Hi Larry!
Here are some links
zdnet.com
The benchmarks in the above article can be found on this page.
zdnet.com
www8.zdnet.com
www5.zdnet.com
Here is a clip from this article
"In the Chips
Six of the 11 cards are based on some variant of the
S3 Virge chip architecture. When the original Virge
appeared last year, it was praised for superior 2-D
performance, but 3-D performance was lacking--partly
because S3 layered 3-D features on top of the original
Trio64V+ 2-D core without fine- tuning the 3-D
performance.
The new Virge/DX and Virge/GX chips have no
additional 3-D rendering features, but 3-D performance
has been streamlined--some rendering instructions for
example, occur in parallel. The Virge/DX is limited to
EDO DRAM; the GX supports faster SGRAM.
Otherwise, the two chip sets are identical. "
"Rendering 3-D graphics requires moving huge
amounts of data, and to keep up with the data rate,
fast memory is a must. The two S3 Virge/VX-based
cards use more traditional dual-ported VRAM, which
was once the performance choice for graphics cards,
but has been surpassed by a new, faster generation of
EDO DRAM that is used on many of the other cards."
Buried in the articles about specific cards are comments like:
"The [Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro] 3-D performance was about average for
these cards, but is significantly faster than that of
equivalent cards using the older Virge/VX. The card's
image quality looked good as well, but as with most of
the S3 cards reviewed, Diamond's Direct3D driver
doesn't support some of the features that the
hardware is supposed to be capable of, such as alpha
blending and MIP mapping."
which isnt clear whether that is a problem of S3 or Diamond,
on the up side
"The card uses the newer S3 Virge/DX accelerator
chip, which has an integrated 170MHz RAMDAC,
supporting refresh rates up to 85Hz at a resolution
of 1,280x1,024. As we mentioned above, the Virge/DX
hardwires x/y scaling of video and color space
conversion; it came as no surprise, then, that the
Stealth 3D 2000 Pro's video playback performance on
our tests was excellent."
I was not able to find the online links to the Computer Gaming World articles I was thinking of. I believe it was the June '97, September '97 issues that covered 3D cards. Also they had reviews of the "hottest gaming computers" which discuss the internal components in some detail. I can get exact references if you want.
Tony |
