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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!"
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.)