arcticstoat writes "It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia, and the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it's now even developed its own GPGPU technology. S3 claims that its Chrome 400 chips can accelerate gaming physics, HD video transcoding/encoding and photo enhancement. To demonstrate the latter, S3 has released a free download called S3FotoPro, which enhances color clarity and reduces haze in photos. However, the company hasn't yet revealed whether it plans to support OpenCL in the future."
The Tech Report also points out that this could allow S3's parent company, VIA, to compete with Intel and AMD in graphics processing technology.
This is definitely not the first time in recent years that we hear S3 can compete with ATI and Nvidia again. As much as I'd like to see that, I certainly won't believe it until I see some decent independent benchmarks.
Hey, give them a chance. If their excellent 3D graphics chipsets are anything to go by this could give you the power of a 386 processor ON YOUR DESKTOP! Imagine it: DooM running in practically real-time. This baby could render the teapot POV example in 3/4 mins rather than the hours it would take on the older XT class machine.
ATi, Trident, Matrox, S3, the good old days... I remember when I worked in a computer shop, we used to burn through S3 Virge and S3 Trio cards like they were going out of fashion.
Unfortunately they were left for dead when people no longer needed a 2D card to go with their 3DFX card - the combo cards from Diamond were killer cards and removed the need for the usual S3 Virge/Trio or Trident.
I had an S3 Virge about 11 years ago, they were pretty popular back then. I don't recall hearing much about them since, I assumed they'd gone the way of 3DFX.
i thought in a recent/. interview [slashdot.org] with the VIA open source rep he said that VIA didn't own S3 (not entirely at least):
However, S3 Graphics is an entirely independent company and not a subsidiary of VIA. That basically means that VIA is holding some stock, but that's more or less all. They also promote their products together.
The S3 Graphics discrete GPU's are developed independently from the VIA integrated graphics, and they share no common hardware core or driver.
S3 is from the age of 3dfx cards and pre Nvidia Geforce cards. I don't remember any of their cards being very successful? Other than some late Savage cards, but even then, not equal to 3dfx, ATI, or Nvidia offerings.
I still have stuff with 3dfx logos.. i miss them:(
As I stated in an post further up - the Trio and Virge cards are what S3 made a killing on.
I actually remember a server board that basically required a Trio - other cards would cause the system to hang mid use. They were great little cards and even were able to have expanded memory added.
I actually think I've seen some of their hardware before; but, I didn't know they were still around, so I guess I'm in a similar boat as you. S3 Graphics [wikipedia.org]
While the press release doesnt make this terribly clear, I think it may be that this applciations automatically processes all image data and adjusts as needed before it sends it out to the monitor. So i a way its an image 'normalizer', like how you have audio normalizer that make all sounds have about the same volume. This actually would make sense (if its what I think it is), because this would, for example, mean that all your photos 'look good' without an touching up, all your homemovies dito, and dito th
First we need to see a video card that performs well. Serious. The whole reason that nVidia (and ATi) cards can do well at GPGPU stuff is that they are fast at gaming stuff.
Gaming graphics are at their heart a whole lot of parallel single precision floating point math. Thus, that is what modern video cards are good at calculating. Well the GPGPU idea was just someone saying "Hey, these things are amazingly fast as number crunching, and graphics aren't the only sort of thing this is relivant to. Let's get an
Do games later. For now, let's see some really small, low-power, low-heat video chips with enough power for HD video and basic 3D acceleration. If they do that and release documentation for Linux, they can pwn the netbook market. Guess what S3 appears to be aiming at?
Not true. Some filters which took minutes in Adobe Photoshop CS2 only took half a second in CS4. Just doing a low-pass filter or a blur to get noise reduction would, of course, be doable by a single cpu correctly. But once you go professional, the time saved through using GPGPU is amazing, and means you can see results in realtime, so you can make adjustments much much faster.
nVidia already has this market covered with the Cuda API. In fact, the new version of photoshop is GPGPU accelerated with nVidia cards that support Cuda.
Except in Aperture there the GPU acceleration is much slower than Lightroom thanks to Apples retarded decision of using 128 MB vram. Hurray for less choice.
