Diamond
Viper II Z200 review
Posted
by Adam
Klein on March 24, 2000 - Page 2/6
Company: Diamond
Product: Viper
II Z200
Features and Specs
The Viper II is a very feature
rich board. The Viper II offers the same T&L enhancements
like NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 boards offer, but this feature is
still not included in the drivers. It is true that there are
no games out that can really take advantage of T&L
enhancements, so that is why it not a pressing issue for
Diamond in driver releases. What I feel is more important is
to get the board running without any visual distortions.
Controller:
- S3
Savage2000 controller
- 128-bit
2D, 3D and video
Bus
Type:
Memory:
Maximum
Dot (Pixel) Rate:
Video
Support and Features:
- TV-Output
(S-Video & Composite)
- High
Quality 16-tap up/down scaler
- Third
Generation Motion Compensation Engine
- Integrated
Hardware Accelerated DVD Playback
- DVD*/MPEG-2
and MPEG-1 Playback
- X and
Y Interpolation
- Fully
Programmable Settings and Controls
Enhanced
2D Acceleration Features:
- Highly
Efficient 128-bit 2D-Graphics Engine
- Full
Featured with Acceleration for BitBLT, Rectangle
Fill, Line Draw, Polygon Fill, Panning/Scrolling and
Hardware Cursor
- 8-,
16-, and 32-bbp mode acceleration
Output
Supported:
- Standard
and Multi-frequency Analog Monitors
- DB-15
connector (VESA DDC2B)
- TV-output
(S-Video and Composite)
Horizontal
Sync Signals:
Vertical
Refresh:
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High-Performance
3D Acceleration:
- Dual-Pixel/Dual-Texture
Pipeline
- Single
Pass Quad Texture Engine
- Integrated
Hardware Texture Compression(S3TCTM )
- S3TLTM
Transformation & Lighting
Complete 3D Feature Set:
- Alpha-Blending
- Anisotropic
Filtering
- Atmospheric
Effects
- Backface
Culling
- Bilinear
and Trilinear MIP mapping
- Bilinear
filtering
- Bump
Mapping
- Enhanced
Alpha-blending Modes
- Full
Scene Anti-aliasing
- Gouraud
Shading
- MPEG-2
Video Textures
- Per-pixel
and Range-based Fog
- Perspective
Correction
- Procedural
Textures
- Reflection
Mapping
- Shadows
- Single
Cycle Trilinear Filtering
- Single
Pass Quad Texture Engine
- Specular
Lighting/Diffuse Shading
- Sprite
Anti-aliasing
- Stencil
Buffer 8-bit
- Strips
and Fans
- Subpixel
Precision
- Support
for Up to 8 Independent Light Sources
- Texel
Engine Z-buffering 32-bit
- Texture
Mapping
- Transparency
- Triangle
Setup Engine
- Trilinear
Filtering
- Vertex
and Table Fog
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As said before, the Viper II
supports S3's popular S3TC, which I have seen can improve
frame rates significantly. With the recent licensing agreement
with Nvidia, you can also have S3TC support in future drivers.
It makes me wonder what features Diamond/S3 will acquire from
Nvidia.
Go
to next page !
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