S3 Graphics Comes out of Hiding with Chrome20 275
Steve from Hexus writes "S3 Graphics, having been quiet for a while, has today announced a new graphics solution, Chrome20, with which they intend to take some market share away from ATI and Nvidia. From the article: 'We were offered a chance for some hands on play with a mid-range Chrome20 series desktop board - the machine was loaded with over 40 top games. A quick run of Half Life2 , Far Cry , Halo and a couple of other titles demonstrated that S3G's new 90nm mainstream card was working without any visual problems and with very playable frame rates.'"
The Obligatory Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Obligatory Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe working more closely with the kernel developers, releasing the driver module as source code with the main kernel download, so it works out of the box.
Re:The Obligatory Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Hear that, S3? I know you people read Slashdot.
Obligatory Observation: SGI (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in 1995, SGI should have dumped its proprietary hardware: specialized graphics chips and MIPS. SGI should have created the following dream box: Linux + ARM + commodity graphics chips from NVIDIA, S3, Chromatics, etc.
The special sauce that greases every component is OpenGL. SGI should have leveraged its software technology and dominated the graphics market for decades to come.
Yet, no one at SGI listened.
The critics warned that x86-plus-commodity-graphics-chips would eat SGI's lunch. The critics were right.
HDMI? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I'm getting beyond tired of technology companies who, some singularly and definitely collectively, make more money than Holly-hood, err, Hollywood bending over backward to placate them. Yes, I know that the studios/**AA control the media/content for the most part but if the _major_ technology players stand up and say "Well, we control the technology everyone uses to your content and there is no other tech company(ies) large enough to challenge all of us so THIS is how we're going to play ball." then WTF would Hollywood do except try to get more laws passed? Then all the technology companies that opposed Hollywood could band together to fight that off as well - dollar for dollar and then some. What would happen to the products that those companies that stood up to Hollywood do - especially when the tech-oriented crowd started praising them to friends/family/etc? Sell multiple, multiples of items that are free of DRM and friendly to the CONSUMER? Wow, what a frigging concept! Make products friendly towards the consumer, don't treat them like a dollar with a body attached, treat fair use rights as they should be treated, don't treat the customer like a criminal from the get-go, tell the **AAs to fuck off and fight piracy where it counts (you know, those media distributors in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Russia, etc), and make millions upon millions of dollars.
Whew, I've had a very long day.. I think I need lots of sleep now. Sorry for the rant.
GP2 (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been waiting to see "coprocessor" PCI cards become popular, especially among gamers. I remember when we could buy "math coprocessors" to augment relatively slow/cheap math onboard the x86. That was before CPU manufacturing/marketing economics selected for all CPUs to have fast math sections, but with cheaper ones leaving the circuit lines "cut" to the fast part. Maybe that marketing hustle has inhibited the addition of "redundant" coprocessor chips.
GPUs are really just fast math coprocessors, optimized for graphics math and fitted with video coder chips. Gamers are the primary performancemongers and live at the bleeding edge of cranking performance. So they're the natural demanding market for pulling GPGPU products across the bleeding edge into mainstream architectures. Especially since GPGPUs aren't "Central", they're more likely to be "stackable", scalable processing units dynamically allocable for whatever's found at boot.
What we really need are GPUs that have "public" interfaces, either HW or SW (open drivers) that others can harness for GPGPU. Let's see if that kind of competition expands the market for these GPUs, instead of just fighting ATI and nVidia for the current market.
Um... (Score:3, Interesting)
Average users don't tend to replace their cards very often. If they do, they'll go with a 6-month-old card from a major player, not a formerly-OK company that basically seems to be saying "Look at us! We're as good as anything else! w00t!"* And until computers run on $3/gallon gasoline, I don't think "lower power consumption" is going to move a lot of cards.
As for "better performance" when it comes to HDTV... huh? Lots of rigs today can play HD video just fine, and unlike games, video does not benefit much from an ability to show more FPS--once you get past 30, you're pretty much done. Besides, video playback--a series of raster images--has not been much of a problem for years now. It's rendering polygons that's hard.
Sorry, S3, but I don't think this will do much for you.
* except for the fact that it's not actually shipping yet, and those other cards have had drivers out for years, and games are already optimized for them, and...
Re:The Obligatory Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Well after visiting their web site [s3graphics.com] and not finding any Linux drivers for their existing cards, and not even any mention of Linux nywhere on their site, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Re:I hope it's bundled with PowerPoint. (Score:5, Interesting)
The card in the machine was a 2MB Virge. Things I found out about the card over the next few minutes included:
1) It supported no resolution higher than 1024x768 60hz 16-bit color.
