Slashdot Mirror
The Return of S3
flynn_nrg writes "Just saw this article on ExtremeTech about S3's new graphics card. S3 is back on the scene with its first new GPU architecture in five years. Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category, which is currently dominated by ATI's Radeon 9600 XT and nVidia's GeForce FX 5700, both of which are under $200. Today S3 unveils the DeltaChrome S8 GPU, which represents the midrange of its upcoming line of DeltaChrome GPUs."
Welcome back S3..
Maybe it'll drive the prices down a bit.
Without some razzle-dazzle high end cards to "wow" people with, they probably won't get the publicity needed to sell these midrange cards.
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.
There is no god
I have been using out S3 supply (outrageously large) of these cards for servers for a long time. And it doesn't get any better then that.
Basically, we have tons of these things and they were used back in the day when we didn't spend all of our money on expensive computer peripherals.
I would recommend using these for anyone that does not use the computer as a workstation - such as a file server or in my case, a home machine that I ssh into. Heck, I don't ever turn on the monitor quite so often for that thing.
Go S3!
Wow.
There 3d cards sucked back in 96 when I bought my S3 virge. I figured it was going to be the defacto standard since Vodoo was new and never heard of. Just upgrading to NT4 and Linux from DOS, I assumed it was up to the game makers to provide the drivers and not up to directx and opengl to provide support.
But I have upgraded to 2 newer pc's since. I forgot all about them and assumed they went under. I doubt they will support FreeBSD/Linux and X as they did in the past with their own Xserver.
http://saveie6.com/
DeltaChrome. Sounds like a cheap mod you can buy for your Civic. I wish S3 would die and Diamond would come back.
...since VESA local bus (VLB) video died. Now THOSE were the days. Even AMD was really, really cool in a mainstream sort of way - anyone remember the 486DX2-80MHz? Or the 120MHz which was faster than the Pentiums at the time? A DX4 120 + a fast S3 VLB video kicked serious butt, at least in 2D and text modes.
But for only $150, nothing should hold this card back aside from name recognition. The $150 print point almost seals the deal for me, only that I'm holding out for better offerings from ATi and NVidia before moving up from my GeForce2 MX (I'm not much of a gamer).
.13 micron manufacturing process, the same as ATi and NVidia, which should allow them to crank out higher-speed cards within the next few months, at least allowing S3 to remain competitive.
Overall, I have to agree with the concensus that S3 is back, and may be primed to stay in the market for some time. The article mentions that they are using a
Either way, the video card market may just be heating up for 2004.
The Political Programmer
Right now, I have an NVidia card in my workstation and I hate it. Why? Because I have to choose between using the OpenGL renderer and staying true to my beliefs about software freedom. This basically means that I paid extra for a card that I can only halfway use.
S3, take heed. Give us a product that we can use and we'll support you. Do it. It's the right thing.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Mid-range graphics cards seem a slightly pointless purchase, given that you can buy top-of-the-range cards from 6 months ago for a fraction of their original prices (not to mention the second hand prices).
Why buy something mediocre but brand new, when you could buy something that absolutely kicked ass six months ago for a similar amount of money?
Organic free-range music... yum!
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system that produced performance similar to the then-current Geforce 2s (although some synthetic benchmarks indicated otherwise) while being priced more in line with the MX line of cards. After much reading and research, a buddy of mine decided to pick one up for his machine, his reasoning being that he wasn't a super hardcore gamer, but wanted to be able to throw down with us every once in a while.
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported, even though NEC (the chip designer) and Guillemot/Hercules (the card manufacturer) are still going strong. My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself.
The moral of the story: S3 is a reasonably well-known name. So is Hercules/Guillemot/NEC. It's gonna take a hell of a price/performance ratio to get me to recommend a video card not based on Ati or NVidia after the Kyro debacle.
http://www.tech-report.com/etc/2003q4/deltachrome- s8/index.x?pg=1
It looks like they have half a product. Good enough hardware, absolutely horrible drivers.
And I'm not talking about drivers that don't run quickly. I'm talking about drivers that render things incorrectly or even crash! Ugh.
At least with Intel's Integrated Graphics (or Nvidia or even ATI these days) even though they may not be the quickest on the block at least their drivers *work*.
