, a Slave Zero trial offer, various S3TC playable demos, a customized S3TC Quake 3 level, Diamond InControl Tools 99, Zoran SoftDVD player, RioPort Audio Manager, and "exclusive online offers from Chumbo.com."

It's kind of amusing how Diamond s making a big deal out of a single Quake 3 S3TC customized level. Makes us wonder what kind of person would actually take the level into account when making the purchase decision. Actually, if the level is as good as Quake 1's DM4 or DM3...

We've already talked enough about the Savage2000 and T&L in previous articles. We won't make you wade through all the same info again. The sidebar contains links to various articles for those of you who missed them the first time around.

Let's take a look at the Viper II and see how it performs in real life.