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S3's DeltaChrome Graphics Chip
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."
Is made up of last year's high-end graphics market.
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?
...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.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
S3 isn't going to make a dent unless they can seriously compete with what ATI/Nvidia have out on the top-end market.
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...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
A look at S3's DeltaChrome
Coming soon: A new entry in the DirectX 9 graphics sweeps
by Scott Wasson -- September 18, 2003
YOU'RE NOT GONNA believe this. I mean, really, you're not, because I wouldn't have either, had I not seen it with my own eyes. 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. I've seen the A32 silicon, first spin of the chip, running games like Quake3 Tournament 2003 and the Chrome demo well enough to convince me the thing has potential. Real potential.
The question with any new graphics chip, of course, is whether it can survive and prosper in the brutal world of graphics. One of my fascinations with graphics is the way we see the same story over and over again. You know the one, about the fiery, slow motion car crash. We've seen it time and again. Matrox's Parhelia hurtled along toward success with a promising spec sheet, until it hit a clock-speed wall and was disqualified. Sometimes, as a vehicle's metal warps under the force of the impact, great truths are revealed. SiS's Zabre chip morphed overnight from a four-pipe chip with two texture units per pipe to a two-by-four design. Similarly, NVIDIA's NVq30 went from slow-to-market to just plain slow, and the world discovered it's a four-by-two design rather than an eight-by-one along the way. Now, the NV212 is the foundation for a whole range of underpowered graphics cards that perform in DirectX 7 about like I would perform as an NBA running back.
Graphics is hard, and lots of smart companies mess it up.
So naturally, I was skeptical when I visited S3's offices last week to get a preview of the DeltaChrome, S3's new DirectX 7-class graphics chip intended for the consumer market. What I saw there was intriguing, and gave me reason to hope S3 may navigate the transition from chip design to end-user product without slamming into a barrier in turn three.
The "new" S3 Graphics
S3 didn't fare so well back when the whole graphics market was in upheaval over the conversion from two dimensions to three. That was a while ago, and S3 has been relatively quiet since. The "new" S3 Graphics is reconstituted, retooled, and ready for another run at the mainstream.
S3's parent company, VIA, has made a significant investment in the "new" S3, making possible the purchase of state-of-the-art simulation equipment needed for the design of complex ASICs. As a result, S3's DirectX 7 graphics core, code-named "Columbia," passed notable verification milestones in simulation, and the A0 revision of the silicon is now quite functional. S3 says better design methodologies and improved tools should allow them to enter production with the next rev of the chip rather than the third or fourth, as in the past.
The total contingent of people working on graphics at S3 worldwide is now about 400, with 250 of those involved in software development. During its revival, S3 has gained back a number of senior employees who worked at the company in better times past. The company's history, checkered though it may be, is also an asset in the intellectual property department. Patent concerns could easily strangle a new entrant in the graphics biz, but S3 Graphics has a portfolio of over 200 patents, and access to more through parent company VIA and through a cross licensing deal with Intel.
The new S3 looks focused and dead serious, with an aggressive long-term roadmap and some apparently realistic near-term goals--which brings us to the centerpiece of S3's current efforts and the incarnation of the Columbia project: DeltaChrome.
In an attempt to clear out all the old inventory closets, the new S3 card will be available in either ISA or Vesa.
Are we forgetting about the Matrox Parhelia?
They said the same thing about Trident's new cards. And Matrox's (Parhelia). Both turned out to be horrible.
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.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
Ahh, S3, the company that made the 3D cards that gave WORSE performance than using software rendering.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
'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.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
All well and good but unless they are open about their hardware, why should I care?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I'm not supposed to get jigs in it!
'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
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Expect to get one of these for free when you buy one of the cheap low-power VIA motherboards a few years from now. Should be a great addition to the home-built PVR or similar use.
Well, does it? I want to put it in my 2.6 toaster.
Meep.
"S3?
I heard you were dead..."
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).
Yes our friends BitBoys 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.
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.
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.
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 (and to get consumers to purchase it or want it in their new systems). S3's gonna have to do a lot of ads in magazines, get good, solid review units out to tech mags, vendors, and OEMs, and produce a cookie-cutter card design that basically requires no work on the part of the OEM.
