#Diamond Viper
10 messages in this thread
I am sure that this topic has been chewed to death bu.. I have a student who is
about to take the plunge and buy a new system. He is looking at the Diamond
Viper (32bit – 2MB) video adapter. Does anyone have thoughts on this selection
– or – can you make another suggestion? He wants to go VL bus. He is on a
limited budget.
Thanks in advance….
Bill
Bill,
Personally, I'd take a look at the Hercules Graphite Pro VLB w/2 megs. I've
installed several of these cards lately. They've become our standard
recommendation … they even come with Vibrant Graphics' drivers for ACAD and
3DS.
John
John,
>>Hercules Graphite VLB
Me too John, we have also standardized on this line of cards. A real easy and
straight forward card to install .. no conflicts .. no special "hocus pocus" to
get it to work.
I'm keeping my eye on the Matrox MGA series though. One of the card has a
z-buffer option and hardware shading capabilities. I think they are working on
a driver to allow the 3DS user to realtime g-shaded flc on the fly! Also maybe
allow you to work with g-shaded models in the editor!
Ang
Currently they have their MGA cards doing realtime gouraud with AutoCAD for a
long long time. It's really strange that they don't write a driver for 3ds to
do the same. That cards are full of ASIC custom processors and TI graphics
processors, all working together.
Ana
>> MGA 3D in ACAD for a while
Ana,
Yea, I know … its pretty nice. As I understand it, the ADI interface in
3DSr2 was pretty fundumental .. that's why noone could much to speed things up
in the ADI driver (noone = Panacea & Vibrant). I think (but not sure) that YG
has expanded the ADI protocal for allow for more access and "messing around" to
the interface by ADI developers. If not, I wouldn't be supprised if Matrox
writes an "pop-up window" allowing realtime shading for preview.
I bet they have something soon after r3 ships.
Ang
After that, I hope lower prices (I know that there are "low cost" MGA boards,
but the realtime gouraud one…he! that's another story 🙂
Ana
All I can say is that I have been VERY happy with my ViperVLB since buying it
just after release. No problems, and very fast.
-Alan Iglesias
I have been using a Viper for about 5 months now and I do have some
complaints. My first problem was getting a motherboard that would work with
the Viper and an Ultrastor 34f VLB SCSI controller. It appears that just
because the components are Vesa LB compliant does not mean that the hardware
will work together. After 3 motherboard changes I ended up with a NICE 486-66
(VLB, EISA,ISA). It uses a HINT chipset and supports 128 megs ram and 1meg
cache.
This setup is working great with 32 megs ram and 512k cache, and it is really
fast, (it's never fast enough). The other complaint is about the Windows and
ADI drivers. The supplied drivers didn't function correctly. I ended up
downloading new ADI drivers for 3DS. I still have problems with the Windows
drivers causing protection exception errors when viewing .flc files with AAWIN
or AAPLAYW. If it were not for the drivers this would be one of my top choices
for a new card. The P9000 chip is very fast. I am looking at Matrox and
Hercules for my next card.
My 2 cents worth,
Scott Higgins
Scott–
Try downloading the new 1.05 drivers. I just installed them yesterday and
Diamond appears to have solved all of the problems that I've seen to date (and
there were plenty). Based on my experience with their beta version, I believe
you'll find the AAWIN problems will be solved as well.
Best of luck.
Jerry
Thanks to all! I pass on your thoughts …
Bill