Ballistics Report

Performance:

Both flavors of the Viper 770 perform quite well against their 3dfx competitors, which is even more impressive considering they are clocked approximately ten percent lower. Evidently the TNT2 architecture is efficient enough to overcome the raw fill rate difference in the cards, even at high resolutions. Also, both the regular and ultra versions of the Viper 770 are clocked quite conservatively. Tweakers should be able to coax another twenty percent speed improvement out of both cards, though it may take some additional cooling.

Installation and Setup:

Diamond made a good faith effort to deliver truly unique drivers. They include overclocking sliders out of the box, and extensive per-game tweaking ability. However, I still prefer the more up to date reference drivers.

Innovation:

The TNT2, though mostly a repackaging of the existing TNT chipset, is still quite competitive with new chipsets from 3dlabs, Matrox, and others. It's unfortunate that the designers didn't include specific DVD hardware acceleration features such as IDC (inverse discrete cosine) or motion compensation support. Also, some of the new video cards on the horizon can do limited forms of three texture blends in a single pass, whereas the TNT2 only does two textures in a single pass. But the TNT2 has the advantage of being well-designed in the first place, and the designers have had a year to tweak the drivers and the chipset for performance.

The Viper card itself doesn't have much to distinguish itself from the many other TNT2 cards on the market. I found it strange that Diamond didn't see fit to even include TV out on the Ultra. Both cards are, however, well designed with quality memory and excellent 2D output, and backed by one of the largest names in the video industry.

Price:

I don't consider the Diamond cards to be particularly good values. At $199 and $249 MSRP, they may suffer from the competitive TNT2 market. Unlike the single-vendor Voodoo3, I expect lots of price wars to break out between TNT2 vendors, and the Viper 770 family isn't especially unique. The clever internet software bundle is about the only standout item inside the V770 box.