Diamond Viper V770 Ultra Graphics Accelerator

Stocking all the 3-D necessities, the Viper V770 Ultra's feature set includes alpha blending, anti-aliasing, bilinear filtering, bump mapping, environment mapping, fogging, gouraud shading, MIP mapping, stencil buffer, subpixel precision, texture mapping, transparency, trilinear filtering, and z-buffering. The card also supports hardware-assisted playback of DVD (MPEG-2) video, and ships with a nice selection of software.

As the only chip currently on the market that supports 32-bit rendering, the RIVA TNT Ultra has a leg up on the competition. Its easy installation, stunning graphics, and impressive frame rates in our testing impressed us.

We put the Viper V770 Ultra to work on a 333 MHz Celeron system running Windows 95 and DirectX 6.1 using the Quake II time-demo test. With optimized 32-bit color at a resolution of 800 x 600, the Viper managed 42.4 frames per second, and at 1024 x 768, the frames per second dropped to 36.2. With 16-bit color at 800 x 600, frames per second came in at 43.1, and at 1024 x 768, the Viper managed 40.7 frames per second. These figures are nowhere near Diamond's lofty claims of 100 frames per second; however, with our limited CPU speed, we took these numbers with a grain of salt. Also, our 14-inch monitor maxed out at 1024 x 768, and it's important to note that the Viper V770 Ultra can go far beyond that to resolutions of 2,048 x 1,536 with a 24-inch monitor.

For Quake III, which will support 32-bit rendering, and a number of other games that are beginning to use more sophisticated graphics, you may want to check out a card like the Viper V770 Ultra. This card has everything the hard-core gamer needs for the most intense, lifelike 3-D experience.

Pros:

• Only card to support 32-bit rendering
• High-resolution support
• Easy to install
• Supports most games
• 32 MB memory increases performance

Cons:

• Sacrifice in performance for increased resolutions