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Ease of Installation: 4 Features: 6 Performance: 3 Value: 7 Reviewer's Tilt: 3

The Velocity 3D is a very nice 2-D card. It comes with a really fast RAMDAC and the option of a memory upgrade, allowing for a whopping 8MB. Unfortunately, it's not a very fast 3-D card.

S3, the chip vendor that makes the Virge ASIC on which the Velocity 3D is based, was one of the first companies to ship their chip in quantity. As a result, several companies, wanting to jump on the 3-D bandwagon, used this ASIC instead of waiting for something better. As our test scores show, sometimes patience really is a virtue, even in the computer industry. MechWarrior 2, a game ported specifically to the chip, looked fairly nice but played very slowly - more slowly, in fact, than any of the other cards with hardware-specific MechWarrior 2 ports.

The situation only got worse with Direct3D. The Direct3D Tunnel test could not have been more embarrassingly slow. How about a whopping 12 frames per second? We can't even blame the Pentium 100, as the Pentium 200 only increased the frame rate by about 2 more frames a second. Turning off the bi-linear filtering helped a bit, bumping the score up to over 18 frames a second. With scores this slow, one wonders why S3 even bothers supporting such a sophisticated texturing feature.

Fortunately for the Velocity 3D, the Tunnel test brings out its greatest weaknesses. With the Twist test, instead of performing at about one-third the rate of the non-Virge competition, it turns in scores about half as fast. Surprisingly, the Direct3D test did not reflect such horrific results. The simple fill rate test was almost respectable, although turning on some features and forcing a fill, of course, caused the score to plummet to the very bottom again.

The polygon score was decent, competitive with the ATI and Matrox products. Overall, however, Virge's Direct3D test results still proved lower than anyone else's, save the Diamond Stealth 2000 board which is, you guessed it, another Virge-based product.

On the other hand, DOS and Windows performance was nothing to laugh at. Without question, this board performed faster in DOS than any other product, matched only by the Matrox Mystique. Unfortunately, we could not get Scitech's Display Doctor - a utility that allows DOS games to play at higher resolutions with certain chips - to work properly. Windows performance was also top-notch, except for a bug that left artifacts in a Photoshop image while scrolling.

If you're looking for a good deal on a solid 2-D board with a lot of memory and a bit of 3-D help, you might want this product. If you want good gameplay, however, forget it.