The Contenders

Viper II

S3 Savage2000 Graphics Controller
Dual-Pixel/Dual-Texture Pipeline
AGP 1X/2X/4X Support
32MB SDRAM
350MHz RAMDAC
32-bit Color 3D Rendering
125MHz Core Clock
155MHz Memory Clock
250Mpixels/s Fill Rate
500Mtexels/s Fill Rate
S3TC (Texture Compression)
TV-out, S-Video and Composite

Viper II

GeForce SDR

NVIDIA GeForce 256 GPU
QuadPipe Rendering engine
AGP 1X/2X/4X support
32MB SDRAM
350MHz RAMDAC
32-bit Color 3D Rendering
120MHz Core Clock
166MHz Memory Clock
480Mpixels/s Fill Rate
480Mtexels/s Fill Rate
DX6 Texture Compression
15 million triangles/s

GeForce 256 SDR

Notes

The Viper II is the only Savage2000 based card currently available, but there are several different GeForce SDR cards on the market. Basically this means that you can only get the Savage2000 with the features found on the Viper II S-Video and composite TV-out, but you can get almost any input/output feature you want with the GeForce depending on the card you chose. Cards such as the ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe have video inputs and support for 3D VR glasses.

The first difference you notice between the Savage2000 and the GeForce are the different 3D pipelines. The Savage2000 has a dual-pixel/dual-texture pipeline and the GeForce has a quad-pixel/single texture pipeline. That means the Savage2000 is only able to push out 250Mpixels a second, but it's able to do 500Mtexels/s thanks to the dual-texturing. Not all games use multitexturing, and you'll find that the GeForce's 480Mpixels/s fill rate helps immensely. The GeForce card is able to push out 480Mpixels a second and 480Mtexels a second. The GeForce is able to support up to 128MB of memory, but we listed 32MB because that's the amount included on all the GeForce cards currently available. NVIDIA claims that the 15 million triangles/s

The GeForce supports all five forms of DX6 texture compression, including S3TC, but it doesn't support S3TC in OpenGL. S3 charges a licensing fee for OpenGL S3TC. Also note that the RAMDAC on some OEM GeForce cards are 300MHz instead of 350MHz.