1999 GPU Upgrade: Diamond S3 Savage4 Pro+

Upgrading a late 90s Windows 98 computer setup with a Diamond Stealth III S540 graphics card! Mm, S3TC. Installation, setup, and testing it out with Midtown Madness, Unreal Tournament, Max Payne.

Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And todays 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 holy crap that has twice the memory of my Voodoo 3! And it can also do things like 32-bit textures and S3 Texture Compression so in some ways I was seriously like, lusting after this thing. And in other ways I’m like nah I’m rather happy with my Voodoo 3. I’ve always wanted to go back and take a look at the Stealth III S540 for myself since back then it was only ever at a friend’s house. 

But yeah for the $130 that this cost at the time, I mean, this was pretty awesome. It had support for the larger 2048x2048 textures, 32-bit color depth instead of just 16-bit in games, OpenGL, Direct3D, and the Savage 4 mode if your games supported that. But yeah I got this one new-old-stock. I saw it a couple years ago on eBay and just had to pick it up. So let’s open this thing up and see what you get inside. I’ve been curious to dive into this thing again for a long time I haven’t used one in probably 17 years. So, inside the box you get another box, and inside that box you get a bunch of little boxes. 

They’re kind of just like folded over bits of cardboard that you would think there’d be some other stuff under there -- some adapters or cables or something, but nope. Yeah, you get the driver disk from Diamond here. And a lot of companies made these things, just all sorts of companies manufactured their own using this chipset. And you also get the graphics installation guide here which is not much. You literally get seven pages just telling you how to install crap and then the rest of it’s in a bunch of other languages so it’s just like yeah install the drivers, you moron. And finally, mmm the main event. Still wrapped up in its anti-static bag here is the video card itself.

And it’s a pretty simple-looking thing, just some chips for memory and controllers, and... I don’t know what else. I’m just making crap up at this point because I am not an expert on graphics card chips and what they all do. But you can see that the entire board is not populated, they just used the same ones for different models. There was an AGP one and then there was an extreme one and all sorts of other things. The main event though is the chipset itself: the Savage 4 Pro Plus under this little heat sink. Not a whole lot going on and really who cares because the software and the games and stuff, that is what’s gonna be important.

 So let’s go ahead and get this thing installed, and for this event I have chosen my Packard Bell Multimedia 955 that I restored here on LGR not too long ago specifically for this kind of purpose. it’s just a 333MHz AMD K6-2 based system, and other than upgrading it to Windows 98SE and a Creative DVD-ROM drive with an MPEG-2 card I haven’t done much to it. So let’s just get it open once again and look inside at the lovely cable management from late 90s Packard Bell, mm. And as you can see I only have two PCI slots in here and they’re both filled up. One with that MPEG-2 card and the other with an Ethernet card. So I’m going to take out the Ethernet, I’m not using that at the moment. 

And you know, really I don’t necessarily need the MPEG-2 card either since this Diamond card can do the MPEG-2 compression for the DVDs. But whatever, gonna leave it in there for now and just get the card installed in that slot that was once taken up by the Ethernet card. And while this Stealth III did not require a pass-through, that MPEG card does. And that was for the DVD-ROM that I did an upgrade video on a while back. So it has this little pass-through cable that goes from the card, that is MPEG-2 compression, to the graphics card that were now installing here. All right time to start her up and see what happens!

Cool! And that is a good sign there, the Stealth III S540 logo -- well, the information pops up there before the BIOS and everything seems to be just fine! So let’s go ahead and start up the driver installation process. And yep simple enough it’s just your standard driver install for Windows 98SE. And it sees it just fine from the software on the disk. It restarts and... nothing happens. Yeah it just completely froze, so that’s fun. Did a few more restarts and tried the drivers again, it still froze. Every time it tried to start Windows. So I thought ok maybe its conflicting with the MPEG-2 card or something, I don’t know maybe it’s an easy fix like that. 

So I just ripped that thing out and started it up again, and once again nope. Nothing whatsoever just refuses to start. So I booted it up into safe mode and ripped out all the drivers and reinstalled them from there and made sure that nothing was conflicting and you know, all the normal troubleshooting crap. Restarted it and dang it once again, nothing whatsoever. It just starts, installs the stuff that it needs to, and nothing. So I was all ok maybe it’s the drivers themselves, so I downloaded some other ones and tried those and nope. It freezes in pretty much the same spot. And at this point I am getting thoroughly frustrated. And you know, who knows what it is, there’s no way to actually like, disable the integrated video chip that was in the computer. It’s an ATI Rage 2C. 