Looks like VIA is really serious about this whole x86 business - they are the little (compared to Intel and AMD) thorn in the side to the big boys. With so many bald decisions regarding their own x86 roadmap, it's a miracle they're still around!
What I mean is: AMD has been on the razor's edge for many years already, always in danger of unprofitability due to the thin or sometimes non-existent margins they had in order to keep with the top-dog. And AMD has a substantial slice of the x86 market, definitely way bigger than VIA. Imagine what sort of creative management it takes for VIA to stay competitive.
S3's role in VIA's x86 plans could be crucial. I can definitely see them help VIA into the emerging netbook market. Cheap and low-power, is what VIA and S3 are good at, and that's exactly what netbooks are all about.
With so many bald decisions regarding their own x86 roadmap, it's a miracle they're still around!
Uh.... I shouldn't be posting minutes after waking up from an afternoon slumber:o) Obviously, I meant bold decisions! Oh well - at least it's a funny typo!
Incidentally, I put together a completelly fanless audio system based around via esther at 1Ghz (the only noise producing thing is HD and I used a quiet barracuda HD and even that gets annoying after a while). The little box soon expanded into torrent downloader, file and web server and is incredibly stable platform. The best ever spent $400 (it is actually more stable than my 8 core xeon monster worth $8000 last year that I use at work).
VIA is also an ARM licensee, but I've not seen any products from them based on ARM designs. I don't know if this is because they only sell to OEMs, or if it's because they don't exist.
I can't say I'm wildly optimistic about the likely power of an S3 GPGPU setup, given the history of S3 GPUs. On the other hand, because their performance is likely to be somewhat mediocre, and they certainly don't have the marketshare or power of someone like NVIDIA, they are more likely to do things like release documentation in order to attract development for their platform. In general, the dominant player has the greatest incentive to go it alone, keep things proprietary, and generally try to leverage their power, while the second stringers are much more likely to be helpful in their attempt to build marketshare.
I think the program simply performs some basic automatic tunings such as contrast, saturation and sharpness adjustments. It is not supposed to be a replacement of Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom with tons of sophisticated filters (which mostly are meaningless without manually inputted parameters anyway). It's simply a demo app to show the effect of RELATIVE performance gain one can get from GPU hardware acceleration. Even though it is likely that the stuff still runs faster on my Xeon PC without acceleration than
If i remember correctly, it was Diamond that first brought us the Diamond EDGE cards which used Nvidia's first 3d chip. It was the same chip used in the Sega Saturn.
I believe S3 Virge came after. As far as i can remember... the Diamond EDGE PC cards were the first 3D accelerator cards.... And that would make Nvidia first no?
After Edge flopped, Matrox gave us the Millenia cards which had terrible 3D support on them. Voodoo then took the entire market for a while until Nvidia launched the TNT2 which was a gr
I want to work as a GPU designer for S3 and put my heart and soul into a product that will be laughably pathetic compared to nVidia and ATi's offerings.
I also want to fight two MMA champs at the same time, just so I can push my body to the limit and get utterly humiliated and destroyed anyways by two laughing guys drinking beer while they are beating me up.
I think you must mean you want to work for S3's driver team- it's the drivers which are laughable. S3's hardware is- like many other things VIA and its subsidiaries have come up with, such as the Envy and the Nano- good engineering.
S3 cards have done fairly well in benchmarks compared to parts from nV and AMD/ATI of the same classes (midrange and low end- S3 doesn't bother with the high end)- an impressive achievement considering that 800-lb gorilla Intel has consistently failed to even come anywhere close
I think the whole point of OpenCL is that one doesn't need to be concerned about the underlying hardware. It can be a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU, an chipset integrated GPU, or even a hybrid multi-core CPU with graphics acceleration cores. I've read that both NVidia and ATI/AMD claimed to support OpenCL in the future. From Apple's point of view it's a matter of choosing a vendor who can provide them with the best(by Apple's own standard) hardware solution.
Yeah, Nvidia supports Cuda on everything above the 6000-series I think.
