First post, by retro games 100
- Rank
- l33t
Introduction
I am testing a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PCI Virge 86C325 VGA card. It's got 2MB of RAM onboard, and this amount cannot be upgraded. These RAM chips have 60MHz and also -40 written on them. Is the speed 60, or 40?
1) Link to the Windows 95 driver. Filename is DIAMOND_STEALTH_VIDEO_3D_2XX0_WIN9X_DRIVER.exe. Source: Diamond legacy download page.
2) Link to a generic S3 Virge 325 Windows 95 driver. Filename is W9531201.zip. Source: S3 graphics legacy download page.
3) Link to the Diamond Windows 3 driver. Filename is s3d31101.7z.
4) Link to the S3 Windows 3 driver. Filename is w3110505.zip. Source: S3 graphics legacy download page.
5) Link to a Vogons thread where user unmei220 discusses Virge specific games.
Notes
1) This package is a bit disorganised. It contains various W95 driver versions, and it isn't immediately obvious which one is the latest. Also, a Windows 3 driver is mentioned in one of the text files, but is missing. However, I have included two of them above.
2) This doesn't include Diamond's "InControl" tools utilitiy, and seems slower than Diamond's driver.
3) + 4) I haven't tested these yet. I'll test them very soon... Begin edit - I have now tested this, and commented about them in my second post below. (I have also tested Forsaken.) End edit.
5) I'm also going to test Forsaken... 😉
Test machine
I am testing this card on a 486 mobo, with the FSB set to 50MHz, and the PCI divider set to 1:1. The CPU used is an AMD 5x86 @ 133MHz, but I've set its multi to 3x, so the CPU is running at "3x & 50fsb = 150 MHz". I am using Windows 95, with the screen resolution set to 640x480x16-bit. The mobo's BIOS cache timing value is set to 2-2-2-2. That setting makes the Windows 95 CD-ROM's built in PCI Virge 325 driver work OK. If I set the mobo's cache timing value to 2-1-1-1, I get a critical boot up error, saying that the file VMM32.VX.D cannot be found. This file is associated with the PCI VGA card. Please note that this issue doesn't occur if I used a number nine PCI Virge 325 VGA card.
Benchmarks
Test configuration 1 of 5: using the Windows 95 built in PCI Virge 325 driver. The 4 screenshots below show information about this driver, and WinTune 98's video scores. Although the Direct3D score is good, this benchmark doesn't display correctly, so it's a failure.
Test configuration 2 of 5: using the generic S3 325 driver. This S3 Virge 325 driver makes the Direct3D tests behave normally. You can see the images properly this time. Previously, with the built in W95 CD-ROM driver, you couldn't see the graphics properly - there was no colour, just black images. The results are much slower, but that's probably because it's doing more processing now. However, compared to the later Diamond drivers discussed below, this score is poor.
Test configuration 3 of 5: using the Diamond driver, version v4.03.00.3217, including the Diamond "inControl" tools utility. That's more like it. The Direct3D score is the best so far.
Test configuration 4 of 5: using the Diamond driver, version v4.04.00.2104, including the Diamond "inControl" tools utility. And this is ridiculous - this "updated driver" includes an *older* InControl tools utility. When I installed this version after the software discussed above in test 3, a lot of pop up message boxes appeared saying that the file I am now currently copying over is older than the file version on my system. But no real complaints, as this is the Direct3D winning score.
Test configuration 5 of 5: using the Diamond driver, version v4.10.01.0069, including the Diamond "inControl" tools utility.
Conclusion
The fastest Direct3D package seems to be 3d952104.exe, which is the penultimate release, and it can be found in the first download link at the top of this thread.
The card