If you think that the Savage4 can speed up your 166Mhz like a 400Mhz, then you are wrong. The Savage4 is still dependent on the CPU and unless you have a 1000Mhz you will not get the full performance. And for the card to perform at its max well you'll need a Pentium 3 or above to prevent any "CPU-Limiting". Supposing a Quake III game will go at a maximum of 20-25fps on a Pentium I, but on a PIII or K7 it will be excellent 70>fps.
Let's start with the 2D acceleration. It does provides excellent 2D acceleration when V-Sync is off because of its 300Mhz DAC.
My Savage4 is clocked at two different rates 114.5 and 109.8Mhz. I tried to overclock it to 130.7 and 125.3Mhz and it worked fine. When I put some extra 5Mhz to it, it crashed, most probably due to overheating. But at 140, it simply crashes in Windows without any need for a test. Click here to find out about my Savage4 and its problem.
The worst part of the Savage cards are the drivers. The only stable drivers you will get are the ones which came with the package. Other newer drivers, will mostly crash your system when a 3D game is run. This could be the problem with my card only, I am not sure. Now S3 has stopped making new drivers for the Savage4 and Savage2000. What a pity?
Also, with my Savage4, my package drivers did NOT support anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing, but my card did (I think). If you plan you buy the Savage4, I recommend that you contact the card manufacturer first and check whether they reply or not. Creative, Diamond are the okay till now. I also learnt that the Savage4 hardware is not really Environmental Bump Mapping compatible....I am still looking for driver version 8.09.02 and 8.06.01, they have support for Anisotropic filtering.
The Savage4 is an average card if you dont care for new drivers, and just want to play games the way they are. Some people consider it to be an excellent card for value. One person claimed that the card reached upto 1000fps in Quake 2 when facing the floor!!!!(V-sync off/S3TC on)....I also reached 3000+ fps in Unreal, the game was very slow at that, most probably it was a bug. With Wintune98, I get some 150+ OpenGL pixels per second and the test cube doesnt even move, but when I try the newer versions of OpenGL then I get some reasonable 33-44 OpenGL pixels/sec. Others say that it can hardly reach 1fps in 3D Mark 2000. It all depends on the machine and chipset (ALi,SiS) your using.
My card
problem has been solved. It is discussed here.
It crashes no more in D3D, but Unreal Tournament S3TC mode is still buggy.