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Graphics Software Hardware

S3's DeltaChrome Graphics Chip 193

Posted by michael from the recovering-from-savage-failure dept.
Noob Jones writes "The Tech Report has an article about a new video card in the works at S3. 'S3 Graphics is back with a new chip, dubbed DeltaChrome, which looks like it might just be strong enough to become a player in the mid-range consumer graphics market.' With a third player back in the graphics market both Nvidia and ATi are going to have things to worry about but this can only spell good news for customers."
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S3's DeltaChrome Graphics Chip More

S3's DeltaChrome Graphics Chip

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  • The mid-range graphics market (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:01PM (#7007922)
    Is made up of last year's high-end graphics market.

  • If only . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Brahmastra ( 685988 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:01PM (#7007933)
    They find a way to plug this into a C64 along with broadband
  • Is it as hot as Chernobyl? Will a cooling pond be required to run it for long periods of time?

  • S3 is about as much of a threat as... (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <<lynxpro> <at> <gmail.com>> on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:05PM (#7007960)
    ...the last vaporware product announced by the BitMap Brothers. Seriously, I think Atari will have a decent videocard out before either of these two previously-mentioned chuckleheads bring anything serious to the market. If you believe that, I have a spare Athlon64 Adapter for your TI99/4A I could sell you.

  • There are other markets (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:06PM (#7007966) Homepage
    I havent seen one company out there that makes small BGA chips for handheld markets and PDAs. The chip must be taking VERY low power, should support OpenGL, and must have drivers including OpenGL 1.4 support in Linux, NetBSD, QNX, QTopia and WindowsCE.

    I was trying to look for such a chip and found only the embedded versions of NVidia and Radeon which are obscenely grotesque for handheld devices. For resolutions maximum of which are 640x480 and color depths of max 16bits, there must be a 3d video chip that supports OpenGL 1.4. It will at least be used in the next GBA, NGage and other handhelds and cellphones.
    • how much money do you believe could be made in this cutthoat market where the whole device has to be cheaper than a high end gfx-card and handhelds with GPU shouldnt be more expensive than those without?

      on the other hand, if you really look you will find PowerVR MBX and the new Bitboys chip.

    • Guess who who does? (Score:3, Informative)

      by msgmonkey ( 599753 )
      Yes our friends BitBoys [bitboys.fi] have an "Acceleon" range that is a combination of software/hardware to full hardware implementations.

      Now I know their previous products have had a rather strong vapour but maybe they've finally found their niche.
    • PowerVR [powervr.com] is the best solution for that segment. There's even the way to incorporate it's core alongside an ARM processor inside a single chip.
    • I've heard PowerVR are into such things. And they have DRI drivers, albeit closed source at the moment.

  • Whatever can you mean? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dzym ( 544085 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:06PM (#7007968) Homepage Journal
    Mid-range ATI/Nvidia cards are already dirt-cheap as it is.

    S3 isn't going to make a dent unless they can seriously compete with what ATI/Nvidia have out on the top-end market.

    • Re:Whatever can you mean? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by msgmonkey ( 599753 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:16PM (#7008052)
      Well I dont know about Mid-range but I do remember from a few years back at university when I built el-cheapo machines for people. You could always get a S3 card for some single digit price.

      These days you don't even need a Video card, just get a board with onboard/shared memory graphics card. S3 cant compete for the low end because in most respects it does n't exist anymore.

      Did n't someone buy S3 out because they had some rather nice patents that they purchased from another dead company?

      • Re:Whatever can you mean? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ehovland ( 2915 ) * on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:40PM (#7008234) Homepage
        Didn't someone buy S3 out because they had some rather nice patents that they purchased from another dead company?

        Yeah, VIA. S3 coming out with new 3D hardware is entirely driven by VIA having complete converage of a computer.

        All of the comments so far have neglected to figure that S3/VIA are selling EPIA boards like hotcakes. With 3D hardware worse then this chip included. Expect to see this part on the next gen of EPIA boards.
        • Argh! I had modpoints I was going to give you only to find they'd expired. =( Either way, you've hit the nail square on the head. This would be a great compliment for the EPIA boards, and would further their already strong utility.
      • duh, eh could that company be via, the parent company as mentioned in the article. Via the company that makes motherboards. Via that makes a cpu. So the via that could now produce an entire computer? (well a significant part of it, not as much as Intel but certainly more then AMD)

