Diamond Viper V330 Launches

Tuesday night, Diamond allowed the media types to take a look at its new Viper V330 card that is making a new battle in the 3-D graphics card war.

Diamond's newest card, the Viper V330, is being pushed as a solution for 2-D/3-D business, mainstream graphics, and multimedia. If games are your business, you'll want to read on. Pricing for the board starts at US$199.95. The PCI-based board sports the new NVIDIA Riva 128 media controller, 2-D support, 4MG of 100MHz SGRAM, 128-bit data path, and a 128-bit graphics path. Translated this means that the accelerator is capable of supporting a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200 with a color depth of up to 32-bit color. Many probably don't have monitors that can even reach this type of depth, but the option definitely could open some new doors as the next generation of Windows 95 games moves to the richer 24-bit color depth.

For hard-core tech 3-D fans, the board supports hardware triangle setup, a 12k chip cache, and 3.5 million transistors (putting that into perspective: a Pentium Pro has 5.5 million transistors and a Pentium 166 without MMX technology has 3.3 million transistors) that can perform 20 billion operations per second. Also, an AGP version is planned but will at first only be available on new systems supporting the new Intel 440LX chip set.

So why would you need this power? Diamond talks about how your CPU can be bogged down with intensive 3-D processing. If you're running some of the newer games and run them on anything under a Pentium 166, you understand all too well. Basically, the board will take over the 3-D processing from the microprocessor and transfer those functions to the board. This means the microprocessor can spend more time dealing with the AI or other features in your game.

While the party was going on, I took some time to investigate what the technology mix would do to a real game. Luckily Psygnosis allowed me to take a spin with its upcoming title G Police. My early impressions centered on the depth of texture and the lighting effects for enemies and weapon discharges, and the amazing smoothness of the environment. There was no lag time in the game. The game was running on a Pentium 200 and it definitely had onlookers focused. The only problem with the game was that there was an obvious tiling effect in the HUD and in the background dome of the game. Other than this, it felt like I was flying in the futuristic world of Blade Runner.

Also, a version of Acclaim's upcoming Descent-like title was being shown in a looping movie that looked amazing. Again, the lighting for weapon discharges blew me away. Descent fans will want to take a look at this title. If the game plays as good as it looks, it will be a hit. The movie had gameplay moving so fast that the 360-degree rotations definitely induced instant vertigo - not a bad thing at all.

Other specifications for the board include video out so you can play all your games on your TV, MPEG-1 support and add-on boards for MPEG-2, a TV tuner/capture board, and a DVD option.

The Viper will support DirectX 5.0, Direct 3-D, and Open GL applications on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. And once Memphis (Windows 98) and Windows NT 5.0 arrive, Diamond will support the new multiple monitor capability.