I tried messing around with stuff in the BIOS, I tried disabling it in Windows, I tried everything that I think of that would possibly work. And while none of it did... in fact, the only way I could get it to boot again was taking out the Stealth III entirely, so that totally defeats the point. Yep screw this Packard Hell. I can see why this little sticker was on the front there, the power on and off. Yeah you’re gonna need to use that a lot because this thing fringing sucks. I knew it sucked that’s why I wanted to upgrade it with this card, so you could see the dramatic difference. But it sucked a little too much! 

So what I’m gonna do is move on to my tried and true. Windows 98 PC that I threw together with random parts. It’s got an AMD Athlon 750 megahertz, pretty much the equivalent of like a Pentium 3 800MHz. Which would have been quite high-end when this card came out but still appropriate for when I played with it back in the early 2000s. And yeah this time around drivers, software, everything installed perfectly first time, so screw that Packard Bell. Well almost everything was perfect, they popped up this Diamond registration with this really dramatic music. And yeah you can’t actually exit out of this, you have to start it and then cancel it if you don’t want to register. Which I don’t because who cares. And then immediately I noticed that it also installed this obnoxious pop-up menu. 

It changed the right-click menu entirely and then also the Start Menu was just popping up all over the place with left click. What’s the point of that?! So I went and disabled that immediately, the stupid Diamond tools that it installed are really obnoxious. There’s also some useful stuff with their In Control Tools 99. Like the graphics properties you can go and change the color correction as well as enable and disable some stuff for Direct3D and OpenGL, like the fog table and Sync. But yeah let’s just go ahead and get to some games, starting with Midtown Madness, which was the game that my friend upgraded his computer with this card for back in the day. And was one that I really wanted to run on my Voodoo 3, and did indeed do. But first up here let me just show you how it looked if you didn’t have any of these cards installed at all. No 3D accelerator, this is what you’ve got. 

So it was just a 2D software renderer that was using your computers CPU and your 2D chipset, or whatever you had installed on your computer for graphics. And here you go! Admittedly not the very worst I’ve ever seen in this case because it is a fast CPU. So it could do some good software rendering. But it is absolutely night and day 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 others it’s just fantastic. Seriously an absolute crazy difference. Ah and you know the higher resolution and better frame rate as well, this is running an 800x600. I’m not sure if it’s in 32-bit color in this case. I’m not entirely sure if the game even supported it, I don’t remember seeing that as an option. But yeah it just looks fringing great. 

Another thing that I was really curious to check is to see what the comparison would be like between the Voodoo 3. I had a Voodoo 3 2000 back in the day. Because I always remember it looking just a little bit better on the Stealth and it seems that I was right! Like, my memory wasn’t actually failing me this time. It’s not a massive difference but I do see greater color depth and sharper textures all around. I do think that the smoke behind the car coming up from the tires and whatnot looks a little smoother on the Voodoo 3 but like, overall it just looks much better to my eyes on this Savage 4 Pro Plus. And yeah this was one of those experiences that like, while I couldn’t prove it at the time... like we never put our computers side-by-side or did any crazy benchmarking or direct image comparisons like you can do now with video capture and all that stuff...

I always thought that it looked a little bit better on my friends computer than it did on mine. It certainly ran better because he had a faster CPU than I did, I was running on a 233MHz K6. But like, just visually I thought it looked better. I mean to my eyes it does. So it’s really cool to be able to see this again and just not like, rely on 17 year old memories. This is how I remember playing Midtown Madness a lot, I played it a bunch at their house and this was one reason why: this card was awesome for this game. Another game that the S3 cards of this era were really good with is Unreal Tournament, specifically the Game of the Year Edition. Because as you can see it does directly support the S3 Savage 4 and many other things, but in particular when you installed disc 2 of the GOTYE here you could choose to include the high-res compressed textures. 

This was like 200 megabytes more of the S3TC format textures, and you specifically needed one of these kind of cards in order to get it working, at least at the time. And then yeah, once you started it up you would choose this S3 MeTaL for Windows. Hehehe, metal. I wish there were more graphics options today called METAL. But yeah let’s just go through the fly-through here from the introduction of the game. And I mean it’s not a huge, massive difference right here. 

