Diamond Viper V330 Riva 128 Accelerator

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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