S3 Savage 2000 (Diamond Viper II)

While we secretly hoped that S3 would get their act together with the Savage 2000’s drivers, we did expect them to have some problems. The drivers themselves are much better than we expected, but they do have their bugs. The drivers we used were the latest available and were dated 11/11/99, and they will be the shipping drivers.

A problem we have noticed in virtually every product from S3 since the Savage 3D is the incredible ‘tearing’ effect when V-Sync is turned off. The problem is present with the Savage 2000’s drivers, but seems to be worst when in a game’s menu or in timedemo mode. During normal gameplay, the tearing isn’t too bad but it is definitely present.

The board ships in AGP 1X/2X mode, like the Viper V770 Ultra, and, in order to enable AGP 4X, the three jumpers on the Diamond’s Viper II must be capped (they ship in the open position). This will, of course, vary from board to board, but since the Diamond board is the only available Savage 2000 board on the market we decided to include this note.

The shipping drivers are DirectX 6.0 drivers and thus won’t feature hardware T&L for Direct3D games. Luckily there are no currently available D3D titles that take advantage of hardware T&L, so you don’t have to worry too much there. While we were hoping that hardware T&L would be enabled in OpenGL, where it would be taken advantage of in Quake 3 (at least the hardware lighting part of S3TL), the shipping drivers do not take advantage of the Savage 2000’s Hardware T&L (S3TL).

We have taken a look at their DirectX 7.0 drivers and they are coming along, but they are not nearly shipping quality. It looks like drivers will be another limitation of the Savage 2000.