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Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today's particular thing is the Diamond Stealth III S540 graphics card from 1999.

This is the PCI 32 megabyte version of the S3 Savage 4 Pro Plus graphics accelerator that was quite a thing at the time period. I was rather envious of this card back then, because a friend of mine had gotten one and I was like ...

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings and welcome to an LGR thing!And today's particular thing is theDiamond Stealth III S540 graphics cardfrom 1999. This is the PCI 32 megabyteversion of the S3 Savage 4 Pro Plusgraphics accelerator that was quite athing at the time period. I was ratherenvious of this card back then, because afriend of mine had gotten one and I waslike \"holy crap that has twice the memoryof my Voodoo 3!\" And it can also do thingslike 32-bit textures and S3 TextureCompression so in some ways I wasseriously like, lusting after this thing.And in other ways I'm like \"nah I'mrather happy with my Voodoo 3.\" I'vealways wanted to go back and take a lookat the Stealth III S540 for myself sinceback then it was only ever at a friend'shouse. But yeah for the $130 that thiscost at the time, I mean, this was prettyawesome. It had support for the larger2048x2048 textures, 32-bit color depthinstead of just 16-bit in games, OpenGL,Direct3D, and the Savage 4 mode if your games supported that. But yeah I got this onenew-old-stock. I saw it a couple yearsago on eBay and just had to pick it up.So let's open this thing up and see whatyou get inside. I've been curious to diveinto this thing again for a long time Ihaven't used one in probably 17 years. So,inside the box you get another box, andinside that box you get a bunch oflittle boxes. They're kind of just likefolded over bits of cardboard that youwould think there'd be some other stuffunder there -- some adapters or cables orsomething, but nope. Yeah, you get thedriver disk from Diamond here. And alot of companies made these things, justall sorts of companies manufacturedtheir own using this chipset. And youalso get the graphics installation guidehere which is not much. You literally getseven pages just telling you how toinstall crap and then the rest of its ina bunch of other languages so it's justlike \"yeah install the drivers, you moron.\"And finally, mmm the main event. Stillwrapped up in its anti-static bag here isthe video card itself.And it's a pretty simple-looking thing,just some chips for memoryand controllers, and... I don't know whatelse. I'm just making crap up at thispoint because I am not an expert ongraphics card chips and what they all do.But you can see that the entire board isnot populated, they just used the sameones for different models. There was anAGP one and then there was an extremeone and all sorts of other things. Themain event though is the chipset itself:the Savage 4 Pro Plus under thislittle heatsink. Not a whole lot going onand really who cares because thesoftware and the games and stuff, that iswhat's gonna be important. So let's goahead and get this thing installed, andfor this event I have chosen myPackard Bell Multimedia 955 that Irestored here on LGR not too long agospecifically for this kind of purpose.it's just a 333MHz AMD K6-2 based system, and other thanupgrading it to Windows 98SE and aCreative DVD-ROM drive with an MPEG-2card I haven't done much to it. So let'sjust get it open once again and lookinside at the lovely cable managementfrom late 90s Packard Bell, mm. And asyou can see I only have two PCI slots inhere and they're both filled up. One withthat MPEG-2 card and the other with anethernet card. So I'm going to take outthe ethernet, I'm not using that at themoment. And you know, really I don'tnecessarily need the MPEG-2 cardeither since this Diamond card can dothe MPEG-2 compression for theDVDs. But whatever, gonna leave itin there for now and just get the cardinstalled in that slot that was oncetaken up by the ethernet card. And whilethis Stealth III did not require a passthrough,that MPEG card does. And thatwas for the DVD-ROM that I did anupgrade video on a while back. So it hasthis little passthrough cable that goesfrom the card, that is MPEG-2compression, to the graphics card thatwe're now installing here.All right time to start her up and seewhat happens!*computer fans and beeping noises*Cool! And that is a good sign there,the Stealth III S540 logo -- well, theinformation pops up there before theBIOS and everything seems to be justfine! So let's go ahead and start up thedriver installation process. And yepsimple enough it's just your standarddriver install for Windows 98SE. And itsees it just fine from the software onthe disk. It restarts and... nothing happens.*nervous chuckle*Yeah it just completely froze, so that'sfun. Did a few more restarts and tried thedrivers again, it still froze. Every timeit tried to start Windows. So I thought\"ok maybe it's conflicting with the MPEG-2 card or something,\" I don't knowmaybe it's an easy fix like that. So I justripped that thing out and started it upagain, and once again nope. Nothing whatsoever just refuses to start. So Ibooted it up into safe mode and rippedout all the drivers and reinstalled themfrom there and made sure that nothingwas conflicting and you know, all thenormal troubleshooting crap. Restarted itand dang it once again, nothingwhatsoever. It just starts, installs thestuff that it needs to, and nothing.So I was all \"ok maybe it's the drivers themselves,\" so I downloaded some other ones and triedthose and nope. It freezes in pretty muchthe same spot. And at this point I amgetting thoroughly frustrated. And youknow, who knows what it is, there's no wayto actually like, disable the integratedvideo chip that was in the computer. It'san ATI Rage 2C. I tried messingaround with stuff in the BIOS, I trieddisabling it in Windows, I triedeverything that I think of that wouldpossibly work. And while none of it did...in fact, the only way I could get it toboot again was taking out the Stealth IIIentirely, so that totally defeats thepoint. Yep screw this \"Packard Hell.