Even in 2000, still a screamer.
Written: Mar 20 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, Cheap, Excellent overclocker, Superb drivers, great feature set, 32-bit colordepth in 3D modes, very good 2D.
Cons: 2D above 1280x1024 quality on high-end monitors not too great, 16-bit 3D not as nice as on Voodoo3 chips.
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| hansmuff's Full Review: S3 Diamond Viper Ultra 770 |
The Diamond v770 Ultra has been a full success when it debuted, with very high benchmark results in 2D and 3D, and it still holds its own in its class. It directly competes with 3dfx' Voodoo3 cards, Matrox' G400 series and offerings from ATI, to name a few.
In 2D performance it's up there with Matrox, the king of 2D quality and speed. 2D quality is top notch, but not as good as Matrox, and may not be suitable for work at resolutions beyond 1280x1024 on a high-quality monitor where differences are really visible. Nevertheless, up to that resolution, everything is crisp and with vibrant colors. Windows open, close and move very fast without any noticeable delays, basically all Windows user interface functions that utilize the v770 (Ultra) are lightning fast.
3D performance is high, even by todays standards. Given the right CPU, this card will still scream in Quake3 with high resolutions and full 32bit colordepth. The successor of the TNT2 chip which is used on the v770 , NVidia's GeForce256 chip, naturally outperforms the TNT2 in almost all cases; however, on a fast (600 MHz+) P3 or Athlon chip, the TNT2 Ultra is still good for resolutions of 1024x768 at 32bit with high framerates. 3D driver quality is top notch, no visual artifacts and high performance in all games make this card very enjoyable. On slower CPUs such as a Celeron 400, 800x600 with 32bit is no problem either, but you'll have to sacrifice some eye-candy options. 16-bit is much faster than 32-bit in high resolutions, but the difference is very noticeable in some games like Quake3. The 16-bit modes do not look as good on a v770 (Ultra) as on a Voodoo3 card, simply because the Voodoo3 does additional filtering and is trimmed for this color depth.
The card comes with a full Win9x/NT/2000 OpenGL ICD, meaning it's OpenGL driver will work with almost any OpenGL application out there without messy driver switching or tweaking, the same goes for Direct3D.
Further, NVidia is working on a GlX driver for Linux that can be plugged into XFree86 4.0, and gives Linux users the benefit of hardware 3D acceleration within X. Further, the TNT2 chip is now fully supported in XFree 3.3.6 and higher, so that configuring the video part of XFree is no longer a hassle.
In Windows 9x/NT/2k, the v770 (as any other TNT2 card) can be taken to even higher levels with so-called overclocking tools (tntclk, powerstrip etc) to raise the speed with which TNT2 chip and the memory chips are clocked, thus gaining some extra performance. Both the v770 and the v770 Ultra are said to be good overclockers, with the v770 reaching v770 Ultra levels and higher, and the v770 Ultra going well beyond 170 MHz core (150 stock) and 200 MHz memory clock (175 stock) and higher. This is no guarantee, will shorten the life of the video card, and needs additional cooling, so don't overclock your card if you are not completely aware of the dangers.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
hansmuff
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Location: PA, USA
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 3 members
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