So they're releasing a card with serious driver issues, where the top of the line model is expected to compete in the mid-price range market.
Wouldn't this be the perfect situation to open the source and getting the community to squeeze every last bit of performance outta their chip? It helps them save money on paying people to code the driver, and it gets the most outta their hardware. IN addition, it would also give them a healthy community that would reccommend this solution to friends/family that aren't into the bleeding-edge gaming machines.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Perhaps someone with some real knowledge could fill me in here.. but does anyone else remember Matrox 'coming back' less than a year ago with the Matrox Parhelia? This S3 return sounds like it could be the same, unless they make good on their promise of lower prices (and considering the price you can get a GeForce 4 MX for now.. it's a hard fight).
It seems the Parhelia was a card that was priced at more than most nVidia cards, yet provided no-where near the performance.. yet people still bought them. Why? I remember seeing the benchmarks and the Parhelia was absolutely shocking. Supposedly the only great thing was the FSAA quality but... you don't buy a card just for that, shurely?
So, what was so great about Matrox coming back with the Parhelia? I must have missed the point.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I used to use Diamond Stealth VRAM video cards (actually when I got my first "real" job we shared an AT compatible that had an EGA card (ooohh ahhhhhh -at the time)which were my first exposure to accelerated video. They delivered hardware BitBlT's with S3 chips and I loved them.
I Am Not A Graphics Chipset (IANAGC).
save the GNUs!
From the article: "One feature not on this list is compression of texture, color and Z data." I thought S3 invented S3 texture compression.
Actually, I think previous PowerVR chips before the Kyro II also had tile based rendering, but I could be wrong. This presentation on TBR discusses that it seems to be present in the Naomi arcade board and Sega Dreamcasts rendering pipelines, and I'm pretty sure the DC didn't have a Kyro inside, but some earlier PowerVR.
Bitch about the drivers though, I agree.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
The Kyro has a couple problems. See, it isn't cheap purely by virtue of better design. You have to figure that nvidia and ATI both have pretty decent engineers...
:(
In order to get the price lower you can do three things:
a) design a easier to manufacture/smaller chip with fewer transitors to cut down on manufacturing costs
b) use the effects of mass production to drive costs down (nvidia and ATI have this, not new comers)
c) cut into your profits
Assuming reasonably qualified engineers at nvidia, S3, ATI, Kyro etc the only way to achive A is to do engineering trade offs. Basically no transistors are free. In order to make it smaller you have to cut something. Matrox for the Parhelia went with a 256bit bus, but didn't have zbuffer compression which defeated most of the benefits of their wide bus.
Kyro cut features. The most obvious one is the lacking T&L hardware which was ok when it launched, but cards that don't have T&L can't play games with high poly counts like Homeworld2 at a reasonable frame rate.
They also cut less obvious features like Cubemap support. It turns out cubemaps are really useful for normal mapping. And they are a requirement for OpenGL 1.3. So while current cards support OpenGL 1.4 or 1.5 the Kyro cards are stuck at with OpenGL 1.2...
It may not be Kyro's software support that prevents it from running modern games, it could simply be that required features like cube map support can not be done on the Kyro.
Software support is a good reason to stick to the established companies like nvidia, ati, intel, matrox, and 3dlabs.
... the new architecture is based on 31-bit integer datestamps and is expected to roll over to zero before it is released.
http://delphi3d.net/hardware/
Could one of the reviewers give us a report of what version of OpenGL the deltachrome supports? What extensions does it support? How many instructions long can the fragment and vertex programs be?
GLInfo (w32 application) gives a complete list of all this.
Umm no as a gamer i can tell you... the thing is that to play at 1024X768 you'd still need at least 2x the amount at $150 for a decent performing DX9 card (with hardware support for the new shaders). By far at this range is ATI with their radeon 9600 pro and even better is their older model the 9500pro if you can find it.
Hmmm... Pie...
Tell him to check the web site. There are new drivers in the last month or two. Get them from Powervr.com, not Guillemot. I did the same thing and bought one. While it mostly rocks, it does run into the not-supported-game problem, and I'm about to have to get my THIRD fan for it. :(
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
They're better than their older cards. If I do remember correctly I had issues primarily with S3 cards when they were at the height of their popularity. I avoided them as much as I could, if only because in the early 90's the 200 dollar card capped out at 1meg of dram, which wasn't that bad but it was a hassle for some things.
