They are both really good options, the 3D 2000 being an S3 Virge and the Viper being an Nvidia Riva 128. If you can make a deal and get both of them for a good price I think I would try them both out and decide which one suits your needs better 😀 there are a lot of threads around here relevant to your question you can search for, here is one example: Re: Advice for a video card and I am sure you will get plenty of responses detailing the pros and cons of each card on this thread 😀
EDIT: Just wanted to add that the Riva 128 has great 3D performance for the time while the S3 Virge. . .not so much, I would go with the Riva 128 myself

The Stealth 3D is the less powerful of the two cards but is technically more "correct" for such a system. The S3 Virge chip is very good in 2D and at most tasks the Pentium is likely to be used for.

The Viper V330 is nVidia Riva based. Probably better if you want to run 3D accelerated software for some reason.

The trade-offs are that the Stealth 3D is, ironically, terrible at accelerated 3D (Good at Software 3D though, like Duke 3D) whereas the Viper is better in 3D but not quite as quick in the 2D/Software rendering department and my not have as good of an image output - though you probably won't notice that.

So it depends on what you want to do with the machine. If you plan on getting a 3DFX board, as a lot of people do for some strange reason - I really don't understand that - then definitely go with the Stealth as you'd have a top 2D card as well as a gimmicky 3D one to fit in with the "cool kids" and stuff. If you want to run things in Direct3D mode, get the Viper.

I was about to say the same thing. It really does come down to the classic "what do you want to do with this system?" question. The Riva's better at 3D acceleration than the ViRGE, but I always found ViRGE cards better at DOS stuff whilst not being as good at 3D acceleration. So yeah, choose which one fits what you want to do with that system the most. Actually, if I were in that situation, I'd try to see if I could get a hold of both cards, if possible.

Mmm ok, I understand. But I have a new question. Let's suposse I choose the Viper: It would be worse, equal or better at 2D than my actual Trident 9680 1mb? Because I find my Trident enough for 2D gaming, but I can't play games like Diablo or Commandos at enough framerate to be pleasant playable. Also I would like to play Grand Theft Auto 2, which I can't with my Trident (I only can play gta 1 but not enough framerate)

I use this system to play old DOS games and many titles like those I mentioned above. Yes, I know it would be better if I build a Pentium ii but I just want to use this rig for sentimental reasons 😀

A silly question, is V330 AGP or PCI? AGP is more common, so you'd better check.

ramiro77 wrote:

Mmm ok, I understand. But I have a new question. Let's suposse I choose the Viper: It would be worse, equal or better at 2D than my actual Trident 9680 1mb? Because I find my Trident enough for 2D gaming, but I can't play games like Diablo or Commandos at enough framerate to be pleasant playable. Also I would like to play Grand Theft Auto 2, which I can't with my Trident (I only can play gta 1 but not enough framerate)

I use this system to play old DOS games and many titles like those I mentioned above. Yes, I know it would be better if I build a Pentium ii but I just want to use this rig for sentimental reasons 😀

Either card will be much better than the Trident for 2D games (I had a 9440 2mb back in the day and it wasn't very good, to say the least).

And as RacoonRider said, make sure the Viper is PCI. AGP won't work with your motherboard (no AGP slot).

Weird thread. I thought everyone's Instant Ideal Answer(tm) would be a Matrox Millenium II in one of those babies.

but yes, take the Viper. Anything's better than a ViRGE in a choice of two.*

A weird problem with having the ViRGE in a 3dfx pairing configuration as suggested is that some D3D games will go head first initializing the ViRGE's crappy 3d (being the primary card) and then erroring out on some caps check without a secondary device fallback. The more typical Trio32/64+3dfx configuration doesn't suffer that, and neither should a Riva+3dfx.

* - I personally own both of these Diamond cards and my V330 is AGP and it has very good driver support as well.

Jajaja leileilol, there aren't many old parts here. In fact, these two cards are the only 3D things that I've found in local websites.
And yes, it's the PCI version. Can I assume it's a little rare? I assume that because of what you are saying.

I will go for the Viper. I hope it's ok without artifacts. Seller told me that the card is OK, but a few days ago another seller sold me a broken RS232 mouse for pennies and refused to give my money back or change it. This is Argentina folks. A place where scammers abound in all areas. 😠

Of course, thank you for beeing so helpful!!! I will post some testing results when I get the card.

Not rare. Diamond was once a big respectable brand.

Yes, I know that. I mean rare for that model in PCI version. I understood that most of those were agp.

I would go for the Viper , its compatible enough for DOS , has the extra 3D capability (the S3 Virge cards are lacking in the 3D department) and the image quality should be at least as good or better.

So Viper is the winner! 😎
I will go for it tomowrrow. He is offering it for something like five dollars. I think it will be a good purchase.

Well, I finally bought the Viper. I'm running w98se and I can't make the vga work okay. Every time I use any 3D game, the screen moves randomly. It's something like the card switches randomly between screen resolutions. No artifacts, only that. It gets worse depending on which driver I use.
Any thoughts on this? I've tried using Diamond and nVidia drivers.

I would also get a voodoo1 as it works perfectly on a p200mmx and the early glide games. Annoying hightreason is bonus! 🤣

Why would it annoy me? It isn't in my machine so I don't really care. You could jam whatever you like into the PCI BUS for all I care. Ain't going to bother me what you do, I'll still be running my Riva quite happily over here and gloating how my preferred API didn't fail while you're busy enjoying your blurry, washed-out error messages and mechanical relays. Bought 3DFX back in the day? How does it feel to know you threw your money down the bog?

