Diamond Viper II Z200

Diamond Viper II Z200 ... is among the first of a new breed of graphics accelerator: cards with on-board geometry processors that produce an insanely high number of polygons for amazing realism and detail in 3D environments. Yet the Viper II is priced far lower than other boards with geometry processing units (GPUs), making high-end 3D acceleration more affordable than ever before.

The Viper II is based on S3's new Savage 2000 graphics chipset, which features a transform and lighting (T&L) engine as well as a texture-rendering engine. In the past, a computer's CPU performed the transform and lighting calculations that are needed to draw all the polygons that make up a 3D scene, and then the graphics card handled the rendering phase, in which textures are applied to the bare geometric shapes to make them appear to be real 3D objects. That procedure changes with the Viper II. With its T&L engine, the Savage 2000 chipset takes the burden of geometry processing off of the computer's CPU, freeing it to work on other things like game physics and enemy AI. At the same time, the T&L engine in the Savage 2000 is capable of producing a much greater number of 3D polygons than any CPU currently available - enough polygons to create realistic 3D trees, smoothly rolling terrain, characters and animals that do not appear blocky... the possibilities are nearly endless.

The Viper II is a good investment in your future gaming experience, because 3D games that take advantage of the Viper II's T&L geometry processing power will appear throughout the year 2000 and after. Even current games that are not T&L-optimized will benefit from the card's high texture fill rate: up to 500 megapixels per second. This high fill rate is due to the versatile rendering engine of the Savage 2000 chipset. The engine can produce four single-textured pixels per clock cycle, or two dual-textured pixels, or a single quad-textured pixel, for amazing multi-textured 3D effects. With support for both DirectX and OpenGL, the Viper II boasts a broad range of 3D features, among which are alpha-blending, MIP mapping, bump mapping, full scene anti-aliasing, procedural textures, reflection mapping, bilinear and trilinear filtering, transparency, and more. The card also offers the unique feature of S3TC, the texture compression technique used by the Savage 2000 chipset. S3TC allows the Viper II card to store extremely large and detailed textures - up to 2048 x 2048 pixels - in a small amount of system memory, and then decompress them for use in the game without any noticeable distortion of the image. The level of detail that this technique provides is astounding.