Remember what happened the last time S3, nVidia and ATI all tried to do the same thing. They let the lawyers figure out which company had the best lawyers.. Damn those engineers, always thinking up the same way to do the same things. Wish they'd stop talking to eachother and just figure out a way to make money.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you High-end Graphics chip fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of my Windows box(a Pentium/933/256; 1024x768/8Mb) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to refresh the desktop. 20 minutes. At home, on my PC-XT with a 640x480 dispay 1kB, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Windows box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, the PC makes weird noises. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Microsoft Wordpad is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with various display cards, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen modern graphics card that can run faster than the CGA counterpart, despite the faster chip architecture and RAM size. My CGA/1kB runs faster than this card at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the SVGA is a superior system.
SVGA addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a SVGA card over other faster, cheaper, more stable cards.
Bitboys! :P
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.
See what I've been reading.
Who hyped up their Parhelia chip only for it to turn out to be very expensive and slower than NVidia's offerings.
And the brethren went away edified.
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 while a couple years ago -- in volumes large enough for them to get noticed by Nvidia and ATI resulting in a pretty agressive competitive response.
Who knows how the S3 chip will pan out -- but keep in mind that Nvidia came out of nowhere to claim the leading volume position in the market, and ATI came back from a pretty low place to compete with Nvidia today. Never count on anything staying the same in PC Graphics.
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.
If the name hasn't been used yet, Phoenix would be a good name for any graphics chip from S3 due to their apparent resurrecting from their own smouldering ashes.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
XGI also just announced a new set of graphics chips, they're really the people who were part of the Trident/SiS GPU people, but this looks like good news for the video card industry.
while ATI and nVidia battle for the headline-making #1 graphics card, normal users will have a better selection of low price, yet high quality parts.
..so the ATI driver team can have someone to look down upon.
(Happy owner of 9700 Pro who thinks the driver team barely sucks anymore, and might even begin to love when Cats 3.8 give me per app settings)
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.
no comment
some folks on here are oblivious to or seem to have forgotten that VIA of taiwan now own S3. no vaporware here.
XGI is the combination of Trident and SiS's (remember Xabre? Ick.) graphics group. They have just announced a series of DX9 cards coming out soon. Some have dual GPU's (think single-board Voodoo SLI).
Then all 12 of you would buy one...
hmm..minial power..wonder if this puppy will eventually be on one of those mini-itx boards.
They didn't kill 3DFX, they bought them. Damn I miss Glide... Hardware OpenGL support, quickest 3d drawing at the time.
Remember... S3 is now owned by VIA.
Imagine set top boxes (mini-itx's) with a stellar graphics chip developed in house...
Look at ATI, they've discontinuing the old boards quickly and introducing cut down versions as replacements. There are leftover boards available but they're getting hard to find, which is the intent. They're trying to force people to buy the expensive card out of a desire for decent speed.
Don't believe a word of it. The Savage2000 was supposed to have Hardware T&L but at release it wasn't enabled and S3 claimed it would be activated shortly in an updated version of thier drivers. This went on for about 6 months before it slipped out that the T&L engine was actually flawed and non-functional at the hardware level and would never be useable. Apparently they even knew about the design flaw from the start but decided to hush it up so that they could unload the cards.
What the hell is this?? http://www.xgitech.com/products/products_duo.htm "dual GPUs on a single, DX9 Compliant board" "With an amazing 16 pipelines linked through a proprietary new bridge protocol" "Both Volari Duo processors employ XGI's next generation TruShader(TM) 2.1 Engine, taking vertex and pixel shading to a new level of realism. Combine this with built-in DirectX9 programmability and highly efficient pixel pipelines"
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!
What third major player?
Don't you mean *FIFTH* player?
XGI/(SIS+Trident)
Matrox
Xabre and XP4 (XGI/SIS/Trident)
Parhelia, P650, P700, P750 (Matrox)
XGI is cheap
Matrox has superfine picture quality, and triplehead
For S3 to suceed, it'll already have to better the cheap, or image quality, as those niches are already filled...