Two other reasons is probably that: a) It's faster. b) Transgamings Cider software don't support the Intel graphics, and now with this one EA:s "mac games" such as C&C 3, Spore and such will run on the Macbook aswell.
not the first time we hear that S3 can compete... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is definitely not the first time in recent years that we hear S3 can compete with ATI and Nvidia again. As much as I'd like to see that, I certainly won't believe it until I see some decent independent benchmarks.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, give them a chance. If their excellent 3D graphics chipsets are anything to go by this could give you the power of a 386 processor ON YOUR DESKTOP! Imagine it: DooM running in practically real-time. This baby could render the teapot POV example in 3/4 mins rather than the hours it would take on the older XT class machine.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
America really has gone downhill.
Re:not the first time we hear that S3 can compete. (Score:4, Informative)
Long ago they used to be, back when ATI and Trident were big names in the video card business.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
ATi, Trident, Matrox, S3, the good old days... I remember when I worked in a computer shop, we used to burn through S3 Virge and S3 Trio cards like they were going out of fashion.
Unfortunately they were left for dead when people no longer needed a 2D card to go with their 3DFX card - the combo cards from Diamond were killer cards and removed the need for the usual S3 Virge/Trio or Trident.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
3Dfx got bought by Nvidia, so no.
Re:not the first time we hear that S3 can compete. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
i thought in a recent /. interview [slashdot.org] with the VIA open source rep he said that VIA didn't own S3 (not entirely at least):
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
S3 is from the age of 3dfx cards and pre Nvidia Geforce cards. I don't remember any of their cards being very successful? Other than some late Savage cards, but even then, not equal to 3dfx, ATI, or Nvidia offerings.
I still have stuff with 3dfx logos.. i miss them :(
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As I stated in an post further up - the Trio and Virge cards are what S3 made a killing on.
I actually remember a server board that basically required a Trio - other cards would cause the system to hang mid use. They were great little cards and even were able to have expanded memory added.
Direct3D texture compression (Score:3, Informative)
The original name for "DXTC" was .... "S3TC"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_compression [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
S3 Graphics [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Yep (Score:3, Interesting)
First we need to see a video card that performs well. Serious. The whole reason that nVidia (and ATi) cards can do well at GPGPU stuff is that they are fast at gaming stuff.
Gaming graphics are at their heart a whole lot of parallel single precision floating point math. Thus, that is what modern video cards are good at calculating. Well the GPGPU idea was just someone saying "Hey, these things are amazingly fast as number crunching, and graphics aren't the only sort of thing this is relivant to. Let's get an
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Do games later.
For now, let's see some really small, low-power, low-heat video chips with enough power for HD video and basic 3D acceleration. If they do that and release documentation for Linux, they can pwn the netbook market. Guess what S3 appears to be aiming at?
what (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
nVidia already has this market covered with the Cuda API. In fact, the new version of photoshop is GPGPU accelerated with nVidia cards that support Cuda.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm fairly sure that's what he said. He even specifically mentioned photoshop
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much... oh noes, Nvidia wasn't mentioned.
Either someone is a bit too much of a pedant or we're seeing some fanboyism.
Re: (Score:2)
Except in Aperture there the GPU acceleration is much slower than Lightroom thanks to Apples retarded decision of using 128 MB vram. Hurray for less choice.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How is enhancing photos the business of a central processing unit? That can be done in hardware acceleration at incredible speeds without software.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Or you can just squint a bit, or step back a little. Cheap and fast and used to work just as well.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hos is enhancing photos the buisness of professional equipment and lighting? That can be done with a few lenses, a cheap pen light and some cardboard.
Re: (Score:2)
Off-topic my ass, funny or insightful :D
Why ISN'T enhancing photos the business of the central processing unit? Does it matter how it's done as long as you get the results you want?
Anyway, all enhanchments will still try to fix what the exposure didn't.
S3 (Score:3, Funny)
Easy to forget (Score:4, Informative)
It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia
That's right. Intel own it too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, Intel has like 60% market share.
And they have the worse performance.
Sounds like a perfect take over target for good old Microsoft, if I ever saw one.
Re:Easy to forget (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, Intel has like 60% market share.
And they have the worse performance.
