Diamond Viper V550

The Slot-1 Pentium II Test System AnandTech used was configured as follows:

• An Intel Celeron 300A, an Intel Pentium II 400, & an Intel Pentium II 450 on an ABIT BX6 Motherboard

• 64MB Mushkin SEC PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

• Windows 98 with all of the latest patches/drivers installed

The benchmark suite consisted of the following full version game titles

• Forsaken - Running the Nuke Demo

• Quake 2 v3.17 using Demo1.dm2 and Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo

Ziff Davis' Winbench 98 was used to test 2D performance at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color.

VSYNC was disabled during AnandTech's tests (VSYNC is the synchronization of all buffer swaps to the refresh rate of your monitor, theoretically limiting the attainable frame rate by the refresh rate your monitor is set at.  Disabling it will improve performance but may degrade visual quality by introducing "tearing")  

For the in-depth gaming performance tests Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo was used to simulate the worst case scenario in terms of Quake 2 performance, the point at which your frame rate will rarely drop any further.  In contrast, the demo1.dm2 demo was used to simulate the ideal situation in terms of Quake 2 performance, the average high point for your frame rate in normal play.  The range covered by the two benchmarks can be interpreted as the range in which you can expect average frame rates during gameplay. 

Note: Performance between two TNT based cards is virtually identical, to see a more complete comparison of how your system will perform using a TNT based video card, visit the AnandTech Canopus Spectra 2500 Review.

The difference in performance doesn't justify the difference in image quality between 16bpp and 32bpp color modes with the TNT and current games, as can be seen from the Unreal screen shots below.  Keep in mind that some quality was lost due to the JPEG compression.

16bpp	32bpp

* The Matrox G200 was using a Direct3D Wrapper for the Quake 2 tests, performance should improve once a Full OpenGL ICD is released

* The Matrox G200 was using a Direct3D Wrapper for the Quake 2 tests, performance should improve once a Full OpenGL ICD is released

Any real differences between the two TNT cards?  Not really, leave performance out of your decision and concentrate on features.

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