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S3's DeltaChrome Examined
sand writes "Firingsquad takes a look at DeltaChrome, which is a graphics chip from S3. The core runs at 300MHz and offers pixel and vertex shaders that go beyond DirectX 9, just like Nvidia GeForce FX. The really cool feature though is the integrated HDTV encoder, you can output from your PC or laptop directly to an HDTV or 1080p projector!"
AGP exists for a reason -- PCI isn't fast enough for heavy graphics use. Heck, some SCSI setups can completely saturate the PCI bus, which is why there are other alternatives (like 64-bit PCI or AGP).Then why would you be considering hundreds of dollars for a new video card when you can probably get a replacement motherboard for under $50?
It's been stated that Doom 3 won't run at full frame rate on any of today's existing hardware. Does a card like this change that situation? What types of advances in graphics cards are going to be necessary to play Doom 3 at it's fullest potential?
Actually, that is also a relevant question to those people with agp motherboards, who want to add a second display adapter to their systems.
The top-of-the-line adapters often have dual-head capability these days, but there are people who are interested in decent secondary display adapters.
What is the market for this thing?
Cheap lapops.
Rest assured that it will be better then the current state-of-the-art of low-end S3 laptop chips (talk about oxymoronic...). I have a Via TwisterK with the current S3 chip, and the only regret I have for buying such a low-level laptop is that the 3D performance on this 1 GHz Duron is roughly equivalent to a Voodoo I. (Otherwise I've been happy with it because I didn't buy it for 3D performance, I bought it because even the crappiest laptop on the market today is still a kick-ass portable Linux machine.)
Maybe people like me?
The current top-end graphics cards are in the $300 range. The second tier is around half that, and the third tier half again. The real sales on the top-end graphics cards are rather small, and grow as you go down. But having that top-end card helps your lower tiers, because of the assumption that good top-end implies good rest-of-line.
In today's market that's not necessarily true. IMHO both nVidia and ATI short-cut the lower ends with the MX and 9000 lines, respectively. Both of those product lines have cut features from a previous generation, and ramped the clock to regain performance. Also, both product lines will show their age on newer (let's face it, DoomIII) games.
I recently bought a third-tier card - a Radeon 8500LE. It has all the features, a slightly lower clock, and a much lower price. The reasonable competition would have been a GeForce3 Ti200 for a little more. This is also a stopgap card - in a year or so I want to step up and get DX9/OGL2 features when they're available in the second tier. (I know OGL2 is still an unknown.)
The reason to pay attention to the top end is because it presumably brings features down to the bottom end. But both dominant suppliers today have broken that feature chain. So if someone else comes in with the features and performance I want, and linux support through drivers or documentation, I'll buy, even if they don't own the top end.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You forgot the step where you solder SMD resistors to the card to unlock the rest of the memory bus, and keep your fingers crossed that the extra logic you just enabled wasn't faulty in the first place (which is why it was placed on the 9500 and not the 9700).
Clocking it higher isn't the whole story, it's not a 9700 Pro until you unlock the other half of the memory bus.
It works, but I've heard as many failure stories as I have successes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!