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Almost Everything You Need to Know About Your
Packard Bell Computer
Diamond Stealth II S220
Part 2
These pages are about the Diamond Stealth II S220 which I installed
on my system, it is divided into 3 sections because it is heavy on the
graphics. Since I can not write about video improvements without
showing pictures.
3D Performance -
The 3D acceleration is the best part of this card for you gamers.
I have been playing Tomb Raider for months with the Cirrus Logic 5430/40
video, which would handle all the 3D through the software.
But once I tried Tomb Raider with the Rendition patch I saw dramatic improvements.
The patch allows all the 3D to be handled through the hardware. It
is like a whole new game, I get to see things in the game I did not see
before. Unfortunatly I could not figure out how to get screen shots
of tomb raider to show you the difference.
In order to show you the difference I used the demo game Terracide to
demenstrate the differences. Click on the pictures below to get a
better view. Remember that all four of these pictures were from the
Stealth II S220, if I was to show you the software accelarated 3D on the
cirrus logic I am sure the picture would not be as good as the one below.
Also my original Cirrus Logic video was not capable of 3D via hardware.
Hardware vrs
Software 3D Acceleration
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| Software 3D |
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Hardware 3D |
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800 X 600 75Mhz Refreshrate
The above picture were from the demo Teracide that is included with
the Stealth II S220. Both the software and hardware 3D acceleration
were done on the Stealth II S220. If I did the software accelaration
on my cirrus logic chip I am sure the graphics would be worse. Another
benifit of the hardware acceleration yhat can not be seen in the picture
is the speed of the game. The harware acceleration was the game play
was smooth and fast. In the software accelearated version the play
was slower and jerky, I also think the software accelarated version was
darker. You really need to experience this for your self, I am impressed
at the performance gain.
This promise of radical 3D gamining is delivered through the 3D feature
set.
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The Stealth II S220 has a
Compleate 3D Feature Set |
Gouard Shading
Textured Mapping
Perspective Correction
Bilinear Filtering
Mip Mapping
Transparency
Fogging
Hardware Triangle Setup
Alpha Blending
Anti-aliasing
Z-buffering (16 bpz) |
What all this means is that the hardware accelerated anti-aliasing,
gouard shading and Bilinear Filtering will remove the jaggy edges and blocky
graphics. The transparency, texture mapping and alpha blending are
what are said to provide the true 3D immersion and realistic background.
The Stealth II S220 is also optimized for RRedLine, Speedy 3D and Direct3D
games. See any of the links in my Related
Links Section to get more info on what games are supported and where
to get patches for the games when you need them.
Overclocking -
Game Sampler -
Well unfortunatly the Stealth II S220 does not come with any full games,
but the plus side is that saves you money and you are not stuck with any
games you do not like. There is a nice selection of games so you
can see what the Stealth II S220 can do. The Diamond CD sampler also
has a nice interface that tell you more about Diamond, their products and
lets you play or instal the demos.
Included are:
Go back to Part 1
Go on to Part 3
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