I want a new video card, but no one makes the card I want. I do not give a crap about playing games, I want the modern equivalent of a Matrox card, one that is cheap yet renders beautiful color for 2D apps. Hell I still prefer the ATI Rage card with all 8mb of ram to the crappy Geforce with 64mb. I want clean bright color, I do not care how fast the card is. I am willing to pay about 50 bucks for it. So where is it? Maybe I need to find some new old stock matrox cards? Any pointers towards those?
Dues Ex 2 players, generally, can expect their speeds to cap out at 15 fps, regardless of the video card in use or screen resolution.
Someone's math is a little off here on how long it's been since the last S3 video card. The last card they produced(not counting numerous mobile parts) was the Savage2000, a DX7 class card designed to compete with the GeForce256 in late 1999/2000. The S2K of course had its infamous issues(defective T&L unit, S3/Diamond was accepting S2K's in trade for TNT2U's), but the point is that it has barely been 4 years, not 5.
http://www.diamondmm.com/
I totally disagree. S3 cards have one feature in great abundance: poor visual quality. Do not buy S3 cards for their 2D performance. The text looks blurry. At least they do colour better than nVidia. If you want good quality 2D that mama can read without needing her glasses, a Matrox or ATI card is your best bet.
Ha ha ha ... ha ha ha ... Oh wait. Were you serious?
I coulda written my post correctly, but I was high. If you can't understand it then I'll know why, 'cos I got high. x3
More computer hardware.
For my wife.
MOD-PARENT UP
Good point
They had to buckle under.
Sad to say, S3's new DeltaChrome technology is just a bit too late to the game to compete against ATI and nVidia. The only way S3 can compete is to price their cards at an extremely attractive price; if they don't do it, S3 will not be able to take marketshare from graphics cards that use ATI's and nVidia's lower-end graphics chips.
of Diamond/Supra/Micronics/S3/Sonic Blue/Rio/Via/Cyrix
I don't know who's who anymore!
Goatse link in parent's sig
They did. I use to have a second generation PowerVR. The bundled game package was nice, and the video quality was great (Tseng), and smooth (hard to describe, but the colors appeared cleaner. not a hint of lag). However Guiellmoint didn't keep up with the drivers. I and others complained to no effect on a forum devoted to the PowerVR (now defunt). Fast forward a little and I finally got tired of all the issues and got a Nvidia and have been with them since, although I may go to a Radeon next. Interesting was that RedHat would always hang during installation, and had to be setup manually. Not the Nvidia. Sold the PowerVR (practically had to give it away 32MB). And lets not start on my Guiellmoint sound card and the fight to get the open source drivers made.
Since when is $200 and under the midrange? Isn't that where video cards top out for most of the market?
I only purchased one video card in my life that was over $100 and it was noting spectacular compared to video cards in older systems I had around the house with half the video memeory. What are you people doing with video? Heck, I had a system with a 16 meg voodoo card that can play DVD's. And they are selling on ebay for 10 bucks.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
WHY?!
Trent Polack
www.polycat.net
I reciently bought a ATI AIW 9600 pro card, and It is one of the biggest computer let downs I have ever seen. The drivers were crap, and it took me the better part of two weeks to get all of the 'features' on the card to work.
Maybe now, with more competition in this segment of the market, the card makers will start putting out a good final product, and not make the buyers be the the BETA testers!
"I'm a Linux user, and I believe in/contribute to "the open source movement". When it comes down to it, however, I care a lot more about things working right than whether or not I have the source code."
I wasn't aware that you liked renting your hardware. what's that? You bought the hardware? Yeah, but you have to pay a "driver" tax to use it. Anyone get a bee in their bonnet, and your hardware is worth nothing to you, unless you "play by their rules" and dance. Hope you like dancing?
"I'm a Linux user, and I believe in/contribute to "the open source movement""
Doubtful, else you wouldn't need all this explained to you.
In fact, they've been updated fairly recently in fact.
They're fairly well supported, the Kyro2 I'm still using runs everything from Natural Selection under WineX to Enemy Territory natively under Linux without a hitch.
Unsupported? Hardly.