        So a decent video chip they now can put on their own boards without having to pay a 3rd party for it and one that doesn't completly suck? Mmm, yeah I could see a business case for that. Anyone wanna bet we are going to finally see

        • The Whole Da#n thing! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @09:42PM (#7009683)
          Via makes: C3 cpu [a joke, but still a cpu], northbridge, southbridge, S3 embeded video on chipsets + discret parts, Firewire phy layer, USB 2.0, and Envy sound chips. Enter the EPIA that everyone is so fond of [hey! it's cute] Via makes the whole thing in house! It may be low end, and cheap, but they make the whole thing so they get every red cent they can squeeze out of it! Oh they also make many other "driver" chips for CD ROMS, and other devices. They probably make just as many, if not more, parts as intel in-house. They're a sleeping giant waiting for an opportunity...like the EPIA boards!

      • Re:Whatever can you mean? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually, S3 sold their graphics division to Via a while back. They then renamed themselves Sonic Blue, and shifted focus to Entertainment appliances such as the Rio, and ReplayTV brands.
        And yes S3 had a rather nice patent portfolio, but only the graphics related patents transfered to Via AFAIK.

        The new S3 is not the same as the old S3. The new S3 is something Via put together with assets purchased from the old S3 (now Sonic Blue). But this is not necessarily a bad thing.

        IMHO The old S3 had some decent h

    • Depends on your metric. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:24PM (#7008118)
      S3 making a dent would depend on what metric you you to measure the graphics card market. For instance if you consider the market to be high-end, 3D, hardware accelerated, graphics chips then, S3 probably won't have much impact. But, that is a specialized market that isn't very large when compared to the more basic or on-board graphics chips market which , accounts for probably 90 percent of the graphics chip market as a whole.

      Using the broader metric of this much larger whole market, the S3 could very well have a significant impact. It would only take the right deal with a major PC manufacturer like Dell or HP and suddenly S3 would have probably >50% of the graphics chip market, regardless of the quality or performance of the chip.

      Would it take the best performance and price ratio to win such a deal? No. It would take barely acceptable performance at a great price and , perhaps most importantly, the ability to meet the manufacturing demands while maintaining a low failure rate. Of course, playing golf with the guy in procurement at Dell probably wouldn't hurt too much either.
      • ...They can demonstrate that DeltaChrome can perform almost like the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro at a fraction of the price. Such success could convince Dell and HP to offer it on their retail machines, and that could be a huge win for S3.

        With the resources of VIA Technologies behind S3, they have the potential to be a major spoiler in the low to midrange market.

    • Re:Whatever can you mean? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      nvidia and ati battle for the crown of fastest but the real money is make in the middle and low end cards. Because production costs are so high for the high end cards there is minimal profit. But the mid range cards are extremely profitable. The nvidia ti 4200 made them a ton of money because they sold alot more of them than they sold of the ti 4600's. The same was true in the past and will likely be true in the future.

  • I really wouldnt mind a third player.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:07PM (#7007971)
    But the last 2 years, PowerVR, SIS, S3 and Tritend produced little more than hot Air. The specs might look good on paper, but in the end the chips still sucked.

    Prime example: Parhelia.
    On release 256bit memory interface,8 texel per clock -> everybody thought it would rock.
    reality: Horrible drivers, DX9 drivers "will not be made", abysmal memory performance because of lack of bandwith saving gimmicks, ect.

    S3 in particular hasnt got a very good track record. The last time they released a product that was supposed to reach nvidea&atis performance, they ended up with a chip chose T&L never worked and was emulated in a driver that sucked in every aspect except producing render errors...

  • Our Inventory's Got to Go! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nuclear Elephant ( 700938 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:08PM (#7007987) Homepage
    In an attempt to clear out all the old inventory closets, the new S3 card will be available in either ISA or Vesa.

  • 3rd Player? (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:08PM (#7007988) Homepage
    Are we forgetting about the Matrox [matrox.com] Parhelia [matrox.com]?

    • Re:3rd Player? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      Sucks. Is slow as a Geforce MX and expensive like a radeon 9800pro.
      Doesnt have any drives providing the (limited) DX9 features the card has, like 10Bit/channel.
      And it wont get any, because they said so and they fired the driver team this spring.

      Well, it does have good 2D and triplehead, which would make sense if the card was 5 times as fast as it is (of course you can play Q3 or any other 4 year old game, no probs, but try something newer..)

  • Bah, another flop I bet. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:09PM (#7007994)
    They said the same thing about Trident's new cards. And Matrox's (Parhelia). Both turned out to be horrible.

