Price: $129.99 Retail, $99.99 after a $30 rebate

It used to be that when we thought of low-end video cards, we thought of frame rates that lurched along like Igor in the Mel Brooks classic, "Young Frankenstein." Those days may be in the past. S3 Inc. and Diamond Multimedia have merged and they seem determined to end those dark times for the low-end.

Their Savage 4 Pro powered Diamond Stealth III 540 was good enough to earn an overall score from us of eight back in May. Now they've whipped up a faster card using the Savage 4 Pro Xtreme chip, with surprisingly high 160MHz graphics clock and 166MHz memory frequency. This is a nice bump up from the regular Stealth III 540's 125MHz graphics clock and 143MHz memory frequency. The Xtreme also has an even more surprisingly low price of $99 after a $30 rebate, which is the same price as the original. We decided to put the Xtreme to the test to see how good the "low-end" has gotten.

The Xtreme has quite a complete list of specs, as you can see below. And in addition to supporting all the run-of-the-mill 3D features, it also supports S3's Texture Compression (S3TC). S3TC allows a game maker artist to fit more and larger textures into a card's video memory and thereby have more detail in a scene with less on-card memory and less speed hits from AGP memory accesses. S3TC is a great technology and was built into DirectX 6, but after a long and somewhat bumpy 18 months since its introduction, S3TC still hasn't seen the light of day in many game titles. If you are interested in reading more about S3TC, take a look at this page from our S3 Savage4 Pro Xtreme Preview.

However, texture compression in hardware is catching on. By 2000, it looks as though there will be more than a 'few' S3TC titles, with the likes of 3dfx also announcing a Hardware Texture compression part for Q1 of 2000. When Unreal Tournament ships, a second CD inside the box will contain special S3TC UT levels, which we've seen in action and quite simply put are above and beyond the visuals of any other 3D first person shooter to date. The Xtreme also sports 32MB of SDRAM, so as games come out that require more and more textures in a scene at the same time, it should have enough RAM to hold all the textures needed.