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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
...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?
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."
'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
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.
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.
And the brethren went away edified.
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.
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!