  • Good to see competition... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:09PM (#7007995) Homepage Journal
    I used to use an S3 card back in the day (Virge?) for 2D processing. I'm a bit curious about how they're going to break into the current 3D marketplace, though, given the barrier to entry posed by the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines.

    Maybe they're looking at creating bargain chips, a la AMD's entry into CPU development that promises to unseat Intel, but the price differential between Intel and AMD is far greater than that S3 could possibly achieve between its chips and those of nVidia/ATi.

    To be honest, it's mostly fanboys that are buying up all the new cards anyway to squeeze another frame or two per second out, so it's possible S3 could do something like offer longer warranties on older technology to drive the price point down while delivering all the graphics power anybody could need. It'll be interesting to see what happens, of course, but it's good to see S3 back regardless.

    • first, I stumble across your 'technically superior nVidia'.
      A card that can't be quiet (as in, lower Db's then a system fan) is not in my lane. ATI is heads first right now, and until nVidia gets this thermo-thingy right (alas, low-noise), it sucks from my perspective...

      And for S3: Well, it's always good to see some competition. S3 was the first for me in my 286, and then in a VESA version for a 486. Never really bothered with them again...

      Matrox failed at it's pricing. I would have had a paraphelia (
    • I used to use an S3 card back in the day (Virge?) for 2D processing. I'm a bit curious about how they're going to break into the current 3D marketplace, though, given the barrier to entry posed by the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines.

      I remember the Virge chips, wildly popular, but by most accounts the world's first 3d decellerator. I wish the best to S3 because another choice in the marketplace can obly be a good thing, but their track record does not inspire confidence.

      LK
    • the market leader ATi and the technically superior nVidia lines
      You got it backwards, nVidia has the biggest market share but ATi is technically superior (seen some recent benchmarks lately? twice as fast in DX9 PS2.0, ditto with ARB2/OGL).

  • Hah... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Amorpheus_MMS ( 653095 )
    A competitor for the two top dogs would be great, but I remember the Kyro and Parhelia too well to think any of this until we see benchmarks.

  • S3 3D decellerator (Score:5, Funny)

    by doublem ( 118724 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:14PM (#7008036) Homepage Journal
    Ahh, S3, the company that made the 3D cards that gave WORSE performance than using software rendering.

    • Re:S3 3D decellerator (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nothing beats running GLQuake on a 4mb PCI ViRGE DX.. there was a special virge-dx-glquake-only-gl-miniport floating around. Ran at a beautiful 0.9fps ... with tearing all over the place
      • Gosh I remember my first Virge DX. It didn't support any of the 3d APIs, did it?

        • Re:S3 3D decellerator (Score:3, Informative)

          by Stonent1 ( 594886 )
          Gosh I remember my first Virge DX. It didn't support any of the 3d APIs, did it?

          It supported S3D. My old Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 came with several games that "appeared" to be accellerated by the card. One was a roller derby style game and the other was a special version of Descent.

  • Consumer grapics market?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:14PM (#7008037)
    I wasn't aware that there was still a consumer graphics market. From what I've seen, most MB's have a chip built in which is fine for most apps. From what I can tell, the only people buying graphics cards indidually these days are hard core gamers.
    • Oh and what are the gamers called then? They are consumers, they are just not a large chunk of the consumers. Anyways, i hope s3's chip does well since the prices ati and nvidia want for their gfx cards is just bs. 1/3 to 1/2 of your pc cost is gfx card. And then of course if your spending a lot on a gfx card then your the type who will need to upgrade every year, which just adds up to a bunch more bullshit. I guess i'm just bitter because i'm poor.
    • Not so. For awhile the motherboard manufacturers were incorporating grapics chipsets into their designs, but stopped about 4 years ago. But those graphics chipsets were atrocious. Most were barely above VGA and they were frequently turned off in bios and a decent AGP card installed. They were only good for office PC's where the person using it was just doing spreadsheets and writing documents.
      • What? Ever heard of the nForce Chipset from nVidia? The graphics chip it used was bassed on the gForce 2. Then they upgraded it. And now they have upgraded again to use a low end FX chip. These chipsets give pretty good perforance in most of today's games.
      • Bargain systems never left integrated video behind; SiS has made good money by cranking out integrated-video chipsets for systems from Pentiums to Athlons. For manufacturers like Emachines who operate on razor-thin margins, even $15 or $20 more for a separate video card means the difference between a decent profit and a loss-leader.

