I managed to get one last year (the only one that appeared in Poland during the last 2 years), but haven't had the time to test it. Is it compatible with a AGP x8 slot (voltage wise)?

It's AGP 4x so it should work. It may have to have some jumpers changed to enable 4x though. Some of these Diamond cards had those at the time (see the two open jumpers on the card).

swaaye wrote:

RG100, you have one of these [S3 Savage 2000] yet? 😁

Hehe! No not yet. I read a Wikipedia article about it some time ago, and it stated that its driver was poor, and so I decided to avoid it. I think I've probably got enough cards from that particular era - Voodoo, nVidia, ATI and Matrox offerings. IMHO, as all these 4 types of cards have good things about them, I don't feel any strong need to get a 5th card from this period in time.

Actually, I wrote most of that Wikipedia article about it. A few years back I was really into filling in the retro PC hardware gaps on Wiki. The S3 articles were really bare (not popular like say 3dfx) so I filled in the Virge and Savage articles. 😁

Just because it doesn't work really well doesn't mean you aren't missing out !!! Missing out on something.....

Its GL drivers were bad, slow texture uploads made lightmap dynamic lights go slower in older engines. Also it doesn't like vertex arrays in GL either as much as other cards, causing some normals to break up as unintended (such as in their favorite game, Quake III Arena) and some glColor calls getting more saturated primary colors than the real color it tried to use. This is an ANNOYING card to program for.

There is a Q3 map pack designed to show off this card with lots of hi-res JPEG textures, though any card with S3TC (like a Geforce256) can play it as intended, also.

The card SUCKS at 3dmark2001.

I remember reviews saying this card is only good for Q3 (this game actually worked on it).

This card isn't even good enough to play Q3 at full detail. r_picmip 0 makes the FPS dive more than any other card I tried (well, maybe except the Voodoo2, but)

It is amazing that S3 was always so incompetent. None of their 3D hardware ever amounted to anything. The entire Savage line was a failure mainly because of shitty drivers. You might even be able to say the same about the Virge because even D3D 3/5 games don't work right on them.

I've seen some people say that Savage 2000 was good for Unreal and UT however, because it supports S3 Metal.

This is one of the cards I'm missing from my collection. I do have a 8mb Number Nine with a Savage 4, a 32mb Stealth III S540 with a Savage 4 Pro+ and a unknown 8mb Savage IX with is total crap performer btw (bios has date 10/01 😳 )

Amazing that S3 is still in the graphics business. They must STILL be selling Virge chips somewhere. 🤣

If anyone is interested in obtaining one of these cards drop me a PM.

http://www.s3graphics.com/en/index.aspx

Has anyone used one of their Chrome cards? The only S3 related graphics product I've used since the company was resurrected is the occasional VIA/S3 IGP.

They still make AGP and PCI cards, all too expensive, all of them below average compared to the others. I dont know who buys cards from them these days.

Ok I decided to mess with the Viper II tonight for a bit. 😀

Installed it in:
Celeron 1200
Abit BF6 440BX
*I don't think this card works on 1.5v AGP 4/8x mobos. No POST on 815 and my nforce2 board had a glowing red LED that scared me out of even touching the power button
Aureal Vortex 2
Win98SE

Drivers:
Official Diamond
http://www.dmmdownload.com/legacy.php

Games:
UT99 4.36 w/ S3TC textures
Quake 3

For UT99, the Diamond Viper II driver pack includes a pack of S3 Metal updated drivers supporting the Savage 2000. Surprisingly it runs extremely well. It was pulling 40-70fps at 1024x768x32-bit with high world and skin detail. That's definitely good for a card with 128-bit SDR SDRAM and with the fillrate it has. It would undoubtedly slap around the D3D driver on a TNT2, G400 or Rage Fury. I bet that it would be a better experience than even faster cards stuck on the D3D driver. And you get S3TC textures. The readme states that the S3 Metal driver does 3 textures per pass.

Image quality was great. Even the texture filtering was pretty good, but I could tell it was some sort of simplified trilinear with a little bit of swimming/aliasing. I'm thinking that UT, thanks to S3 Metal, is the best game for this card. It's probably similar to what Glide gets you with a Voodoo compared to D3D.

I also wanted to try out Unreal Gold but didn't see a way to get it to work with S3 Metal so I gave up.

Quake 3, on the other hand, runs rather bad. Quality is ok but it probably has half of the performance or less than UT99 with Metal. 800x600 normal detail was not smooth enough for me. Of course, it's not unsurprising when NVIDIA was the only company that could make a decent OpenGL ICD back then.

I've been wondering about why driver development just died off for this card. I'm thinking the card didn't sell very well for a number of reasons. But also Diamond and S3 are of course known for screwing customers. Curiously, S3's legacy drivers page has no generic drivers at all for Savage 2K.

Unreal S3TC TechDemo maps (Size: 105 MB)
Unique demo made by S3 to showcase the possibilities of high-resolution S3TC textures in Unreal.

http://hyper.dnsalias.net/files-demos.htm

I remember playing that level on my savave 4 card. Textures looked amazing compared to the voodoo1 blur I was used to before that. I Seem to remember some custom quake levels being around too. (probably quake2, but cant remember.).

The problem with the S3TC textures is that the textures sometimes really don't fit in well. It's especially bad when they get mixed with textures that weren't upgraded. It was a sign of things to come though of course.

If you're looking for some interesting Unreal/UT S3TC texture upgrades, look at:
http://www.unrealtexture.com

I scoured the web today looking for drivers for this GPU and found a whole bunch. There are 9x drivers much newer than Diamond ever released. I virus scanned them and archived it all up.

Windows 3.1 / 9x / NT4 / 2K / XP
OS/2
S3 Metal
and a couple of tweakers
S3 Savage 2000 Driver Collection (33MB) @ Rapidshare

1_9x_
29.01.09 VIPER2 Z200
39.51.03 VIPER2 Z200
49.51.09a
59.51.11
69.51.12
79.51.13
89.51.14
99.51.17
10
11_2k/XP_
129.20.11 VIPER2 Z200
139.20.20 VIPER2 Z200
149.20.21 VIPER2 Z200
159.21.01 VIPER2 Z200
169.21.01B
179.21.01D
189.21.01G
19
20_NT4_
21900.10
22900.11 VIPER2 Z200
23900.19
24900.19 VIPER2 Z200
25
26_Win3.x_
276.10.22
28
29_OS2_
307.00.19
317.00.22
32
33_Extras/Misc_
34S3 Metal (VIPER2 Z200) 2.0.0.4
35Savage Tweaker
36S2V Viper II Tweaker Beta
37S3 Savage Tweaker 3.11

I seem to have acquired an S3 Savage4-LT (8MB), are these any good for anything ?
Dos?
Windows?
Socket7?

From the wiki, it looks like its slightly better than a TNT... 😵
(and... intended for Laptops ?!)

The box art says AGP, but there's a sticker telling me it is PCI.
Which also is evident from the connector itself.
Made by Inno3D(InnoVISION), may 2002.

PS: would those 2000 driver files work with my card, I wonder...?