Ballistics Report

Performance:
The Viper II trades leads with the rest of the next generation cards in all the Quake 3 benchmarks. The card performs very well at fastest in the low resolutions, but falls behind in the normal settings. The high quality settings are the most interesting with the Viper II performing better than the SDR GeForce and Rage Fury MAXX in a couple of the benchmarks. Expendable and Quake 2 performance were lacking, but we'll give 'em credit for the overclocking ability. The card also has S-Video and composite TV outputs for you sketchy TV surfers. What? The monitor isn't good enough for ya?

Innovation:
S3 has finally shown us that they can hang with the big boys in the 3D accelerator industry. The GX4 chip, now known as the Savage 2000, has been in development for quite a while. Like the GeForce, the Savage 2000 brings in on-chip T&L. The Savage2000 also features the new 0.18 manufacturing process, and a 10-yr cross-licensing deal with Intel will ensure that Santa Clara won't give S3 any trouble.

Installation and Setup:
Installation was pretty straightforward. The Diamond installation CD takes care of all the driver and application software installations. The card installation went smoothly, and the Zoran SoftDVD player could play DVDs right away after the prerequisite reboot. Since we were about to leave for Comdex in Vegas, we decided to take a risk and install the Diamond InControl 99 tools.

The InControl tools worked fine, but we still found the program a bit intrusive. You may not know how often you accidentally click your desktop, but having a random start menu pop up when you do mis-click will start making you aware of it. Each time the dumb menu popped up was another reminder of why we never used to install InControl. Thankfully, the program allows you to disable all the annoying pop-up menu options.

Price:
With a $199 SRP (Suggested Retail Price), the Viper II is the least expensive next generation card available on the market. Hopefully, we'll see Viper II boards fall into the $150-175 range. The SDR GeForce 256 retails for $249, and manufacturers say the DDR versions will be about $100 more expensive. The Rage Fury MAXX will retail near the $299 mark.