Video Card Specifications

The Good

The 2D performance of a Millennium with the 3D acceleration of a Voodoofx.  That is the wish made by just about any hard working individual into playing a game or two of Quake on the side with their home computer.   Unfortunately, until now, this wish has been quite difficult to fulfill.  3Dfx attempted to solve the problem by releasing a new version of the Voodoofx. chipset, entitled the Voodoo Rush chipset, unfortunately a lack of support and initial problems with the design scared away quite a few potential customers.  Therefore it was time for another manufacturer to step up with a one-two punch powered by a killer graphics chipset...the challenge was finally accepted...

...nVIDIA graciously accepted the challenge with their highly acclaimed Riva 128 chipset found in most of the first generation AGP video cards, and Diamond, the pioneers of the original Voodoofx. chipset backed nVIDIA up with their marketing know-how and well known name.  Diamond, powered by the sheer force found in nVIDIA's Riva 128 chipset, managed to harness this immense mass of energy and called it the Diamond Viper V330.

Available in two versions, a PCI and an AGP flavor, the Diamond Viper meets the minimum requirements necessary to be classified as an "incredible combo card".  The card itself is provided to users in a normal length PCI (or AGP) card however, in spite of the Bus Interface of the card, both versions share most of the same excellent features.  The PCI version uses, as Diamond puts it, and "AGP-Like texture Storage" which allows extremely large textures to be placed in System Memory (see AGP Guide).  Unfortunately this theory, when implemented, doesn't yield performance comparable to having a true AGP card when dealing with excruciatingly large textures, however it does come fairly close. 

2D performance of the Viper was much more than expected from a Diamond card considering their past history.  In the past Diamond has always had video cards which produced average to above average 2D or Windows acceleration performance, however the Diamond Viper V330 breaks this tradition by producing some very high Business and High End Graphics Winmark scores, comparable to that of the Matrox Millennium and its successor, the Millennium II. 

The Viper 330, as mentioned above, combines the 2D performance of a Millennium, with the 3D acceleration of a Voodoofx.  How can this be possible?  This is made possible courtesy of the nVIDIA Riva 128 chipset which not only provides for excellent performance under real world applications, it also provides for a complete 3D feature set including support for: Alpha-Blending, Anti-Aliasing, Bilinear Filtering, Fogging, Gouraud Shading, Hardware Triangle Setup, Mip Mapping, Perspective  Correction, Specular highlights, Texture Mapping, Transparency, and Z-Buffering.  This allowed Ziff Davis' 3D Winbench to complete, for the most part, without having to result to software emulation of any popular 3D effects, and this also allows many newer games to take advantage of the full power and potential of the Riva 128 chipset found on the Viper. 

With NVidia's alpha Riva 128 GL driver you can easily play GLQuake/GLQuake 2 in resolutions up to 960 x 720 at full speed, although at 960 x 720 your frame rate may drop below 30 fps the texture quality at that high of a resolution is truly amazing.  Below are screen shots from Quake 2 using NVidia's GL Driver and the Diamond Viper V330 AGP:

quake2_01.jpg	quake2_02.jpg	quake2_03.jpg	quake2_04.jpg	quake2_05.jpg
quake2_06.jpg	quake2_07.jpg	quake2_08.jpg	quake2_09.jpg

Adding to the overall quality of the Viper, Diamond chose to include a few nice goodies with the hardware portion of this card.  The Viper V330 features a NTSC TV Output at a 640 x 480 resolution via a composite as well as a S-Video output.  Also featured on the Viper is a RCA input, as well as an AC3 port to enable the upgradability to DVD and a TV Tuner if you so desire at a later time.   When playing MPEG video on the Viper 330, very rarely do you notice any missed frames or choppy playback even in full screen mode.  The MPEG playback of the Viper is among the best of its competitors, and is rivaled by that of Matrox's Millennium and ATI's 3D Xpression+ PC2TV which also features a TV-output. 

Update - 12/11/97 - A simple re-run of the Direct Draw benchmarks using Diamonds new driver illustrates a contradiction to the original comment made on this review about the DD performance of the V330 lagging behind that of the competition.  The direct draw performance of the Riva 128 chipset is fully accented when using Diamond's new drivers, and the benchmarks below prove that statement fully.   NVidia has also released an Alpha version of their GL drivers so you can even run GLQuake/GLQuake 2 on your Viper 330 at resolutions up to 960 x 720!  Needless to say, the performance and image quality when running GLQuake/2 on your Viper is absolutely amazing.

