|
|
Introduction S3 has been around for quite some time now. 11 years, to be exact. And in that 11 year window, S3 has produced many, many chips. You may have one now (if you have a computer from any retailer from around 1996, you almost assuredly do. S3's ViRGE chip was nearly uniform around that time!) But unfortunately for them, not a single chip has become a 3D success. Let's take a closer look. S3's firt entry into the market was the ViRGE. This chip may ring a bell for you. It was the first mass-market 3D accelerator available, although "accelerator" isn't exactly the correct word.. The ViRGE was more commonly referred to as a "deccelerator" because of the horrendous 3D performance. In fact, it was oftentimes faster to use software acceleration than the ViRGE, it was so slow. S3 was beaten out by the faster chips from NVIDIA and the newbie 3dfx. What was S3's defense from the onslaught? Why, to drop out of the market for a while! S3 remained hidden in the background from view for a few years, while NVIDIA and 3dfx paraded their TNT and Voodoo chipsets around, silently working on a new product. This product came to light in early 98, as the Savage3D chipset. The Savage3D was great on paper: the new "S3TC" compression technique could display over 200MB of textures on a single board, utilizing a 6:1 compression ratio. This technique looked great and performance was good, but the Savage3D had many problems in the actual boards. For starters, only one manufacturer initially adopted the chip: Hercules. (I/O Magic later made a Savage3D board). Add in a lack of multitexturing, only 8MB of onboard RAM, and you have some problems. But despite this, the card still did well enough in tests. It could have done well enough. But one thing caused more problems than anything else: The drivers. They were just horrible. The OpenGL ICD was nothing more than a MiniGL, which wouldn't work with many OpenGL applications and Direct3D was just a mess. S3 screwed this one up bad. S3 went back the labs and a year later came out with a new chip: The Savage4. This chip corrected many of the Savage3D's set-backs, including full multi-texturing capabilities and 32MB of on-board RAM. It also offered superb 3D image quality and a host of features, included single-cycle trilinear filtering and a full (despite slow) OpenGL ICD. But it was still plagued with driver problems, many of which are still being corrected. Many AMD users were also left out in the cold, seeing as some people have serious stability issues with this card. Overall, the Savage4 still sold well and gave S3 some major OEM contracts, and some much needed funding. After these two defeats, mostly at the hands of NVIDIA, S3 went back to the drawing board once again, pulling out all the stops. What was the result? The Savage2000, a full-featured 3D chip with on-board Transformation and Lighting and a 700(!)Mtexel fillrate! Is it a success? Let's read on to find out.. Page 2: The Savage2000 |
