I want to thank Michael Birke and Arnold Winter for their great help on this translation !!

Diamond Viper V550 vs. ELSA Erazor II - The Test

Here it is, the first test of the Erazor II on the Internet. Initially intended only as a separate introduction, it became a comparison with the Viper V550.
Diamond told me they had no card available for testing because of lack of Viper V550 cards. However, a call from my buddy Catweazle (CompuDoc) made it possible, who told me that he had just received a Viper V550. 10 minutes later I had it, too. The Erazor II came directly from ELSA. Both AGP cards feature 16MB RAM. But first to the TNT in general.

 
The RIVA TNT

With 7,5 Million transistors it is as complex as the Pentium II processor. But you cannot see much of that on the cards. The chip is hidden behind a large cooling elements. The Erazor even has a cooling fan, which is very flat and thus cannot block other card slots.

The performance of the TNT is outstanding. It surpasses the RIVA 128 in all regards. The image quality leaves nothing to be desired. If one does not like the Dithering in Incoming under 16Bit color depth, one simply switches to 32Bit. And if you do not like the pixels at the edges of the objects you can switch on anti-aliasing or increase the resolution. And that is where the TNT excels. Resolutions of 1024x768 and higher are playable without any problem. Quake 1 and Incoming still run there with over 40 fps. Quake 2 just passes the limit with 26 fps. Well, even a 333 PII CPU has its borders.

Aside from the performance boost in all Benchmarks that the TNT has over the RIVA 128, the image quality on screen is by far better.
Just take a look at Final Reality, it just looks better. In the robot scene you will notice new mirror reflections on his back, which is already there with the RIVA 128, but you will notice it first with the TNT. With the RIVA 128 everything looks as if made from paper, while the TNT looks like real plastic or metal. All objects are drawn without any errors and are supersharp.
The TNT also offers true 16Bit colors. With the RIVA128 it was only 15Bit. But you have enough Memory and 2D performance to change the color depth to 32Bit colors. The largest 32Bit Resolution is 1900x1200. But the 250MHz RAMDAC can only produce 60 Hz at that resolution.
In contrast to the RIVA 128 which needed several tweaks by NV3Tweak to run certain games properly, the TNT runs every D3D game without tweaking without any problems (at least the games I tested).

The testing system

A Intel Pentium II with 333Mhz and an ASUS P2B Mainboard running with 128MB PC100 SDRAM was used. The system is not overclocked in any way, system and memory performance was at 66 Mhz. (Because of the possibility to easily update your system later, I highly recommend to pay a bit more for PC100 RAM if you get a faster processor later which runs with 100Mhz.)

For the test I have made a 2nd Win98 Installation with FAT32 on a separate primary partition. This was made possible by XFdisk, a freeware tool that comes with a boot manager that runs with FAT32. Both cards had the same starting conditions, but tests on my "normal" Win98 Installation showed me that this really would not have been necessary. The results were identical. I had no problems overwriting my old Erazor (RIVA 128) drivers.
Both cards were tested with the most recent drivers. I´ve also tested a newer Erazor II beta driver (0100-0012) I´ve tested
seperatly.
For better comparison I also made Benchmarks with nVidias's 0.36a Reference Drivers. All tests ran with VSYNC off.

Enough babbling, let's get on with the test.