Heh, all this S3 bashing brings back memories. I remember when the Savage 4 came out, some of the new machines we were selling at the computer store came with them. We were wowed by the 32MB of memory they had on them (everyone else as shipping 8-16MB cards at the time). That is until one of the gamer techs declared the card utter garbage. Good thing most of our customers were not gamers. 😜
I don't think 32 megs was such novelty, for example Rage 128 had it earlier. Certainly 16 MB for chips of this class is enough for all but few cases. Savage4 was maybe the best 3d accelerator by S3. It was modern solid performer for gamers on budget and drivers were not the worst. Actually I had one or two "casual gamer" friends who were satisfied with their Savage4. Savage 2000 ought to be less than doubled Savage4, or it would perform better. Even if texture units were weaker. Or it just did not scale well.
I thought early 32MB was a Number9 thing and it didn't exactly work out for them giving the novelty impression for it in a while
By the way I always liked this card too even if we all know how fast or not it was at his time. But I've to say that it performed quiet well in Dx6 tests and games. And surely it's so exotic!
And regarding the other products, lately I tested the Savage 4 8MB and even without the S3TC I found it a real good alternative to his time competitors. Maybe not faster but I do remember even reviewers talked nicely about it with a good 2d/3d rendering quality, DVD acceleration and not bad fps.
wrote:I thought early 32MB was a Number9 thing and it didn't exactly work out for them giving the novelty impression for it in a while
The Diamond Stealth III S540 Savage 4 Pro had 32mb, not that it helped much. Video card makers started packing more memory onto their cards as prices came down so they could make a selling point out of it. A lot of video chips back them were incapable of handling that much memory effectively, especially some of the slower ones like the Savage 4 but seeing "32mb" on the box could sway consumers away from buying an 8 or 16mb card that might actually perform better because of the "more is better" mentality.
There was also a 64Mb Savage 2000... 😁
And what about that exotic 9800 256 DDR2 or something like that with that strange ram position /heatsink?
wrote:And what about that exotic 9800 256 DDR2 or something like that with that strange ram position /heatsink?
It wasn't exotic really. GeForce 5900 was 256MB as well. Both cards used 16 memory chips.
wrote:wrote:And what about that exotic 9800 256 DDR2 or something like that with that strange ram position /heatsink?
It wasn't exotic really. GeForce 5900 was 256MB as well. Both cards used 16 memory chips.
Well I remember it more as a test than a real alternative to the already powerful solutions.
Obviously not exotic as the 5800 Ultra or the Volari but.. 😉
The Diamond Stealth III S540 Savage 4 Xtreme is a fantastic card IMO. Basically a higher clocked Pro which brought both the Core & Memory clock to 166Mhz. Highly compatible with Dos games and it also shines with Windows 9x games as well. Runs almost any game up until around 2000 on high settings with decent framerates. Nice clear image as well. Only problem is that most of the Stealth S540 cards I see for sale are the Pros and not the Xtremes.
EDIT: I totally missed VooDooMan's post about the Xtreme. Glad there's another fan of this card around here. I do agree though with some other posts regarding problems with certain D3D games. Installed the D3D version of Dungeon Keeper the other day and it was glitchy as hell. Rainbow 6 also had similar issues. I was originally running the latest Diamond drivers but I found the referance S3 drivers to be a lot more stable.
I bought the Diamond Viper II at retail at a closeout price ($30 or $40 maybe) back in the day. It was supposed to replace my Banshee. I never got to play around with the Viper II because it didn't play well with my FIC VA-503+, if I remember. Soon enough, I upgraded to a KT133A board and a Geforce2 MX.
So, this week was the first time I really put the card through its paces. This time I am using a P3-866 on an Intel 815 board.
The drivers on the retail CD are horrible, as everyone knows. Quake 2 wouldn't even run. I upgraded to the Diamond-branded 9.51.03 drivers.
Quake 2 looked good at 1600x1200, and demo1 ran at 42.4 FPS.
UT GOTY also looked good after I installed the S3 MeTaL 2.0.0.4 drivers. I don't know how to run a standard timedemo on this game.
One question: do I have to install S3TC textures for UT? Or does UT GOTY already install them?
I'm also trying to figure out the software package that came at retail. The driver CD comes with a special S3 version of Q3 (just a demo level). The readme says that this level has textures that were "re-created" by "S3-Diamond contract artists" to show off S3TC. The game stutters at 10x7 on my system.
There was also what appears to be a full version of TrickStyle and a demo CD (Tower of the Ancients, Slave Zero, Jetboat Superchamps, Hot Chix 'n' Gear Stix).
I also have a Diamond-branded CD of Unreal that installs as "UnrealSpecial," but I think this is just a cut-down demo version. It won't even do a timedemo. I can't remember whether it came with the Viper II or my Banshee card (also a Diamond product).
