Diamond problems and low-end video cards

[Giling, Erwin]

> >Diamond s540 Stealth III with the drivers that came
> ...
> >I remember seeing some thing about monkeys writing the 
> >drivers for my card on this mail list, so I checked that 
> 

My 2 cents:

I have major problems with VTK and the Diamond Stealth III card, to the
point of getting the "blue screen of death" under WinNT 4.0. After some
email ping-ponging to Diamond tech support I finally got a "human" email
stating:

D> Normally we recommendfor Winnt and OpenGl our Fire Series (Fire Gl1). 
D> The Stealth card is more a gaming card.

Ok, fair enough. But I don't have a Fire card. I tried a Diamond Viper V770
TNT2 based card instead. This card gives me reasonable results, except for
some strange behavior with wireframes (see my previous posting). Do not good
enough either.

In the vtkusers archive there are reports of problems with other TNT and
TNT2 cards, and also with Diamond Fire cards. So I would stay away from
Diamond alltogether, if you had the choice. This means also staying away
from the S3 savage4 based cards, since S3 and Diamond have merged.

The 3dfx cards are not useful either because 3dfx does not have a complete
ICD available. At 3dfx they must also like bananas and play games only.

It seems that 3D card companies are rushing to get the next generation of
cards out of the door before finishing the drivers of the previous
generation.

So do I really have to buy a $500+ videocard just for VTK ?? I would like to
see my VTK programs run on every computer in the department!! What are my
options??

Ok, enough for now,

Erwin G.











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