Diamond Stealth II S220 (Rendition Vérité V2100) Video Card Review

Every now and then some product comes out of left field, grabs me by my lapels, and screams “Pay attention!” The Diamond Stealth II is such a product. It uses Rendition’s new V2100 2D/3D accelerator chip, and the combination of Diamond’s driver-writing abilities coupled with the innovative architecture of the Rendition chip make for a very interesting product. Throw in 4MB of 12-nanosecond SCRAM and sell it for $99, and it moved from the “interesting” column to the “jaw lands here” column.

The card installed very smoothly, and Diamond’s by now familiar driver setup process also went smoothly. During testing, we encountered only one glitch: The CBench SVGA-graphics test crashed with a divide overflow, but we had no problems with Quake, Descent II, or Duke Nukem 3D in SVGA-graphics mode.

Using our test-bed system, a 200MHz Pentium with MMX, the WinBench 97 Business Graphics WinMarks scores were pretty good: 85.2 at 1024x768x16 and 80.7 at 800x600x32. More impressive was the Stealth’s 3D WinBench score. At 126, it was just a tad shy of Diamond’s 3DFX-based Monster 3D (which posted a 130).

Actual gameplay was pretty good, too. Direct3D games played smoothly for the most part and looked great. Flight Simulator 98 ran at a steady 18-22fps, and Moto Racer ran 25-40fps. DirectDraw performance was good, too, with both WinQuake and Descent II/95 running smoothly. SVGA-graphics scores were also quite good: 47fps for DukeBench and 16.2fps running DOS Quake’s three TimeDemo tests. While standard VGA-graphics performance in Rendition’s newest chip has improved somewhat, it was still pretty slow. We saw only 39.1fps in CBench VGA graphics and an average of 28.1fps in Quake using its DOS VGA-graphics mode.

Still, with VGA graphics increasingly becoming a moot issue, the overall performance of the Stealth II was a very pleasant surprise. It’s not just that it’s very affordable, it’s about the best $100 card I’ve ever seen.

Appeal: Gamers on a tight budget looking for a fast 3D accelerator.

Pros: Very good 3D and 2D Windows performance; good SVGA-graphics performance; very low cost.

Cons: Poor standard VGA-graphics performance.