Hmm... Wonder if my posts will start being deleted again? 😁

HighTreason wrote:

Why would it annoy me? It isn't in my machine so I don't really care. You could jam whatever you like into the PCI BUS for all I care. Ain't going to bother me what you do, I'll still be running my Riva quite happily over here and gloating how my preferred API didn't fail while you're busy enjoying your blurry, washed-out error messages and mechanical relays. Bought 3DFX back in the day? How does it feel to know you threw your money down the bog?

Hmm... Wonder if my posts will start being deleted again? 😁

I dunno why this one should be deleted.
Wouldn't know why it even should be a problem, even if you don't like 3DFX (and that's coming from someone who didn't have anything 3DFX at the time, but still considers himself a 3DFX fanboy...sorta anyway 😜). To each his own 😀

That's pretty much my approach. I think the problem some people have is that I tell it like it is, my experiences with 3DFX have not been good, so all I can tell of their products is what I experienced and I am a little bitter to them as I got tired of removing Voodoo 3 cards for people in the early 2000s when they brought in a machine because it wouldn't play a game or run an application they wanted to play/use. Am I going to tell other people not to like them? No, not really.

Some people are blinded by their fanboyism and think that their favorite company can do no wrong. This happens everywhere, not just Vogons - on gaming forums, it might be Sega. On synth forums it might be Roland. You get the picture - but I'll always tell it how I see it. Hell, I really like the Virge, but I cannot pretend to a second it was any good in 3D. Meanwhile I despise the Core 2 but can not for one moment honestly say it wasn't good in the games which were around at the time.

Oh it's not blind fangirlism with the 3dfx recommendations around here. Most of the recommendations are for three, definitely not hype bullshitty factors:

- Optimized drivers - 3dfx is nice in Pentiums, Cyrix6x86s, K6-2s, and even 486s. Far less overhead, sometimes faster than obviously faster cards (i.e. Geforce2) in these slower PCs
- More guaranteed game support - a lot of older games expected a 3dfx as that was the earliest common denominator of a 3d card that didn't suck (in a world of 3d cards that sucked, i.e. ViRGE, Matrox Mystique, etc). It's not just for Glide, but for early D3D caps and GL extensions as well (like paletted texturing)
- working, stable drivers 😀

Even though I wrote a reproduction of a 3dfx dac filter (which I associate my nostalgia of 3dfx with) it's not about "What could have been best company ever voodoo5 6000 will rule the world" history revisionism with us..... though i've seen some of those kind of 3dfx fans overlapping with the same kind of "dreamcast couldve ruled the world and have shenmue 3 sonic adventure 3 and halo" fanatics you speak of, who probably learned about 3dfx post-closure and took it up as a hipster thing, also probably learning from the alternate Dreamcast system design that involved 3dfx.

My scorn for Nvidia actually began later with the GeforceFX series, which also launched their stupid "WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED" marketing campaign, forcing long seconds of arrogant blurb on screen in the start of many AAA games.

And that's fine, your experiences were clearly good. Meanwhile, mine consisted of a BSOD about "FXMEMMAP" or some such and all the games I tried to run supported Direct 3D / GL well where the 3DFX ran slow and often didn't render properly. It also consisted of people nearby bringing me their machine if someone had fitted a 3DFX because they were having the same problem and wanted me to fit a Riva/Rage/Radeon. Evidently we played different games and different programmers favored or understood different APIs better than others. I wouldn't agree that it ran well on Pentium 1 machines as mine proved useless and nobody did that back then for this very reason, but whatever, different usage case I suppose. Unfortunately though, all I can say on that one is in my tests it has never worked well if at all, so if someone asked me that would be the only answer I could give - unfortunately, this seems to bother some people.

Eww... The FX series. I remember when those came out, there was a mad rush to get hold of GeForce 4 Ti boards and people who had been on nVidia since the Riva started buying ATI cards all of a sudden. Which was fair play, the Radeon cards at the time were great. Prior to that I had a Radeon 7500 and I still miss that card very much. I've moved back and forth between ATI and nVidia a lot over the years based on which GPU proved best for what I was trying to do as i have no attachment to any company. At present, I like nVidia's stuff because ATI have some problems in certain GL applications. They make great cards with crap driver support which is a shame, it's like ATI don't communicate internally and the driver team don't know what they're writing for. But I guarantee if ATI made a better driver tomorrow and produced the best card I'd jump ship in a second and then bash on nVidia's line-up instead.

At the end of the day, another point to consider, is that competition is always good for progress. One only has to look at what happened when AMD released the Athlon to prove that. Or else use the SNES / Mega Drive war I mentioned earlier, do you think for one second Sonic 3 would have been so good if Super Mario All-Stars wasn't there? Would Yoshi's Island have even existed if Sega didn't have so many great games on their platform? Where the hell do you think Star Fox and Virtua Racing came from? Whether you like one console or another you have to at least respect that the other was somewhat responsible for it being so great, no company dared make a crappy product because it could cost them the market, they constantly had to compete on every level and it was great for the consumer at the end of the chain, especially towards the end when the technology was being hammered to the absolute limit.

^ For the record, I'm a SNES guy but I like both systems. I still jest with my friend (A Mega Drive guy) about it all "Dude! Donkey Kong is awesome! Sonic and Knuckles sucks balls!" but it's all in good fun.