Just like the lower frequency Savage4, the Xtreme is an improvement over the original Savage Architecture in that is supports tri-linneared single-pass multi-texturing, which is going to come in handy. Quake II, Quake III: Arena and many other first person games benefit greatly in terms of frame rate. The Savage4 Xtreme can not only render in a 24-bit color depth with an 8-bit stencil buffer (for shadows) but it supports a couple of other 'image enhancing' features such as anistropic filtering (for strands of hair etc..) and trilinear filtering in a single cycle. Other effects are listed on the spec sheet such as 'hardware bump mapping' and 'full-scene anti-aliasing'. Neither of these two features is going to give results similar to Environment Bump mapping or the T-Buffer for full scene spatial anti-aliasing. In fact, the anti-aliasing is closer to edge anti-aliasing and very CPU intensive thus better turned 'off'.

The Savage4 Pro Xtreme dishes out excellent image quality, Quake III, Expendable et .al all looked the part in crystal clear 32-bit color. But obviously, the frame rates just weren't as fast as those seen on nippy but more expensive UltraTNT2. However, if you're not fussed about any of the above and just crave raw, cheap and fast 16-bit performance you can always pick up a $100 Voodoo3.

You're kidding, right? This board was one of a kind and as soon as we get more of them into the lab we'll be sure to extensively push the envelope on the Savage 4 Pro Xtreme. Sorry.

This little number is due to start shipping by September and will be available by at retail by mid-September. So those of you not yet on the 3D-card bandwagon have yet another option to consider. If $130 is 'all your momma allows you to spend' (sorry about the Full Metal Jacket line), then Diamond's Stealth III S540 Xtreme is probably going to be a quick and easy fix. With its AGP 4X compliance, 32MB and 32-bit color support it'll be just as if not more attractive to OEM system integrators to boot.

You bought a Savage4Pro+ based Diamond Stealth SIII 540 last week, didn't you? Come on own up. We're not sure if any upgrade/exchange program will be offered to existing Stealth III S540 owners. What we will say is that the benchmarks showed significant performance increases that really make 800x600x32 a very acceptable resolution as opposed to 640x480x32 for lower-clocked versions.