        Not only that, the trend is swinging back towards integrated video on midrange systems; memory is finally fast enough that it's possible to get decent video performance using sh

    • Well yeah, but someone has to make those builtin chips. The motherboard I have right now has an onboard S3 3d graphics card.
    • People go into best buy, say their games are fucking up, running slow, and the sales clerk sells them a video card.

  • Been there, done that. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:16PM (#7008055) Homepage
    'S3 Graphics is back with a new chip, dubbed DeltaChrome, which looks like it might just be strong enough to become a player in the mid-range consumer graphics market.'

    Yeah! Just like the S3 ViRGE!
    And the ViRGE GX2!
    And the Savage!
    And the Savage4!
    And the Savage2000!

    Seriously...they've said the same *damn* thing every time. The only inroads this chipset *might* make would be in low-cost laptops, where S3 already had a sizeable market until the GeForce 2 Go and Radeon Mobility started kicking butt.
    • Yep I owned both a Virge and a Savage 4, both good 2D cards for the money, but their 3D performance was crap, epecially the origional Virge which didn't support all the D3D features. Of course they were bought for linux boxes where their well supported XFree86 drivers were more important than their lack of real 3D performance. Oh yeah and the dirt cheap price had something to do with it too =)
  • All well and good but unless they are open about their hardware, why should I care?

  • excellent.. now my request (Score:3, Funny)

    by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:20PM (#7008082) Journal
    'For those of you unfamiliar with DirectX 9, all those things make a recipe for some very tasty eye candy. With 96 bits per pixel of floating-point precision, DeltaChrome should be able to pull off some killer effects like high-dynamic-range lighting.'

    sweet. realistic on the fly lighting that convinces.. advertising can now blend in the background scenery, objects spinning and *wow*ing will seem more realistic to our brains.. fine, dandy..

    but will someone use that idea in reverse, code up a program that dynamically darkens the likes of Britney Spears, Monster.com, Penis Enlargement and/or goatse refrences on the fly? That would really help my computing experience in a useful way.

    oh.. and highlight natalie portman when she's on screen..

    thanks,

    sincerely,

    pm
  • Well, does it? I want to put it in my 2.6 toaster.

  • Time for rebranding (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JVert ( 578547 ) <[corganbilly] [at] [hotmail.com]> on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:21PM (#7008095) Journal
    ATI to me means poor driver support, not neccesarily more stable then NVIDIA but the installers would be better applied with batch files. Performancewise they are as fast as they want to be. But they have been around forever and probably always will be.

    NVIDIA to me means aswome driver installation but be prepared to roll back. Performancewise they are as fast as their agp speed. These guys are the ones who killed 3dfx, yet we dont hold a grudge againts them for it.

    S3 to means cheap cheap, not value value, install in machines that will never have a monitor hooked up with the sole purpose of getting past a post test.

    I would be much more impressed with a new name comming out of nowhere and whipping the competition like nvidia did to 3dfx. And if they needed some foundation they could point to the fact that they have been making cards for years but are an entirely different company (in mindset at least).
    • NVIDIA to me means aswome driver installation but be prepared to roll back.

      To me, NVIDIA means closed-source kernel binaries and horrible searing stabbing pains when trying to get drivers working in 2.6 test kernels.

      In 2.4, I could run glmatrix on root with no effect on the foreground apps (glmatrix nice'd to +20). No luck with 2.6...
      • and NVidia will care shortly after 2.6 is released as stable. Complaining about support in a testing kernel doesn't mean much to them I'm sure.
      • Works fine with my GeForce4Go on 2.6-test4. No searing stabs of pain necessary --- Gentoo patched the kernel driver automagically :) What're you running?

    • Re:Time for rebranding (Score:2, Insightful)

      by brain1 ( 699194 )
      Actually I do hold a grudge against NVIDIA for killing 3dfx. Personally I had excellent performance with my Voodoo cards. When I was forced to switch to an NVIDIA when I built my new PC, I was disappointed beyond belief. Strange that they absorbed 3dfx, but didnt noticably incorporate anything of theirs into their design. Someone needs to get into the monopoly to keep the players honest.
      • Strange that [nVidia] absorbed 3dfx, but didnt noticably incorporate anything of theirs into their design.

        Ah, but in fact they did: Losing market share and loss of dominance. :-)

        Read the crap going on about Half Life 2 and nVidia's optimisations issues. I've never seen nVidia in such a bad way until after they bought out 3DFX.