\" I cansee why this little sticker was on thefront there, the \"power on and off.\"Yeah you're gonna need to use that a lotbecause this thing friggin sucks.I knew it sucked that's why I wanted toupgrade it with this card, so you couldsee the dramatic difference. But itsucked a little too much! So what I'mgonna do is move on to my tried and trueWindows 98 PC that I threw togetherwith random parts. It's got an AMD Athlong750 megahertz, pretty much the equivalentof like a Pentium 3 800MHz. Whichwould have been quite high-end when thiscard came out but still appropriate forwhen I played with it back in the early2000s. And yeah this time around drivers,software, everything installed perfectlyfirst time, so screw that Packard Bell.Well almost everything was perfect, theypopped up this Diamond registration withthis really dramatic music.And yeah you can't actually exit out of this, you haveto start it and then cancel it if youdon't want to register. Which I don'tbecause who cares. And then immediately I noticed that it also installed thisobnoxious pop-up menu. It changed theright-click menu entirely and then alsothe Start Menu was just popping up allover the place with left click. What'sthe point of that?! So I went and disabledthat immediately, the stupid Diamondtools that it installed are reallyobnoxious. There's also some useful stuffwith their In Control Tools '99. Likethe graphics properties you can go andchange the color correction as well asenable and disable some stuff forDirect3D and OpenGL, like the fog tableand VSync. But yeah let's just go aheadand get to some games, starting withMidtown Madness, which was the game thatmy friend upgraded his computer withthis card for back in the day. And wasone that I really wanted to run on myVoodoo 3, and did indeed do. But first uphere let me just show you how it lookedif you didn't have any of these cardsinstalled at all. No 3D accelerator, this is what you've got. Soit was just a 2D software renderer thatwas using your computer's CPU and your2D chipset, or whatever you hadinstalled on your computer for graphics.And here you go!Admittedly not the very worst I've everseen in this case because it is a fastCPU. So it could do some good softwarerendering. But it is absolutely night andday compared to the S3 Savage 4 Pro Plus,holy crap. Better textures all around,lighting, cloud shadows, car reflections,skid marks, smoke from the tires,environmental effects like fog and othersit's just fantastic. Seriously an absolute crazydifference. Ah and you know the higherresolution and better frame rate as well,this is running an 800x600. I'm notsure if it's in 32-bit color in thiscase. I'm not entirely sure if the gameeven supported it, I don't remember seeingthat as an option. But yeah it just looksfriggin great. Another thing that I wasreally curious to check is to see whatthe comparison would be like between theVoodoo 3. I had a Voodoo 3 2000 back in the day. Because I always remember it lookingjust a little bit better on the Stealthand it seems that I was right! Like, mymemory wasn't actually failing me thistime. It's not a massive difference but Ido see greater color depth and sharpertextures all around. I do think that thesmoke behind the car coming up from thetires and whatnotlooks a little smoother on the Voodoo 3but like, overall it just looks muchbetter to my eyes on this Savage 4Pro Plus. And yeah this was one of thoseexperiences that like, while I couldn'tprove it at the time... like we never putour computers side-by-side or did anycrazy benchmarking or direct imagecomparisons like you can do now withvideo capture and all that stuff...I always thought that it looked a littlebit better on my friend's computer thanit did on mine. It certainly ran betterbecause he had a faster CPU than I did, Iwas running on a 233MHz K6. Butlike, just visually I thought it lookedbetter. I mean to my eyes it does. So it'sreally cool to be able to see this againand just not like, rely on 17 year oldmemories. This is how I remember playingMidtown Madness a lot, I played it abunch at their house and this was onereason why: this card was awesome forthis game.Another game that the S3 cards of thisera we're really good with is UnrealTournament, specifically the Game of theYear Edition. Because as you can see itdoes directly support the S3 Savage 4and many many other things, but inparticular when you installed disc 2 ofthe GOTYE here you could choose toinclude the high-res compressed textures.This was like 200 megabytes more of theS3TC format textures, and youspecifically needed one of these kind ofcards in order to get it working, atleast at the time. And then yeah, once youstarted it up you would choose this S3MeTaL for Windows. Hehehe, \"metal.