The Bad

Update - It seems as though the Diamond Viper's AVI Video performance isn't all that great, although the quality is excellent, at full screen there have been reports of people receiving as low as 6 fps!  On the test system the Viper played back a number of AVI's at an average of about 20 - 25 fps which isn't all that bad although it could be better.

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The drivers bundled with the Viper V330 aren't anything extremely fancy, just basic drivers which are easy to setup and configure.  At startup, Windows 95 SR2 detects the Diamond Viper as a Standard VGA Display Adapter, however upon asking for a drivers disk, popping in the Drivers CD (or disk if you requested it) forces Windows 95 to identify the product as a Diamond Viper V330 (Turbo).   From that point on the installation and configuration is a breeze.  Diamond also included their InControl Tools 95 program which basically allows the user to switch resolutions/color depths on the fly as well as customize their own popup menu to be activated upon a right click of the mouse.  By default, when the user clicks anywhere on the desktop, the StartMenu appears in that exact position making accessing your programs/files on the StartMenu much easier.

The software bundle included with the Viper is characteristic of most Diamond cards, it includes:

• Interactive Magic's IF-22

• The Realistic Simulation of the F-22 Raptor (Full Version)

• Moto Racer (Full Version - the best game in the bundle!!)

• MDK: Mission Laguna Beach (looks just as good as the 3Dfx version)

• Asymetrix Web 3D

• Platinum's VRCreator/Learning Edition

• Diamond InControl Tools 95

• Microsoft Internet Explorer

• BackWeb Software

• Mediamatics MPEG Arcade Player

• Platinum's WIRL

Incompatibilities

• The drivers provided with the video card (v 4.10.01.0011) are quite stable under normal operation, however Hexen 2 and F-22 Raptor continuously crashed the system whenever they were launched with the Viper installed.   GLHexen 2 as well as all other games tested were not effected

• The Viper V330 PCI version seems to have problems coping with the 75/83.3MHz bus speeds, upon using these bus speeds the test system displayed random black spots in place of a few images, however this may be corrected with the next revision of the card/drivers.  This problem appeared only to be present on the AOpen AX6L - Pentium II test system when it was run at 337.5MHz.   All other settings/motherboards appeared to operate normally even at overclocked bus speeds.

• The Viper V330 AGP version also seems to have problems coping with bus speeds above 66MHz, however when using NVidia's Riva 128 driver instead of Diamond's driver the problems seem to disappear, more indepth research on this may be necessary to predict how accurate that statement is however.

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The Test

Test Configuration

For the most part, when compared to Matrox's outstanding Millennium II the Diamond Viper V330 (AGP) comes out on top in the Direct Draw tests illustrating the competitive Direct Draw performance of the Riva 128 chipset.

Does the Accelerated Graphics Port on most newer LX (and VP3) based motherboards actually do any good?  According to the above numbers, absolutely!  Especially with higher resolutions and greater color depths the AGP Viper V330 blew away its PCI counterpart, however in resolutions at  or below 800 x 600 using a color depth of 256 colors (8 bit) the performance difference isn't as accented as some of the other settings (i.e. 1024 x 768 x 32)

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Here the Diamond Viper is almost on par with the Matrox Millennium II, actually beating it in a few tests measuring the 2D or Windows acceleration of the video card. Unfortunately the Diamond Viper did not allow me to run in 24 bit color for one reason or another, therefore no scores at 24 bit color were posted. That could be a downside for some not wishing to migrate to 32 bit color just yet.

Here we can see the Viper really shine with its outstanding 3D WinMark 97 score of 280 in comparison to the 210 by the Diamond Monster 3D and the 191 by the "superior" AGP ATI 3D Rage Pro card. However the Quake frame rate scores below are quite disappointing, so if you do decide to get the Viper and want to run Quake I strongly suggest you purchase a Monster 3D as well since it is still the ultimate gaming add-on.

Does the AGP version of the Diamond Viper show any improvement in unaccelerated WinQuake? Yes again. Using the Timedemo demo2 benchmark, the AGP Viper V330 constantly produced higher frame rates than the PCI version, except at 320 x 200 where the PCI version beat it out by 4 frames per second.

The Final Decision

The Diamond Viper V330, coupled with NVidia's new alpha GL drivers forms an almost perfect combination of performance, compatibility, affordability and quality in a video accelerator...that can even run that beautiful GL Quake 2 at resolutions unheard of with most 3Dfx cards.

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