Bribed press 😀

The T&L somewhat works but it is buggy and not fast. It can be enabled in some drivers with a registry change. Their speed claims may be the result of the bugs causing the game to not render some things.

GeForce 256 is by far the more useable card. No comparison.

I also found another review of the Savage 2000 on Tom's Hardware that showed the Viper putting up respectable numbers in 3DMark 2000 in DX7 with T&L turned on.

Now I'm thinking if a review site gives a card high marks in it's testing, don't they lose all credibility when someone goes out and buys the card and not only doesn't it match the benchmark numbers shown on the review site, but fails to work at all?

I'd also like to know how the TNT2 Ultra scores so well in a T&L test when it isn't supposed to have hardware T&L at all.

The reason TNT2 can keep up with GeForce 256 fairly well is because T&L wasn't used for much in games and in benchmarks you see how the T&L hardware of NV10 is barely faster than an Athlon/P3.

Depends on the situation. In many cases enabling T&L can cause a performance drop or visual anomalies, or both.

The UT MeTal mode looks awesome, but still has some visual anomalies. On top of that, the game's OpenGL renderers have matured enough to the point where a GeForce 256 could do the same with better performance.

Also, towards the end of the card's life cycle, Diamond for a limited time offered Viper II owners to directly trade their cards in for a V770 Ultra (their flagship TNT2 Ultra card before the S3 merger), after realizing how sucky it was.

Also nearly all of the reviews written for the card were many months before the reviewers realized that Diamond/S3 would soon cease writing any new drivers for the card.

UT MeTaL actually comes with detail textures disabled by default. I noticed this when playing with my Viper II. Turning detail textures on hits performance hard. So I have to vote Glide as superior among the classic renderers, unless you are really fond of the S3TC textures.

I didn't know that Diamond offered V770s are replacements. 🤣. Yeah it's pretty clear that there are major problems with Savage 2000.

Yep, I remember being caught in that sweep. Never looked back at any S3 product after that.
The Savage XP was more than likely what the card should've been the first time around, though too bad it was never released (of course, there are engineering samples floating around, albeit with non-functional T&L). Initial performance of it is around that of a GeForce2 MX (which is close to that of a GF256 SDR anyway).

Does any Savage product that came after have hardware T&L? You see dedicated Savage IX boards on ebay once in a while, which is why I wonder about it.

S3 went back to using the Savage4 3D hardware after Savage 2000, AFAIK. The newer Chrome stuff obviously has T&L though.

They did retain the Savage2000 2D core I believe. Hints at more proof that the 3D part was screwed up in the most ways imaginable.