Don't us computer professionals deserve a usable video card for Eur 10,-- or so? Gamer/lamer crap and 5.1 Dolby sound has no place in the bulk of the computing world.
I recently quit one of the big 2 GPU companies to pursue other opportunities...which one is irrelevant, but this is an AC post none-the-less. This is a brief look at the business end...I'll leave the "it's great" or "it's garbage" discussions to others.
To use an overused buzzword, lets assume that the S3 chip has the best "price/performance ratio" of any chip. S3 still has little chance to gain any real market share, mostly because they have little chance to get in OEM systems.
Let me explain. The retail market (where you go to BestBuy or newegg.com) makes up a very small percentage of the overall market. I can't give real numbers (I don't know if they're NDA'd or copywritten by the research company, so better safe than sorry), but lets just say, it's the OEM sales that pay everyone's salaries and keep the investors happy.
Since OEM sales are so important, lets jump into the mind of the OEM. There are 3 major things that the OEMs care about when choosing the chip to put in their computers.
1)Does this chip perform SIGNIFICANTLY better than what we're already using?
2)Is there any benefit with using company X over company Y?
3)Are we getting a better deal from the new company?
So, what does this mean for S3 (lets throw in XGI also). To put it simply, change is difficult and expensive. Assembly lines need to be retooled, software needs to be changed and re-validated. There needs to be a good reason for an OEM to change.
Going down the checklist:
1) They do not, and never will, have a part that performs that much better than nVidia's or ATI's midrange part (if they keep the "we only want the midrange" strategy). This is because the big 2 can generate a better midrange part by either lowering the price on a higher-end part, or by tweaking the binning of the higher-end parts (a high-end part that fails may be able to run as a mid-range part). Obviously, the low and mid-range parts make up the bulk of sales (and therefore contribute most to market share), so there's no way ATI or nVidia would give up any market share without a fight...and both companies have much more ammo (graphics IP) than S3 or XGI.
2)Positive mindshare in the IT world is a HUGE thing. Most of the time it is more important than the quality of the product. Though, a good product usually generates a greater mindshare, it's not always the case (read: Microsoft...to the uneducated masses). In graphics, it's been shown that the easiest way to generate a positive mindshare is to have the fastest & most stable product. nVidia built it's reputation on it's Riva and GeForce lines. ATI got back in the game with it's 9700. For S3 or XGI to gain mindshare, it can't elicit a "ooh, it's competitive" remark. It needs a "holy shit, that's fast" remark...that or some kick-ass marketing.
3)This would have to be one hell of a deal. Switching involves a risk that they will not sell as many PCs (and make as much money) as they already are. If money alone is driving the deal, the OEM would have to feel that there is a good chance of them making more money while selling fewer PCs...it doesn't take an economics major to see what that would mean for S3's or XGI's profit margins.
So, how could S3 or XGI really take market share from ATI and nVidia? Simple, make the fastest part out there at a price that rivals what nVidia and ATI sell their high-end parts for. Can one/both of them do that? Maybe, but it won't be easy. If they can do that, then they will have a solid foundation for deriving the mid-range parts, and the mid-range parts will practically sell themselves.
Since the Xbox is just a pc with a specialized GPU basically, the games were made for a pc in the first place asshat. Here's your "stupid" sign!
It all depends where your priorities lie. You have a wife, which leads me to believe that you have a real life. I on the other hand, do not. Other than my bills, I have nothing to do with my money. My computer is the only thing that keeps me reasonably sane, so why not spend money on it?
OMW why didn't I think of that? :-P America would never do that because at its core it is (classical) liberal.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
3 years ago I had to choose between a gf2mx400 and a kyro.
Benchmarks showed kyro's tiling technology to result in higher framerates with the then current games.
Nvidia's card was more popular at the time and had no fan (my computer was already loud enough).
I ended up getting the mx400 but it proved to be too slow for ut2003 and unplayable with Deus Ex: Invisible War because of the missing pixel shaders.
I am unsure if the Kyro has that technology. That card was at least advertised as a full fledged card (i.e. not a feature lacking gf2) and I suppose it would have done the trick.
I exchanged my faulty gf2mx400 since then for a GF4TI4200 which was a marketed as a performance card back then. I was lucky to have an understanding store clerk. Gladly, it maintains an average of 30 fps for the latest games excluding the bad coded DX2. Now, it's only my 1Ghz Athlon which is a bottleneck. I've grown accustomed to the slightly noisy fan.
