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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."
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?
Are we forgetting about the Matrox Parhelia?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 some support for those, which might be ported to DRI.
Even the ancient S3 Virge might get some DRI support (there some stuff in DRI for it, but it hasn't been finished, and might never be)
So, maybe, just maybe they might be open to the idea to give out specs, or drivers for their new series.
You're right, and you use the same argument I used when PowerVR was considering open sourcing their DRI based drivers: PowerVR could not really compete with what came out of nVidia and ATI at the time the Kyro came out, so, if I have to use binary-only drivers, I might as well get nVidia cards, which are pretty well supported on Linux.
So my money goes to whoever offers a reasonable card with open drivers. Right now, for me personally, this means an ATI9200 on my desktop, and a 855GM in my laptop. Matrox used to get my money, but they dropped the ball big time: with the G550 you need a (user-space) binary only module if you want to use basic features like DVI, and the Parhelia Linux drivers are just a half-closed, buggy, no SMP, Quake3 only, total mess. And that is their on-request-only, "PRO" CAD driver.
Poor game performance. The image quality and multihead are superb.
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.