>Is the Diamond Viper V330 video card the best card for games like
>Hexen II and Grand Prix 2 ?
Depends - do you want to play 3D accel or not. GP2 is not accelerated,
but it should run OK on the Riva (V330) chipset. Hexen II is OpenGL
accelerated, so you can run it on the Riva but _only_ under Windows NT
at present as there are no OpenGL drivers for W95. If you all you want
to do is play games then add a 3Dfx card to your current system. GP2
will still run on your existing card & anything OpenGL,D3D or Glide
will run on the 3Dfx. Incidentally the 3Dfx will run OpenGl faster too
at present.
As an aside to this the Riva 128 based boards - both the Diamond & STB
are not very mature at present. I would give it a month or so to see
what happens.
To answer your question:- Is the V330 the best card to play games on?
Well, no and perhaps - No if you don't pair it with a 3Dfx board &
'perhaps' if you do!
A number of people who have bought STB v128 (Riva based) have come to
the conclusion that the 3Dfx boards are still the best 3D ***
boards at present. A number of these people have both.
I saw a post earlier where you asked which is the best board for N2 &
GP2. You will have to make a decision here - N2 is accelerated, but
_only_ on rendition verite boards. What is it you _really_ want?. Do
you want a 3D card or a 2D/3D card? Do you have a 2D card? What is it?
Do you want to play N2 above all others? Do you want to play
GLHexen2/Glquake above all others? At present you will need to come to
a decision at what you value above all others. If you go one way, you
will have N2 accelerated, & not GlHexen2 (verite - OpenGl drivers are
supposedly on the way, but they are not going to perform as well as
3Dfx). GP2 isn't really an issue - it is not accelerated, you will get
very little from card to card.
Currently there is no card that does everything well. 3Dfx has
limitations so does Riva (V330), what do you _really_ want and what
can you live without?
Dave