My point here is that one should opt for the less popular brand if there is a choice between a similarly priced budget card and a newcomer's performance card.
Tech Report also has DeltaChrome preview with screen shots of just how messed up S3's drivers are in some applications.
I'm glad S3 is back in contention. I have and am still using a S3 Savage 3D card which was fantastic value when I got it 3 years ago. Of course a Delta Chrome would be nice about now.. But I dont think my computer would handle it so well, what with its GPU being faster than my CPU.
I couldn't think of a sig.
I'm pretty sure that most intel based systems (or intel compatible) won't even POST without a video card of some kind plugged in.
Because the card is only an "adequate" performer so far. Of course, that review left a lot to be desired, synthetic benchmarks arent a good basis. More real games, less 3DMark2xxx. nVidia showed how easy it is to cheat at synth benches.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
interesting post, assuming he actually worked at one of those companies.
You made the correct choice. The kyro is missing T&L hardware so your poor Athlon would have to process every single triangle instead of simply handing entire objects off to the video card for processing. Also the Kyro is missing cube map support and is stuck at OpenGL 1.2 while your old GF2 supports OpenGL 1.4 (although shadows are emulated and not real time) and will probably soon support OpenGL 1.5.
I would never take a 1st generation challanger brand myself.
If I were to buy a card today it'd probably be a 5700 or maybe a 9600.
Ok, I just bought this card and it seriously took over a week to configure to get things stablize. I jumped around from the catalyst 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 before things would work decently.
I think if S3 can build a card with drivers stable on the first install... they'll have my money. From what I know the latest geforce FX5900 has the same problems. It's just mind boggling having to pay so much and still dealing with such a bad out-of-box-experience.
I am playing some of the most common games (RTCWET, battlefield 1942, call of duty) and they all took a massive amount of driver tweaks and install sequence to work right. The market is flooded with premature products if you ask me.
Just so you know...
Democratic Republic of the Congo is not primarily Islamic. In fact it is 70% christian according to the CIA, and only about 10% Islamic. It is a dictatorship but what is going on there has less to do with religion, than an incredibly brutal civil war motivated mostly by the lust of foreign capital for congo's natural resources.
As for Nigeria, it is not technically a dictatorship (as opposed to the USA, their current president actually recieved a majority of the popular vote, although there were some "irregularities" reported during the election). It is only 50% muslim, and the few provinces that have imposed Sharia law are opposed by the national government (every time someone convicted in a sharia court appeals to a national court). I am not sure, but I believe the executions of juveniles probably were confined to the period of military dictatorship which has since ended.
I don't know who these GeoForce or Attie Radon companies are, or even heard of them. I've been busy getting my web site ready for the new Duke Nukem launch and haven't had much time to go over any johnny-come-latelys in the 3D addon card scene. I'll ask my buddy Sal who works at Campo what the buzz on them are.
http://www.digitimes.com/NewsShow/Article.asp?date Publish=2003/12/19&pages=A7&seq=47
I don't know when the deltachrome will be on the market, but it looks like ATI and nvidia will have some new cards on the market possibly by April which will push the price of the 5900 and 9800 way down, which will in turn push the price of the 5700 and 9600 down which is going to put some serious pressure on everybody else.
I see XGI's Volari as the biggest compitition to S3's DeltaChrome.
What's the point to not releasing documentation, when your card is not "high speed"? What you have to hide?
By opening source of drivers and releasing documentation - company could gain:
And it means money, because better drivers and better karma means bigger sell.
Seriously... who really misses S3? :)
I'm sure this product will be of the highest standards ;)
Open sourcing the drivers, or at least releasing the specs, would be good insurance against that. In general, open source mitigates the risks of a company out of business, and that's true for both hardware and software.
nVidia and ATI may still keep releasing binary versions of their drivers for old cards, but constant upgrading of binary drivers from vendor sites is such a hassle that they might as well not. I run all my nVidia cards unaccelerated now and I'm not going to buy another one--it's just not worth the hassle.
Oh well, as cheap, junky, consumer-level computers are being made, S3 will always have a customer. Its all about the profit margin.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Remember the Kyro II? The chip used a unique tile-based rendering system ....
