swaaye wrote:

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.

I remember that Unreal has the detail textures option, but I don't see it in UT GOTY. Am I missing it here?

leileilol wrote:

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)

Yes, the version of S3Quake3 that is on my Viper II driver CD is dated December 1999.

philscomputerlab wrote:

boxpressed 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 😀

Thank you. What's interesting is that MeTaL is not the fastest API at 1024x768:

OGL: ~49 FPS
MeTaL: ~56 FPS
D3D: ~61 FPS

MeTaL looks the best, however. Gamma in OGL is too dark, too light in D3D.

[EDIT: The framerates above reflect DetailTextures being on for D3D and OGL while off for MeTaL (default settings). When turned on for MeTaL, the FPS is ~46, the slowest of these APIs.]

Haven't had a chance to test Glide with my V3 or V5 yet.

boxpressed wrote:

swaaye wrote:

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.

I remember that Unreal has the detail textures option, but I don't see it in UT GOTY. Am I missing it here?

http://i1081.photobucket.com/albums/j349/boxp … t99%20metal.jpg

It's in the ini file. Open the console and run 'preferences' or just edit the ini with a text editor. I think only Glide has detail textures enabled normally.

I don't think the compressed textures have detail textures assigned to them. Also detail textures are still loaded+rendered at a distance, their mips are just colored gray. They are enabled when you use high World Texture detail. IIRC

I'm pretty sure if "DetailTextures=False" there will never be detail textures shown.

True, and detail textures don't show if you use Medium or Low world texture detail either. 😀

I found the DetailTextures variable in the ini file (it doesn't appear in the GUI).

MeTal scores take a hit.

1024x768, intro scene
DetailTextures=True ~47 FPS
DetailTextures=False ~57 FPS

I have to say, though, the detail textures look great with MeTaL. In the screenshots below (taken at 1600x1200), notice how the MeTaL textures have scanlines on the giant monitors compared to no scanlines on the D3D textures. Also, the windows have geometric patterns on them in the MeTal textures.

MeTal / DetailTextures=True / 1600x1200

D3D / DetailTextures=True / 1600x1200

I loved the look of the detail textures in Unreal and UT. Is the Metal renderer stuttering strangely at all with them?

I noticed that it stuttered during the practice session as soon as you got really close to a wall. I'm sure it was frantically loading high-res textures at that point. Things were fine when you didn't get up close to a wall. However, the stuttering went away after a while so that you could get close to a wall and back away without slowdown.

Are you using D3D, OGL, or Glide for the detail textures in Unreal? I'd love to be able to play Unreal with S3TC. Things move so fast in UT99 that you don't get to appreciate the high-res textures.

OldUnreal has an OpenGL renderer (UTGLR) that supports S3TC. It works on any card with at least DirectX 8 compliance. The DirectX 9 renderer can do it too.

Glide does detail textures fine but has no S3TC support. Voodoo1 and 2 run low on texture memory with UT though. Voodoo1 4MB and Voodoo2 8MB will stutter a lot.

Just in case anyone was wondering...

The Savage 2000 does NOT scale beyond a P3-866 with the MeTaL API (no surprise). I tried it with my KT133A / Athlon XP 2400+ combo, and the framerate for 1024x768 with DetailTextures=True is virtually identical, ~48 FPS.

Still looks great, though.

borgie83 wrote:

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.

It's not a fast card, but if you're not playing bleeding edge games from that time period you should be OK. I searched for a long time to get a S540 in PCI. As far as I know, only the Pro was available in PCI not the Xtreme. I've only ever seen the Xtreme a few times and always in AGP.

I bought a Tiny PC with a Duron 750 and onboard Savage 2000 a long time ago. It borrowed up to 32MB of onboard memory, which was DDR 266 RAM, and it could play Quake III in Lightmap quality at 512x384 with an FPS range of 40-70 on most maps. I would have liked to have tested a discrete version, which I'm sure would have been faster. It ran my games at a playable rate for a good year until I finally upgraded to a discrete Geforce 2 MX400. I remember the onboard Savage soundly beat my VooDoo 2 when I installed it, just to check.

I've included the Savage4 and 2000 in my most recent Pentium 4 Windows 98 project. Here are some benchmarks comparing them to other cards. Thought this might be relevant:

Super Interesting thanks Phil !

Is the viper 2 card a card safe to use for a everyday pc or it usually overheat or as read somewhere here they will not last long as other savage 2k? And what about the on board jumpers to set agp4x, must they be all closed or i risk to fry it?
i have an athlon 1000 and i an deciding what card to use as time correct but still alternative configuration.

386SX wrote:

Is the viper 2 card a card safe to use for a everyday pc or it usually overheat or as read somewhere here they will not last long as other savage 2k? And what about the on board jumpers to set agp4x, must they be all closed or i risk to fry it?
i have an athlon 1000 and i an deciding what card to use as time correct but still alternative configuration.

I don't know first hand if Viper 2 had thermal problems, but in case this is something you worry about, consider modding a fan to it's heatsink in a similar fashion Brostenen did to his V3 3500 in this thread Athlon-XP V3-3500 Build 😀

Tetrium wrote:

386SX wrote:

Is the viper 2 card a card safe to use for a everyday pc or it usually overheat or as read somewhere here they will not last long as other savage 2k? And what about the on board jumpers to set agp4x, must they be all closed or i risk to fry it?
i have an athlon 1000 and i an deciding what card to use as time correct but still alternative configuration.

I don't know first hand if Viper 2 had thermal problems, but in case this is something you worry about, consider modding a fan to it's heatsink in a similar fashion Brostenen did to his V3 3500 in this thread Athlon-XP V3-3500 Build 😀

😀 from my test it become quiet hot after a while, being not a common easy to find card,i was worried to use it everyday like the rage fury maxx.

386SX wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

386SX wrote:

Is the viper 2 card a card safe to use for a everyday pc or it usually overheat or as read somewhere here they will not last long as other savage 2k? And what about the on board jumpers to set agp4x, must they be all closed or i risk to fry it?
i have an athlon 1000 and i an deciding what card to use as time correct but still alternative configuration.

I don't know first hand if Viper 2 had thermal problems, but in case this is something you worry about, consider modding a fan to it's heatsink in a similar fashion Brostenen did to his V3 3500 in this thread Athlon-XP V3-3500 Build 😀

😀 from my test it become quiet hot after a while, being not a common easy to find card,i was worried to use it everyday like the rage fury maxx.

This card was made by Diamond. I've used a Viper 550 (TNT) for years and a friend of mine used a Viper 770 (TNT2) for years also. Both were passively cooled and seemed to at least not have too much serious thermal issues.

But about your worry about frying your Viper 2: If you rig a fan to the heatsink like in the link I provided (you could also opt to use better case ventilation if you prefer that over rigging active cooling on your old graphics cards) then you should be home free, so to say 😜

And the way Brostenen rigged his Voodoo 3 is actually quite popular here on Vogons, for several for good reasons:
-It's cheap
-It doesn't damage the card (no damaging the original heatsink...if you care about that 😜 but lots of people prefer to not ruin the original heatsink, including me)
-It's very fast and very easy to do, only need some wires and at least some common sense
-Most important is...it works! 😁 I modded my GF6800 (Vanilla Edition) the same way, only had to remove it's original fan assembly

So I can highly recommend it 😉 Only thing that could go wrong I think is if you have some accident while rigging the fan, like ESD damage for instance.