    • yet we dont hold a grudge againts them for it.

      Speak for yourself. I switched from Voodoo 2 to Radeon, ignored Nvidia completely...

      BUT... It was more because ATI cards have always been better bang for the back than Nvidia, and less Nvidia killing one of my favorite technologies....

      No....I'm not bitter..... ;)

      -B
    • ATI to me means poor driver support
      Ever heard of Catalyst drivers?

      NVIDIA to me means aswome driver installation but be prepared to roll back. Performancewise they are as fast as their agp speed.
      Ever heard of DX9 or ARB2?
      • Ever heard of Catalyst drivers?
        >>>>>>>>>>>
        Ever see how bad they suck on a Linux machine? Even 3.2.5, although those just suck speed-wise, not stability-wise.

        Ever heard of DX9 or ARB2?
        >>>>>>>>>>
        What's an ARB2? You mean Carmack's Doom III ARB2 path?
        • Architechture Review Board. AKA: the people who define the OGL API. Generally, OGL works where you have proprietary extensions or the "standard" ARB extension for doing the same thing. I'm not too familiar with OGL2, but I imagine ARB2 is just the "default" set of extensions for OGL2. Given nVidia's performance on DX9 apps so far, it wouldn't surprise me if they did just as poorly with the standard ARB2 set of calls under OGL2.
          • There is no such thing as ARB2. OpenGL2 isn't even an official spec yet. There aren't any graphics cards that support it either. There are such things called ARB extensions, but no such thing as ARB2. ARB2 is the specific name Carmack gave the OpenGL path in Doom III.

  • 3rd party (Score:5, Insightful)

    by freidog ( 706941 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:28PM (#7008152)
    S3 will be as much a 3rd party in graphics as Cryix C3 was in the CPU buisness.

    ATI and nVidia with their 6 month product cycles have produced a market where they have to find ways of convincing lots of people they need a new powerful and expensive piece of hardware atleast once a year.
    This has produced so much 'mid' and 'low' end harware for bargin bin prices that market is saturated. (a GF4 Ti 4200, that will run any game out there, can be found $80). Unless S3 can pull something that is both affordable (~$150) and brings something new to the table, i don't see them grabbing up a market share with this.
    THe only reason i have to buy a Radeon 9600 over the GF4 TI is the DX9/ARB shaders make it look pretty, not because i need the speed.
    And unless S3 can provide something to make me want to buy them over the big two (ie better features, faster performance, cheaper price) i'm sticking with a card that has been a solid and proven performer over the product of a company i remember as second tier hardware before they took a 7 year break.
    • (ie better features, faster performance, cheaper price)

      Don't know if you mean all of these or just one, but for the price - take a look of the Acer laptops. They're betting 90% of their graphics for the low end models on S3 mobility chips and even if it's far enough from the Ati 320IGP, or the nVidia GeForce 448/420 for the the S3 card does sound good for where ordinary you get nothing more than a all in one mb. PS: This said, for the last 3 months there're several very competitive offers from Toshiba wit

  • They've gotta work to improve their image with customers and vendors, and really prove that they've got excellent drivers and good performance, with support to back it up. Otherwise, the vendors are going to go with either nVidia or ATI - because they know they can sell cards based on the brand recognition of chips from those two companies, and basically have to do very little work to sell them. With S3? They've gotta design a new card for a new chipset, and promote the hell out of it to get it into systems

  • You forgot the 4th major player... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Bitboys! :P

  • One way that S3 could compete with the big boys (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RealAlaskan ( 576404 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:49PM (#7008298) Homepage Journal
    Oee way that S3 could compete with the big boys would be to offer a decent, usable, not-bleeding-edge, hardware-accelerated 3D card WITH OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS. This would appeal to the niche market of Linux users, and all the folks who ask them for advice.

    It wouldn't have to be the latest, fastest, most expensive board out there. The really hard-core gamers are the only ones who need to spend $100+ on a video card, and I suspect that most of them run Windows.

    S3 wouldn't even have to write the drivers themselves! I'm sure that if they published the spec's needed to write the drivers, that some Linux geeks would write better drivers than S3 could, and it wouldn't cost S3 a cent. Since we're talking about middle-aged technology here, there shouldn't be any worry about ``intellectual property'' leaking out through the spec's.

    I'd ditch my GF2 in a minute, and pay around $80 (that's what I paid for my old Nvidia) to get opensource, no-hassle drivers, and a card that's no worse than the old GF2.

