S3 was once held in high regard in the graphics chip industry, although over the last couple of years it has slowly slipped further and further behind its main rivals, nVidia, 3dfx, Matrox and ATI. The last major chip release from S3 was the Savage2000 that features on the Diamond Viper II Z200. The cards specification is fairly respectable, with a 125MHz chip clock, 32Mb of 143MHz SDRAM and support for advanced features such as texture compression and hardware transform and lighting (T&L).

Interestingly, when the card was released, S3 did not have drivers with T&L enabled. A market backlash has apparently spurred Diamond to add T&L support to the drivers, meaning that we were able to test the Viper II in this Labs with hardware T&L enabled. Even T&L assisted, the Viper II was still unable to post any high scores in 3DMark2000 Pro or Quake III, and it fell a long way short of the nVidia GeForce2 MX-based cards in both tests.

The Viper II does feature video output through either an S-Video or composite connector, and it comes with some well-featured drivers, with plenty of options to configure your card for maximum performance. In its day, the Viper II was a reasonable choice for the budget-conscious gamer, although with the recent release of the GeForce2 MX, it becomes increasingly difficult to recommend.