is the Diamond Stealth 3 32Mb card any good?

[TripLoop]

I have the S540 Diamond 32Mb card. I have alotta trouble going into hi res in games. I play UT in 1024x768 16bit using the Savage S3 capabilites of my card. It lags like crazy.
I have an AMD Athlon 550Mz w/Asus K7V. 128Mb RAM PC 100Mhz, 20.4Gb HDD w/5400RPM. And a Diamond Sonic Impact 64bit snd card. Why does it lag?

 

[Spoooon]

It's just not a very good card. I used to have an S540 also. It pretty much sucked. I bought a TNT2 to replace it, and it made a pretty big difference. With prices the way they are, you could pick up a Radeon DDR for $130-$150. You might consider it, depending on how new that video card is.

 

[AndyHui]

Try these:

The latest reference drivers are available here for Win9x/ME and here for Win2K. I'm not sure if S3/SonicBlue decided to update their own Diamond drivers, but there you go.

The best and probably only available tweaking program for the S3 Savage family of cards is S3 Tweak, available here.

Hope that helps.

The Diamond Sonic Impact 64-bit is probably the S90 model. It's based on the Aureal Vortex I chip....CPU usage is a little high and it doesn't handle A3D 2.0 in hardware, so that may reduce performance somewhat.

 

[TripLoop]

Thanks for your advise on the TNT2 card. Thing is, I used to OWN NVidia's TNT2 M64 32Mb card. It was GREAT. when I changed from my Gigabyte to my ASUS mb, apperantely the employee shorted my vid card. They offered a replacement (@ the time i didnt know the stealth sucked). Now when i play emulated games LAGGGGS.
well, hopefully soon i can get the readeon thanks.

And as to you, Diamond pro. Thanks man. That tweaker really works.
See ya later
-Shawn

 

[TripLoop]

Thanks ALOT for those sites. Although i do already have the updated driver. Before i got that, I couldn't even run the 3D screen savers (it would crash). But that tweak utility is a god send. THANK YOU.
-Shawn

 

[Dark4ng3l]

What are you talking about m64 sucks bad.

 

[Auric]

Delusional.

Seriously though, what the krunk does lag have to do with a viddy card? Lag is a term for a loss of syncronization when playing online due to high latency of packets. Plain ol' jerkiness might be due to the viddy card or junk running in the background and such. What exactly is the problem? Savage is simply the best card for UT: large textures, full color, fast, etc. With the driver hack you can use a Geforce in OpenGL to get the most of the same features (if not picture quality) but even the fastest models are not terribly fast compared to a lowly ol' Savage. You should really only be using 800x600 especially with that relatively slow CPU. UT is a hog but I recall getting 45ish FPS with all audio and video options maxed out. In any case it was schmoove as a schmoove thing.