tware

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

Processor(s): Intel Pentium II 300 (512KB ECC)
Motherboard: AOpen AX6L LX Based Pentium II Motherboard
RAM: 2 - 32MB Advanced Megatrends SDRAM DIMMs
Hard Drive(s): Western Digital Caviar AC21600H
Video Card(s): ATI 3D Rage Pro (4MB SGRAM - AGP)
Diamond Viper V330 (4MB SGRAM - AGP)
Diamond Viper V330 (4MB SGRAM)
Matrox Millennium II (4MB WRAM)

 

WinBench 97 Version 1.1 Direct Draw Results in Million Pixels/Sec
Test Diamond Viper V330 (AGP) Matrox Millennium II
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 640 x 480 239 138
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 800 x 600 232 136
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 1024 x 768 243 134
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 1152 x 864 227 No Result
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 1280 x 1024 233 132
DirectDraw/Animate Screen Size, 1600 x 1200 No Result No Result
DirectDraw/Animate Color Depth, 8 bit 238 138
DirectDraw/Animate Color Depth, 16 bit 194 79.8
DirectDraw/Animate Color Depth, 24 bit No Result 46.4
DirectDraw/Animate Color Depth, 32 bit 98.3 No Result
DirectDraw/Animate BltFast 238 138
DirectDraw/Animate Blt 238 138
DirectDraw/Animate Solid 258 134
DirectDraw/Animate Transparent 258 143
DirectDraw/Animate Full Screen 178 136
DirectDraw/Animate Windowed 11.4 112
DirectDraw/Animate Clipped 11.4 114
DirectDraw/Animate Memory, Source in video, Work area in video 238 138
DirectDraw/Animate Memory, Source in system, Work area in video 41.7 97.8
DirectDraw/Animate Memory, Source in video, Work area in system 84.3 140
DirectDraw/Animate Memory, Source in system, Work area in system 84.8 141
DirectDraw/Animate Blt size, 256 pixels 53.6 62.4
DirectDraw/Animate Blt size, 1024 pixels 118 89.0
DirectDraw/Animate Blt size, 4096 pixels 238 138
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, 2.0x, 8 bit 52.8 16.9
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, 1.7x, 8 bit 47.3 6.04
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, Transparent, 1.7x, 8 bit 46.4 6.21
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, 1.7x, 16 bit 71.5 4.61
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, 1.7x, 24 bit No Result 0.781
DirectDraw/Animate Stretch, Solid, 1.7x, 32 bit 47.8 4.54
DirectDraw/Fill Color Depth, 8 bit color 1410 2920
DirectDraw/Fill Color Depth, 16 bit color 679 1770
DirectDraw/Fill Color Depth, 24 bit color No Result 162
DirectDraw/Fill Color Depth, 32 bit color 262 940

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.

WinBench 97 Version 1.1 Graphics Winmark Results
Video Card Diamond Viper V330 (AGP) Diamond Viper V330 (PCI)
Resolution Business Graphics Winmark 97 High End Graphics Winmark 97 Business Graphics Winmark 97 High End Graphics Winmark 97
800 x 600 x 8 bit Color (256 Colors) 171 No Result 151 No Result
800 x 600 x 16 bit Color (65K Colors) 187 No Result 144 No Result
800 x 600 x 24 bit Color (16.7M Colors) Not Supported Not Supported Not Supported Not Supported
800 x 600 x 32 bit Color (4B Colors) 156 No Result 129 No Result
1024 x 768 x 8 bit Color (256 Colors) 157 67.8 135 55.8
1024 x 768 x 16 bit Color (65K Colors) 159 63.9 109 58.4
1024 x 768 x 24 bit Color (16.7M Colors) Not Supported Not Supported Not Supported Not Supported
1024 x 768 x 32 bit Color (4B Colors) 107 65.3 78.4 45.1

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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Index The Test (cont)
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  • tipoo - Friday, March 18, 2011 - link

    This should be added to AT bench!
  • slatanek - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link

    It's amazing to see this review! this was my first video card and at that time its performance was awesome for the money. to think that this thing had 4MB of video memory is just mindblowing! Quake 2 indeed looked great on the Riva 128.
    AnandTech started at almost same time as my interest for PC. Now I got emotional... ;-)

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