\" I wish therewere more graphics options today calledMETAL. But yeah let's just gothrough the fly-through here from theintroduction of the game. And I mean it'snot a huge, massive difference right here.It is running in 32-bit color so you getbetter representation of things likegrays and blacks and all those kind ofdarker colors. Whereas on the Voodoo 3,which could only do 16-bit color,everything just looked a little moregreen and got like, more banding andstuff in between the color ranges. Itjust didn't look quite as nice, buthonestly the color depth wasn't a hugedeal to me at the time. I really didn'teven notice until years later when Ibecame aware of that. What *did* make amassive difference though, and I wassuper envious of, was the S3 TextureCompression just look at thisdirect side by side right here.Like this is just your normal, you know Voodoo 3 or Direct 3D mode right here, and thenyou go to this, holy crap! It's like ageneration ahead! Look at that again Imean, it's just muddied regular kind oflate nineties textures... to this righthere, it looks fantastic. And if you cansee the average frame rate up there itruns better too in the S3 mode. Now, notevery single texture in the game looksbetter, but most of them do. Andadmittedly it's not something you'regonna notice if you're just playing thegame because it's super fast-paced andall that kind of stuff. Like you know,you get to playing it who cares,everything's moving around so quicklyyou're not gonna look at the walltextures. But I was a burgeoning graphicsnob at the time so *I* was looking atwall textures. You know I'd get gamesspecifically to benchmark them betweenme and my friends' different graphicschipsets. I had the Voodoo 3, friendhad the S4, another one had a MatroxMillennium something or other. You knowit was all sorts of different things wewere trying out, and it was just thatgolden era of being able to play aroundwith different graphics chipsets and seewhich ones did which.Because likeeverybody had their own exclusive modes,and then as OpenGL and Direct3D startedto take off and more and more games wereusing those and they worked across allcards, some ended up coming out on topand had better support for Direct3D orOpenGL. And then others were kind of leftbehind because they weren't necessarilymade for that, and they were more gearedtowards like, their own proprietaryformats or APIs. You knowit was just a weird, fun time, and alsofrustrating because like, you could buy acard and then six months later nobodywas supporting it anymore. Good stuff. Andthen finally I wanted to try out MaxPayne here from 2001 because I thoughtthat maybe this would push the card alittle bit. And well, yeah, it pushed itall right, look at the introduction here! Imean it looks kind of awesome but that'snot that's not how it's supposed to look.That New York snowstorm has completelychanged the atmosphere, hehehe. Uhh yeah that's how it's supposed to lookrunning on my Voodoo 3. You know I'm surprised my Voodoo 3 --this is a 3000 that I'mrunning it on here but yeah --- I wassurprised that it worked just fine withit.16-bit colours of course, not 32-bit, buthey whatever man at least runs it. Andyeah the actual gameplay was okay. Justseemed to be that introduction sequencethat had real problems with the colorsand textures. But it's a slideshow, orit's getting to that territory. It's justnot handling this game very well at all.Again it's got 32-bit textures which iskind of cool, but swapping over to theVoodoo 3 here -- even with the 16-bittextures and stuff it just runs waybetter. Granted, again this is the Voodoo3 3000 AGP that I'm using here, so itdoes have a little bit of a leg up onthe Savage 4 Pro Plus just in terms of alittle bit more horsepower. You know, youhave the AGP bus and a higher RAMDACand stuff like that but yeah. I wasreally surprised at how badly thisSavage 4 handled Max Payne, even with the newest drivers that I could find and theMax Payne patch updates and stuff likethat, it just didn't handle it very wellat all. But yeah that's about it for thisparticular video on the Diamond Stealth IIIS540: a card that I have some fondmemories of using even though I neveractually owned one, or used one in one ofmy own machines, until this very video.And would I recommend it for one of yourWindows 98 machines? Absolutely, incertain cases and if you were to get thehigher tier like, \"Extreme AGP\" version. Butyeah, for the games that work really wellwith it I mean, it works really well. Andlooked better, I think, than a lot of itscompetition from the time period. Howeverthe big reason that I wasn't too bummedabout not havingthis back in the day was because itdidn't do Glide mode games. And in thelate 90s there were just a ton of gamesthat did that Glide API. The 3Dfx modewas something that I really wantedbecause certain games -- like I rememberedNuclear Strike I believe -- it just did waybetter with a Glide mode card and itlooked kind of like garbage in Direct3D.Maybe I'm not remembering that correctly,I haven't played in years, but there werecertain games that just looked better inGlide mode or that was the only 3D-accelerated mode that they supported. AndDirect3D and OpenGL wasn't quitea thing on certain games at that point.Yeah there weren't a ton of games thatwere like that, but those few that did itI was happy to have that extra bit ofsupport. But yeah I just have funcomparing late 90s graphics cardsand 3D accelerators that are kind offrom that era. I don't know, it's justreally fun to me and I think it alwayswill be. So if you enjoyed this do stickaround -- I do this kind of thing every sooften and all sorts of other stuff everyMonday and Friday here on LGR. And asalways thank you very much for watching!\n"