2) The output looked so bad even on 2D that looking at the monitor hurt my eyes.
3) The instant I dragged any 3D game window, even older ones, to the monitor with the Virge card, they started going at about 10 frames... per minute.
The Virge was the worst graphics card I have ever used. A while back I even tried to run Homeworld on it (as a primary card). Lowest detail levels--check. Lowest resolution--check. Lowest memory allocation--check. End result: D3D hardware acceleration mode goes slower than software mode, at about 2 frames per minute.
Re:A tiny market, but a loyal one? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah and they still suck. ATI writes shit Windows drivers and the Linux drivers are not any better.
yet all I see from the
It's not a fanboy thing at all. nVidia currently just provides the best solution. It's not a great solution because it's so closed but it's the best available. They work pretty good and the performance is better than Windows most of the time. There are no other Linux supported cards and drivers that can match nVidia, period.
My Take (Score:4, Interesting)
The way I read this is yet another small player wants to run with the big boys. What makes this one different? Well they admit up front that they can't compete in the high end so they will target the low end. Is this going to make a difference? I highly doubt it. I predict a flop.
I'm not trying to be too harsh. I'm just stating it like I see it. Personally I'd like to see another player in this market, but I doubt it will ever happen unless someone like Intel decides to make high end graphics cards. Both ATI and NVIDIA spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D to make their high end cards and all that R&D is applicable to the lower end discrete cards. The lower end cards now days use most of the great ideas we've come up with for the high end cards, but we just do fewer pixels in parallel thus using fewer transistors. Our lower end cards are also fairly power effience even though this article didn't mention it (almost like want people to assume our low end cards use 100W just like our high end cards do). Unless another company spends that kind of money I doubt they'll compete. I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely.
I think the graphics industry is becoming less and less likely to have a major revolution (i.e. to something other than triangle based rendering); which would make it much easier for a new player to get into the market. Graphics for the PC with all its legacy software is becoming more like the irreplaceable x86 platform everyday. If we do change to something completely different it will probably come to a console first, but the longer we go on optimizing algorithms and hardware for these triangle based systems the more unlikely such a revolution will come.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design, but Intel and AMD have spent so much time/money optimizing it that nobody can seem to come up with a new general purpose CPU that is better. I think the same thing is happening with graphics. The weird coincidence is that both of these fields have 2 major players...
Re:GP2 (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenGL is a 'public' interface that effectively hides the hardware with a standard API while also offering low level programmability via it's shader language. We already have what you're asking for.
Check out the GPGPU [gpgpu.org] project. It sounds like it might interest you.
Re:A tiny market, but a loyal one? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yeah but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If you mean like ATI's I'll stick with Nvidia.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Liberty is the government not making laws placing restrictions upon you. It's letting you do what you want to without threat of force against you. Trading freedom for temporary security would be forever giving up some freedoms to be safer for the moment.
NVIDIA is a company; this puts them close to being a citizen. Forcing them to open their drivers would be forcing them to give up their freedom to do as they wish with their product. You aren't giving up any liberty by choosing to use their closed source driver because you aren't forced to use it. In this case, there are both open source drivers, and other vendors to choose from.
You are not giving up freedom by using Windows, MacOS, or Solaris, either. You're just choosing a product that you don't get to peek at under the hood. Saying that NVIDIA is limiting freedom is funny considering that you're using a computer that functions on thousands of components that you aren't able to take apart, change, and put back together, and distribute. It is likely running a lot of software/firmware that you don't have the right to disassemble, modify, and rerelease.
Re:Why...oh I see (Score:2, Interesting)
There should be some kind of award for that... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Virge was definitely a dog back in its day, probably even worse than an ATI Rage II, but I would be impressed if any of its better-performing contemporaries (e.g, Rendition or Mystique) would be capable of that feat... I just did a search, and couldn't even find any evidence of Virge drivers for 2000/XP. I had thought that trying to get dual monitors to work under 98 was pretty touch-and-go.
S3's real market is in integrated chipsets (Score:3, Interesting)
That's probably the future. The plug-in graphics card is rapidly headed for the same fate as the plug-in math coprocessor chip, the plug-in MMU chip, the plug-in DMA controller chip, the plug-in serial port board, the plug-in network adapter, and the plug-in disk controller.