The above screenshots were taken with all graphics settings as high as possible (32-bit). As we can see, the image quality of the Savage 2000 pales somewhat in comparison to the GeForce. After extensive testing, we determined the cause of the image degradation to be S3TC, which is enabled by default in Quake 3.

Luckily there is a workaround.

Due to the fact that many of the source textures in Quake 3 are low resolution, compressing them results in an odd banding pattern. A quick way to fix this is to edit the q3config.cfg file located in the /baseq3 directory. By changing the entry r_ext_compress_textures "1" to "0," texture compression will be disabled.

Nothing in life is free though, and this is no exception. To get the image quality back, it's going to cost a few frames per second. We took a couple of numbers on a PIII Coppermine 600 to get some idea what would happen. At 1024x768 with all quality features set to the max, the Viper II dropped from 45.0 to 37.4 fps. Not anything painful, but the process of enabling and disabling compressed textures for those few extra frames could become tedious, which is why we have a helpful suggestion for the S3 driver team: Since InControl Tools 99 allows for tweaking individual applications, an option to disable texture compression would be a welcome addition in the OpenGL settings.