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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."
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.
They said the same thing about Trident's new cards. And Matrox's (Parhelia). Both turned out to be horrible.
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.
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).
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.
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.
first, I stumble across your 'technically superior nVidia'.
;) nvr mind
A card that can't be quiet (as in, lower Db's then a system fan) is not in my lane. ATI is heads first right now, and until nVidia gets this thermo-thingy right (alas, low-noise), it sucks from my perspective...
And for S3: Well, it's always good to see some competition. S3 was the first for me in my 286, and then in a VESA version for a 486. Never really bothered with them again...
Matrox failed at it's pricing. I would have had a paraphelia (or whatever it's called), because I love the 3 screens thingy without all the hastle that I have now. But at the current pricing I'm sticking with the G550 and a pci card, and upgrade to a Radeon when needed. What really pissed me off, was that the g550 sucked at a game which a Geforce I could pull off easily. I don't play games all that often, but a two years old game, come on...wrong textures, slow framerate, etc.... Linux support is not that great either, so there goes another reason. Oh, your post was about S3..
So "used" cases that used "unused" could break, though older compilers in essence used "unused" to mean both "used" and
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!