zuldan wrote on Yesterday, 21:30:

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to insta […]
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MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 19:00:

That's a very cool desktop.

Today I flicked through old magazine CDs looking for Savage 2000 drivers that activate its fabled T&L and I found in the readme.txt of version 4.12.01.9007-9.51.03, "This driver enables Transformation and Lighting. Using this feature may result in visual anomalies."

I am preparing to record actual A/B test of S3 vs Nvidia: Texture compression vs texture compression, T&L vs T&L ... but I don't have any T&L games and my GeForce 256 doesn't work.

I still remember walking into the computer store to purchase my Savage 2000 in December 1999. Couldn’t wait to get home to install it on my Abit BP6. I thought I had built a beast of a machine. I soon realised I had made a mistake. Only CPU 1 was being used in Windows 98 and the Savage 2000 couldn’t keep up with the GeForce 256. Back then information wasn’t readily available like it is today on hardware. You had to rely on magazines being honest. Things improved slightly when Windows 2000 was released 2 months later but only with Quake 3 🤣

Kicking myself for not keep the Savage and BP6, doh!

The Savage 2000 box looked similar to this Savage 4 box.

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My Super Socket 7 system lived through generations of GPUs: Matrox G200, Banshee, Voodoo3, Savage4Pro, GeForce2MX, GeForce4MX, GeForce3, and a mystery Radeon.

Of those, the Savage4Pro had demonstrated the highest image quality by pasting massively more detailed textures with zero CPU impact - but it was not the fastest. Magazines discouraged me from spending any money on a Savage2000. I later discovered the SS7 FPS ceiling. Due to SS7 architectural constraints, the GeForce3 was slower than earlier cards - my SS7 system was choking under heavier DX8 assumptions, various DX7 cards were returning roughly the same FPS, and the DX6 Savage4Pro was clearly behind the pack.

Had magazines focussed too much on marketing new builds and neglected readers upgrading old machines? Maybe. That is when I wanted to try a Savage2000 - I wanted to see if it could deliver the best of both worlds on the older PCs that it was probably designed for. Trouble was, the Savage2000 was short lived and impossibly rare so no answer was found..

.. I'll finish the story shortly, and not at market rates: