As we've seen since the introduction of the Savage4 chip five or so months ago, the featureset of the accelerator is very current. In fact, with S3 being a validation partner of Intel's for AGP 4X development you can bet that the Stealth III is ready right out of the box for the transition to Intel's Camino (820) mainboard core logic set in September of this year.

Clearly the Stealth III wasn't designed to be some kind of bargain basement video solution, the decision to include 32MB of SDRAM was a wise one that will certainly pay off for Diamond when the final sales numbers for the Stealth III are tallied a year or more from now.

A friend of Sharky Extreme's recently told us that covering the 2D quality and speed of the newer video cards was pointless since they're all showing such a strong degree of performance the past year. He's mostly right really, the last calendar year has brought with it not only the rapid acceleration of 3D graphics but very strong improvements on the 2D side of the ball as well.

2D RAMDAC controllers are rare now if they're below 250MHz, and with on card DRAM being plentiful almost every new video card can pound out 75+ Hz levels at 1600x1200x32bpp+.

No more need for a bottle of Visine by the CRT anymore, the old strained peepers aren't nearly as tired after a marathon session on the PC as they used to be.

The Stealth III doesn't match the lofty 2D quality of the Matrox G400 chip-based cards, but it does compare favorably with the nVidia TNT2 powered parts.

Likewise the Savage4 has raised the previously good level of 3D visual quality that last year's Savage3D had provided at its launch. We noticed no dithering or artifacts where there shouldn't be, even when running Star Wars: Racer or EA's Sports Car GT, both of which run at a fast pace and often produce strange results on passing textures.

Here's a Q3 Test screenshot to let you evaluate the way the card looks for yourself: