S3 Savage 2000 (Diamond Viper II)

If 640 x 480 is an indication of how well the drivers of a particular video card were written, then the Savage 2000 has by far the worst set of Direct3D drivers present among these nine cards. The higher fill rate of the Savage 2000 doesn't seem to matter at all as the drivers hold the card back to a meager 65fps. It seems like S3 focused on their OpenGL ICD too much and let their Direct3D performance suffer as a result.

Upping the resolution to 800 x 600 doesn't help prove the Savage 2000's performance level as the drivers are still a major limitation. The 32-bit performance of the card is pretty high, but unfortunately the full potential of the card is not illustrated here.

At 1024 x 768, where fill rate and raw power become more evident and drivers less of a limitation the Savage 2000 pulls ahead of the first half of the competition only to be put to rest by the G400MAX. The 32-bit performance of the Savage 2000 is still superior to that of the GeForce although it takes a backseat to the 200MHz memory bus of the G400MAX and its resulting stellar 32-bit performance.