It is running in 32-bit color so you get better representation of things like grays and blacks and all those kind of darker colors. Whereas on the Voodoo 3, which could only do 16-bit color, everything just looked a little more green and got like, more banding and stuff in between the color ranges. It just didn’t look quite as nice, but honestly the color depth wasn’t a huge deal to me at the time. I really didn’t even notice until years later when I became aware of that. What make a massive difference though, and I was super envious of, was the S3 Texture Compression just look at this direct side by side right here.

Like this is just your normal, you know Voodoo 3 or Direct 3D mode right here, and then you go to this, holy crap! It’s like a generation ahead! Look at that again I mean, it’s just muddied regular kind of late nineties textures... to this right here, it looks fantastic. And if you can see the average frame rate up there it runs better too in the S3 mode. Now, not every single texture in the game looks better, but most of them do. And admittedly it’s not something you’re gonna notice if you’re just playing the game because its super-fast-paced and all that kind of stuff. 

Like you know, you get to playing it who cares, everything’s moving around so quickly you’re not gonna look at the wall textures. But I was a burgeoning graphic snob at the time so I was looking at wall textures. You know I’d get games specifically to benchmark them between me and my friends different graphics chipsets. I had the Voodoo 3, friend had the S4, another one had a Matron Millennium something or other. You know it was all sorts of different things we were trying out, and it was just that golden era of being able to play around with different graphics chipsets and see which ones did which. 

Because like everybody had their own exclusive modes, and then as OpenGL and Direct3D started to take off and more and more games were using those and they worked across all cards, some ended up coming out on top and had better support for Direct3D or OpenGL. And then others were kind of left behind because they weren’t necessarily made for that, and they were more geared towards like, their own proprietary formats or APIs. You know it was just a weird, fun time, and also frustrating because like, you could buy a card and then six months later nobody was supporting it anymore. 

Good stuff. And then finally I wanted to try out Max Payne here from 2001 because I thought that maybe this would push the card a little bit. And well, yeah, it pushed it all right, look at the introduction here! I mean it looks kind of awesome but that’s not that’s not how it’s supposed to look. That New York snowstorm has completely changed the atmosphere, hehehe. Uhh yeah that’s how it’s supposed to look running on my Voodoo 3. You know I’m surprised my Voodoo 3 -- this is a 3000 that I’m running it on here but yeah --- I was surprised that it worked just fine with it.

16-bit colures of course, not 32-bit, but hey whatever man at least runs it. And yeah the actual gameplay was okay. Just seemed to be that introduction sequence that had real problems with the colors and textures. But it’s a slideshow, or

it’s getting to that territory. It’s just not handling this game very well at all. Again it’s got 32-bit textures which is kind of cool, but swapping over to the Voodoo 3 here -- even with the 16-bit textures and stuff it just runs way better. Granted, again this is the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP that I’m using here, so it does have a little bit of a leg up on the Savage 4 Pro Plus just in terms of a little bit more horsepower. You know, you have the AGP bus and a higher RAMDAC and stuff like that but yeah. 

I was really surprised at how badly this. Savage 4 handled Max Payne, even with the newest drivers that I could find and the Max Payne patch updates and stuff like that, it just didn’t handle it very well at all. But yeah that’s about it for this particular video on the Diamond Stealth III S540: a card that I have some fond memories of using even though I never actually owned one, or used one in one of my own machines, until this very video.

And would I recommend it for one of your Windows 98 machines? Absolutely, in certain cases and if you were to get the higher tier like, Extreme AGP version. But yeah, for the games that work really well with it I mean, it works really well. And looked better, I think, than a lot of its competition from the time period. However the big reason that I wasn’t too bummed about not having this back in the day was because it didn’t do Glide mode games. 

And in the late 90s there were just a ton of games that did that Glide API. The 3Dfx mode was something that I really wanted because certain games -- like I remembered Nuclear Strike I believe -- it just did way better with a Glide mode card and it looked kind of like garbage in Direct3D. Maybe I’m not remembering that correctly, I haven’t played in years, but there were certain games that just looked better in Glide mode or that was the only 3D-accelerated mode that they supported. And Direct3D and OpenGL wasn’t quite a thing on certain games at that point.

Yeah there weren’t a ton of games that were like that, but those few that did it I was happy to have that extra bit of support. But yeah I just have fun comparing late 90s graphics cards and 3D accelerators that are kind of from that era. I don’t know, it’s just really fun to me and I think it always will be. So if you enjoyed this do stick around -- I do this kind of thing every so often and all sorts of other stuff every Monday and Friday here on LGR. And as always thank you very much for watching!

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