I had a Viper II Z200 (still have it, but it's no longer working), it was on my main gaming PC around late 2000-2001, I remember having lots of incompatibility and drivers issues with games from that era, to the point where I had to buy a new card to play my games, a few games performed surprisingly well, and 3dmark was decent, but overall... also no proper XP drivers at that time made the card useless pretty quick (I had some generic savage 2000 XP drivers, but they didn't give full support)... the card had potential but it was not there... driver support was really weak compared to the other options from that era
UT CD2 installs the S3TC textures. I think that is the case with GOTY as well.
Savage 2000 runs Quake 1-3 engines quite well, and Unreal Engine 1 assuming the game has Metal support. Otherwise it's not very useful. Of course it also has some hardware flaws, the main known one being the S3TL engine being fubar. It was rushed out with broken silicon, even after being delayed a bit as I recall.
I don't recall 3dmark2001 being decent though. It couldn't run the "Demo" and it had horrible artifacts with a couple tests (mainly Lobby High Detail)
Also similarly technologically related, it's bad in Max Payne somehow causing all texture atlases to go haywire. and this was only just a few of the games that don't randomly freeze on you 😀
I wouldn't say it has decent GL either - it's very, very slow with texture uploads in certain truecolor formats (hence Q3 forcing compressed textures no matter what and you can't turn it off). There's also a few cases of glColor rounding errors
seriously, people that give ATI a lot of shit for their drivers never touched a S3 Savage2000.
yes well, perhaps it's my memory failing, but I never tried the demo with it, and the score looked OK (thanks futuremark for deleting all my scores, so I can't check it, I had saved scores for my PC as low as the one I had in April 2000 up until they deleted it)
as for max payne, I seem to remember a patch specifically to help with it...
It is a novelty card, to be sure. I suppose if you were part of some kind of period-correct, multiplayer UT99 club, the card could be useful to you.
What's funny is that some of the bundled games don't even work quite right, even up with updated Diamond-branded drivers. The menu screens for the Fiendish Entertainment games (Jetboat Superchamps, Hot Chix 'n' Gear Stix) are shifted about 5% to the right. The Jetboat game even crashes unless the desktop is set to 640x480. (Everything looks and behaves fine with the GeForce Ti4600 D3D.) And, as I mentioned above, the S3Quake3 is sluggish even at the lowest res and texture levels.
I haven't tried that special S3 Quake3 but I remember plain Q3Arena working well enough. It's no GeForce 256 though.
I played a good bit of Heretic 2 on it last fall at 1600x1200 and was impressed at how well it ran. That's Quake 2-based.
Another thing - with UT if you enable detail textures with Metal it causes pauses when the detail textures load as you approach a wall AFAIR.
The poor driver quality reminds me of older cards like Verite V2200, RIVA 128, Savage3D, etc. I have a feeling that the drivers suck partly because they were working around hardware problems.
I did a little research and discovered that the Diamond-branded Unreal came from the Diamond Monster Fusion (Banshee) bundle, not the Viper II (Savage 2000) bundle. Apparently, it has a couple of new deathmatch maps not found in the original.
I also discovered that Diamond released seven new deathmatch levels for Q3A with support for S3TC. Here's the link to the press release:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-diamond- … s/1100-2446415/
I haven't been able to locate the files with these levels, however.
I have them. They all start with "dmmq3" and run with a special S3 Quake3 build also dating from around Jan/Feb 2000 (note: this version predates the network protocol breakage so incompatibility is guaranteed)
What it really does is add a DXT loader to Q3A and load DDS textures directly, and the maps ship only with DDS textures (no fallbacks, so normla q3 will just see a null texture). Sadly it's plagued by vendor lock-in so it doesn't work on newer non-S3 cards that support S3TC extensions.
There's repacked versions of the same maps with the textures converted to a lower res TGA, which can bring pure checksum incompatibilities, so watch out for that too.
While most of the maps were indeed 'techdemo' quality, there is one surviving map that's well recirculated for its playability - Blood Run 😀
ALSO FYI no Q3 source port can load these maps natively yet. I did try to start work of this on OA though, but haven't brought it into the Git tree yet nor did I implement mipmaps.
wrote:I don't know how to run a standard timedemo on this game.
Start the game. Set your resolution. Quit the game. Start the game again. At the beginning of the timedemo, open the console (~ key) and enter timedemo 1. Close the console again and some FPS starts appear on the right hand side.
Let it loop a few times, open the console again and you will see the fps for the last few runs. I usually let it run 4 times and take the reading of the 3rd run 😀
wrote:UT CD2 installs the S3TC textures. I think that is the case with GOTY as well.
Thanks! I never used CD2 until just now. The textures do look different and better. I've only observed the tutorial, but there is a starburst pattern on the stained glass and other parts of the arena now.