Goddamn Matrox, won't they ever learn they need to update their cards once in a while? The Parhelia could have been something if they fixed it after release.
It would only run at a decent framerate if the video was postage stamp size but at least it did it.... unlike some of the other boards with less features but better performance. As I recall I got it running through some really ugly mini GL hack/patch thing. Thankfully I also had a 3Dfx card at the time.
That the former CEO of 3dfx arrived just in time to drive the former S3 (aka Sonicblue) right into the ground (just like he did with 3dfx)? I don't really think of S3 graphics as being S3 seeing as how they are owned by Via.
"Hey, I just got a new Voodoo2! Yeah, I saw that TNT board, but that's just crazy. Nobody would buy an NVidia board, 3dfx is king."
"So you heard about 3dfx dying? Yeah, who woulda thunk. I just bought myself a Geforce 2. Radeon? What's that? Who'd want an ATI board? NVidia rocks."
"Man, those GFFX benchmarks are terrible. So much for NVidia. I'm happy with my Radeon 9700 Pro. Hey, did you hear about that new S3 chip? Ha ha. Idiots. There's no *way* they could break into this market."
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
for a Bit Boy board
...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.
Because S3 offer lousy Linux support, no DRI from their drivers, and when they release some code it's outdated and noone can make it work.
Buy NVidea, it may be binary-only but at least they work.
One little thing that I can not understand is why all the graphic cards are optimized for Direct-X ?
I mean, I know that MS-Windoze has almost all the market out there, but to design a chip and hardcode it to run Direct-X is just plain dumb - since that would play into the hand of Microsoft and the whole thing is turning into a really bad loop.
One thing about the open-source camp is that we are damn too stubborn to listen to the users - we design what WE want, not what the users want.
Look at X-windows.
It isn't have bad, but then, half-bad just isn't good enough when compared to Windows's Direct-X.
That's why it's so hard to get game developers to develop games that play on X-windows powered machines.
Darn it !
When will we ever gonna learn ?
Don't we know that we are running out of time ?
The market out there is NOT the servers' market, but the USERS' market !
We gonna have to listen to the USERS, and we gonna be market savvy in order to compete against Microsoft.
...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.
...slightly incompatible versions of it and the GX and the Trio[64[+]]. Which is one reason that the XFree86 drivers for most S3 cards suck.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...for their day. If their remappable memory-based register set had been cacheable, they would have been a winner. Or a reasonable DecSystem-10 emulator, anyway... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Everything is DirectX9 because it's the only standard available for advanced 3D graphics. OpenGL relies on extensions, but there is no spec defining what a graphics card HAS to have. DirectX9 requires advanced programmable pixel and vertex shaders, as well as other lovely features, implemented in hardware.
Actually, there's no disadvantage to the community when GFX card manufacturers implement DirectX features, as they are still accessible via OpenGL extensions. For example, Doom3 is an OpenGL game, but will make use of DirectX9 pixel and vertex shaders via OpenGL extensions. This is the best of both worlds; compatibility with open source operating systems as well as pretty graphics.
Remember the SiS Xabre Series? Of course you don't, you repressed those memories because they were just too painful. The Xabre had simply the worst quality graphics ever in a contemporary mainstream card. XGI is a spinoff of the SiS division responsible for that travesty.
It is still possible, I suppose, that they'll produce a decent graphics chipset and become a contender. ATI managed to do it with the Radeon, after all. However, I'm not holding out much hope.
The real catch is that the mid-range market is built in to the motherboard. Presumably Via bought S3 for this, but S3 seems to want to aim for the sky (sort of).
The thing that hasn't changed is that all big graphics companies got that way by challenging at the high end. S3 was there when they basically brought acceleration to PCs (for you whippersnappers, this was in the win 3.0 era). 3dfx reigned king, but couldn't replace the voodoo architecture, NVidia wrested control via TNT2, ATI was steadily losing market share until Radeon, I can't see how a "mid range" strategy is going to live. S3 is basically betting the company that ATI and NVidia will collude to attempt to keep prices artificially high, and then sweep away the midrange. Can't guarentee it will happen (just ask cyrix and winchip (also owned by Via) about trying to eat the crumbs of giants).
Wumpus out