Windows 95 (2.24)

Name

• Diamond Viper Windows 95 Display Driver, Ver 2.24, 21 March 1997

Download driver(s) from:

• All Diamond Viper drivers
• Viper VLB
• Viper PCI
• Viper SE
• Viper Pro Video

Initial Notes

• I no longer own a Diamond Viper, so if anyone has had any experiences with the new drivers, let me know via email.

Other People's Experiences

• Robert Wagner: "Diamond has released the 2.24 version win95 driver. It is based on the Weitek 2.23 (They even left the CPLX to WeitekPower instead of changing it to DiamondViper like 2.14). It seems to be a bit quicker than 2.24 - videos run quite a bit smoother. Also a few bugs have been fixed (on my machine, 2.23 would take awhile to load up for some strange reason)"
• Eric McClatchie: "The new Viper 2.24 Drivers are much better than the older drivers (Diamond or Weitek). The performance has greatly improved, and the bugs are few. The only problem I have encounter, with these new drivers, is with the Microsoft Works application, the "Pattern Blt's" option of these drivers needed to be disbled. Also, the drivers installed easily."
• Robert Wagner: Here is a rundown of my experiences with 2.24:
  1. Certain DirectDraw games (Namely Winquake) function properly. With 2.23, winquake would crash.
  2. No more missing scrollbar arrows. With 2.14 and 2.23, scrollbar arrows, scrollbar buttons, and even the minimize/maximize buttons would be messed up.
  3. Bug: When returning from a full-screen dos box or using alt-tab to switch, the display becomes corrupted. Sometimes it will fix itself after several seconds, sometimes it would not and I would have to shutdown.
  4. My biggest complaint with the Viper drivers is the lack of working low resolution VESA 2.0 256 colour modes. For some reason the driver can do 320x240, 400x300, etc in 16bit+ modes, but not in 8bit mode. What is up, Weitek and Diamond?
  5. The speed is still not as good as in NT4. The openGL screen savers run MUCH faster in NT4 than in Win95 sr2. Also, the NT driver has a full-screen 320x240x8bit accellerated mode, which is perfect to run winquake in. The 95 driver still does not have anything similar. The WinNT4 driver also does not exhibit the bug when switching from full screen dos mode.
  6. Although not perfect, the new 2.24 drivers are much faster. My p133 with the 2.24 drivers is on par or faster than a friend's 6x86 p150+ with stealth64 vram (he does have older drivers). However, his card's DOS performance is many times better than mine. (A 16bit ISA vga card I have lying around is faster than my viper in DOS) But then, no one uses DOS much anyway.