    • Too many patent issues - it's impossible to create a new graphics engine without having to license dozens of patents from the major players. They've probably signed licensing agreements preventing them from releasing the source.

      It sucks, but that's the way it is. The graphics industry is so competitive that executives are choosing paranoia over making us Linux folks happy.

      • Too many patent issues - it's impossible to create a new graphics engine without having to license dozens of patents from the major players. They've probably signed licensing agreements preventing them from releasing the source.

        So, what's wrong with that picture?

        Patents require full disclosure. If it's patented, it's NOT secret. There's no possibility that anyone could gain by keeping patented stuff secret; the cat's already out of the bag.

        Are there trade secrets in the hardware, which are being sec

      • Well, S3 was in at the start of the PC video card game. They probably hold enough 2D patents to block anyone who won't share with them from making a card that can even do 640x480 VGA.
    • offer a decent, usable, not-bleeding-edge, hardware-accelerated 3D card WITH OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS

      It's called a Radeon. Everything older than the 9700 PRO is well supported by open source drivers, and most of them are $100.

    • Hear, hear!

      Well, maybe, just maybe this might happen. The DRI guys are starting work on drivers for Savage4 based cores (Prosavage like on the Epia boards, Twister, and some others). IIRC, these driver were apparently written in-house by via/s3 for mesa3, and then opened up and given to Alan Cox. It now needs to be cleaned up and ported to Mesa4 or 5, and integrated with the rest if the DRI drivers. That sure sounds open source friendly to me.

      Concerning the older Savage3D/IX/MX, the Utah-GLX guys have som
  • Who hyped up their Parhelia chip only for it to turn out to be very expensive and slower than NVidia's offerings.
  • ...in the opening lines of a technology article goes to The Tech Report for this gem:

    The question with any new graphics chip, of course, is whether it can survive and prosper in the brutal world of graphics.
    Gee guys, I never would have guessed that a graphics chip had to be successful at graphics. Thank you, thank you ever so, for pointing that up for us n00bs!
  • As others have pointed out, there are more than two players in the market. In addition to Nvidia and ATI, other players with measurable shipments in the market include SIS/XGI (actually the third larget player today), Matrox, Silicon Motion, Trident, and S3/VIA. 3DLabs also ships as well, but only into the workstation market as their most recent consumer product never materialized.

    A few others have had credible success recently as well, notably ST Micro which manufactured Videologic's KYRO design for a whi

  • Screw S3 and the donkey they rode in on... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vandan ( 151516 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @06:10PM (#7008425) Homepage
    We have a number of S3 cards at work. Man they blow chunks! They are the slowest of the slow, and were even in their days.

    Their Linux support is woeful. I've tried to get XFree running on a few of them, and I think one out of eight actually work with the XFree driver - about 4 work with the vesa driver ( very, very, very slowly ) and the rest don't even run in vesa mode. For Christ's sake!

    Also, as an owner of a Radeon 64MB DDR, I have been on the receiving end if their S3 Texture Compression patent. The DRI developers have begged S3 to allow them to include support for it in the Radeon driver - apparent the algorithm itself is simple and well-known in the industry. S3 have not responded at all to anyone.

    I suppose there are some weirdos out there who use Windows and read Slashdot, but seriously, the majority of us should avoid S3 like the plague. They're not even concerned with 'extra features like OpenGL', so if bought, this card will most likely run just like the rest of the crap they've churned out so far: in vesa mode if you're lucky, otherwise get used to your console.

  • *yawn* (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by zapp ( 201236 )
    read on on hardocp.com lastnight (thursday) at 7pm.

    I've complained about this before, and got the excuse "this just means there's a large readership overlap" ....

    and having thought about that, it just gives MORE reason not to post to both sites. That means more people read the same story in both places. Slashdot even has a Hardocp slashbox.

    In my eyes, Hardocp is for the gamer/hardware enthusiast/ over clocking/ water cooling/ etc stuff. slashdot is for the rest.
  • some folks on here are oblivious to or seem to have forgotten that VIA of taiwan now own S3. no vaporware here.
  • hmm..minial power..wonder if this puppy will eventually be on one of those mini-itx boards.
  • ...to produce a video card which does tile rendering and it is upgradable by sloting more chips on the motherboard. Since 3d is a computational problem that it is easily parallelizable, I fail to see that why such a solution is not followed by manufacturers.

    I would certainly buy a card that could be upgraded to Doom III levels (and beyond...) later on.

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