And they have some of the easiest Linux support.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
And they have some of the easiest Linux support.
That surely explains their 60% market share
VIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like VIA is really serious about this whole x86 business - they are the little (compared to Intel and AMD) thorn in the side to the big boys. With so many bald decisions regarding their own x86 roadmap, it's a miracle they're still around!
What I mean is: AMD has been on the razor's edge for many years already, always in danger of unprofitability due to the thin or sometimes non-existent margins they had in order to keep with the top-dog. And AMD has a substantial slice of the x86 market, definitely way bigger than VIA. Imagine what sort of creative management it takes for VIA to stay competitive.
S3's role in VIA's x86 plans could be crucial. I can definitely see them help VIA into the emerging netbook market. Cheap and low-power, is what VIA and S3 are good at, and that's exactly what netbooks are all about.
Re: (Score:2)
With so many bald decisions regarding their own x86 roadmap, it's a miracle they're still around!
Uh.... I shouldn't be posting minutes after waking up from an afternoon slumber :o)
Obviously, I meant bold decisions! Oh well - at least it's a funny typo!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Incidentally, I put together a completelly fanless audio system based around via esther at 1Ghz (the only noise producing thing is HD and I used a quiet barracuda HD and even that gets annoying after a while). The little box soon expanded into torrent downloader, file and web server and is incredibly stable platform. The best ever spent $400 (it is actually more stable than my 8 core xeon monster worth $8000 last year that I use at work).
Re: (Score:2)
A small bag of gemstones.
Re: (Score:2)
Potentially interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF? (Score:2)
Is it me or is there "S3FotoPro Enhancement" in TFA looks like nothing different than mere contrast adjustment?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But does it run on Linux? :)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the program simply performs some basic automatic tunings such as contrast, saturation and sharpness adjustments. It is not supposed to be a replacement of Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom with tons of sophisticated filters (which mostly are meaningless without manually inputted parameters anyway). It's simply a demo app to show the effect of RELATIVE performance gain one can get from GPU hardware acceleration. Even though it is likely that the stuff still runs faster on my Xeon PC without acceleration than
Wasnt Nvidia and Diamond the first to bring us 3D? (Score:2)
If i remember correctly, it was Diamond that first brought us the Diamond EDGE cards which used Nvidia's first 3d chip. It was the same chip used in the Sega Saturn.
I believe S3 Virge came after. As far as i can remember... the Diamond EDGE PC cards were the first 3D accelerator cards. ... And that would make Nvidia first no?
After Edge flopped, Matrox gave us the Millenia cards which had terrible 3D support on them. Voodoo then took the entire market for a while until Nvidia launched the TNT2 which was a gr
My dream job? Working for S3! (Score:2)
I want to work as a GPU designer for S3 and put my heart and soul into a product that will be laughably pathetic compared to nVidia and ATi's offerings.
I also want to fight two MMA champs at the same time, just so I can push my body to the limit and get utterly humiliated and destroyed anyways by two laughing guys drinking beer while they are beating me up.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you must mean you want to work for S3's driver team- it's the drivers which are laughable. S3's hardware is- like many other things VIA and its subsidiaries have come up with, such as the Envy and the Nano- good engineering.
S3 cards have done fairly well in benchmarks compared to parts from nV and AMD/ATI of the same classes (midrange and low end- S3 doesn't bother with the high end)- an impressive achievement considering that 800-lb gorilla Intel has consistently failed to even come anywhere close
Without adoption of OpenCL by S3 and it's... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the whole point of OpenCL is that one doesn't need to be concerned about the underlying hardware. It can be a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU, an chipset integrated GPU, or even a hybrid multi-core CPU with graphics acceleration cores. I've read that both NVidia and ATI/AMD claimed to support OpenCL in the future. From Apple's point of view it's a matter of choosing a vendor who can provide them with the best(by Apple's own standard) hardware solution.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Nvidia supports Cuda on everything above the 6000-series I think.
Two other reasons is probably that:
a) It's faster.
b) Transgamings Cider software don't support the Intel graphics, and now with this one EA:s "mac games" such as C&C 3, Spore and such will run on the Macbook aswell.