GameSpot - /features/3d/stealth.html

Latest & Greatest:

ON TV.com: TOP 15: Greatest Opening TITLE SEQUENCES

GameSpot.com

Theme:: Light; Dark



Ease of Installation: 8 Features: 7 Performance: 3 Value: 7 Reviewer's Tilt: 4

This product has everything necessary to make it a fine 3-D game hardware product: an easy installation, some bundled game titles, very nice interface utilities, and a cheap price. Unfortunately, it has one major drawback: its 3-D operations are dreadfully slow.

One of our two Virge board entries, Diamond just wants to get on the 3-D bandwagon as quickly as possible. Although Descent II played fairly decently with this product, all the Direct3D stuff was just abysmal.

First, the Tunnel and Twist test scores were well below 20fps, making this the only board to score so low except for the Velocity 3D. The fill and polygon test results were absolutely horrifying. At least the Velocity 3D board, with the VRAM that comes with the Virge/VX chip, scored in the ballpark of some of the other chips. The Stealth board, though, scored about 10 megapixels per second, half to a third as fast as the rest of the products. The polygon scores were also the worst of the bunch, by far.

As expected, Direct3D gameplay fared no better, as Monster Truck Madness was just about impossible to play with our test settings. Even some of the direct-to-hardware games, such as Destruction Derby, though faring slightly better, suffered performance problems.

By contrast, the DOS and Windows stuff was very good. As an overall 2-D graphics board, this product has excellent board utilities, and sells at a very low price. The 3-D features, though, seem to be nothing more than a nearly useless extra, thrown in to satisfy customer demands.