That bit was correct..
Flash forward a couple of years, and while NVidia and ATI are still willing to release updated drivers for their cards of that era, the Kyro lingers unsupported,
This is incorrect. IIRC, there was a new driver release about 1~2 months ago. Go look on the PowerVR web site.
even though NEC (the chip designer) and
Kyro was designed by PowerVR and ST. NEC were involved with the previous generations (including the Dreamcast version).
My friend wanted to play Halo, and even though the card should've been able to support the game (albeit at a lower resolution/framerate), he can't because his card is basically ignored and unsupported by the game manufacturers and the source comapnies for the card itself.
Ignored by whom? Certainly not the driver writers. There are, however, a number of games which were testing for the existence of HW T&L and refusing to run even when running T&L on a modern CPU resulted in perfectly acceptable performance. New drivers have been released which coerce such games into running. Obviously, if a game insists on, say, DX8/DX9-only features then there is little chance of getting Kyro to run!
Oh, BTW apparently Halo is running on Kyro.
Apparantly the S3 ViRGE made S3 cards known as decelerators. Does this go for my S3 ViRGE GX2 as well, or should my server, which has an onboard ATI Rage Pro become my desktop now?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I am stuck with no 3D graphics even in a 5 year old architeture.
I bought a S3 compatible videocard because I assembled my box in a budget. And it seens that the only hack to enable 3D on it is available for Xfree 4.2, and was never ported to Xfree 4.3.
I do not plan powergamming (or I would aim at a higher card), but I'd like to try with OpenGL hacking and programing, and even to get the KDE OpenGL screensavers running.
I just plead them to make an open architeture and provide either Open Source drivers, or information for the comunity to build them without pain.
-><- no
The fine folks over at c't magazine have a short preview of the DeltaChrome Chip here (article in German, use the fish).
Summary:
DX9 chip, 300 MHz pixel/ram clock. The S8 competes with the Radeon 9600 and the GF 5600Ultra and 5700, a higher clocked variant (the F1) is planned for Q2/04.
Mixed benchmark results (from "faster than the Radeon 9600 in UT2003" to "30 % slower than the 9600 in Serious Sam"). Problems with current drivers (black screen during "bullet time" scenes in MP2, Halo Timedemo crashes @1280 resolution). Very low power consumption (only 5 W, chip needs no active cooling even in graphics intensive games). Some interesting features (HDTV out, filtering of block artifacts in videos).
Given those first impressions, I wonder where S3 will position this chip in the market. The high end seems to be out of reach, and in the OEM and value market they're vulnerable to the phase-out offers from ATI and NVidia.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Overall, I have to agree with the concensus that S3 is back, and may be primed to stay in the market for some time.
Indeed.
I find this card interesting for home theatre applicatons, where 3d capabilities (while nice and IMHO necessary for a complete entertainment system, including xmame and 3d simution support) don't have to be cutting-edge fast. Of particular note is this card's component output capabilities and ability to do 1080p, 1080i, 720p, etc. Right now my home theatre PC has an ATI card connected to my TV's DVI input. However, the TV only has one DVI input, while it has three component inputs, so being able to connect the computer to a component input (and free up the DVI interface for an HDTV tuner) would be nice.
Of course, until and unless there are decent Linux drivers for the hardware it will be of absolutely no interest for those of us building truly DRM-free home entertainment systems. Which is where S3, like so many others, may shoot itself in the foot (more's the pity). Here's hoping I'm wrong, and we do so solid 3d, X11, and linux driver support for the mpeg2/mpeg4 chip, tv and component outputs.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Well, until I can determine S3's attitude to linux with this card I'll have to put it off.
d out of date information: http://www.alphalinux.org/archives/axp-list/1996/D ecember1996/0902.html
If anyone's got a recentish S3 and tried linux support give us a comment please,
That is, more details than:
"limited support" http://www.s3graphics.com/FAQ.html
basic howto: http://www.poulpetersen.dk/linux/uks3serv.htm
an
lack of detail: http://www.xfree86.org/4.0.1/Status27.html
((wish I knew how to do links))
A blog I run for the wealth
I think that everyone who is comparing this chipset with the high end ATI and Nvidia chipsets is missing the point.
The stated market for this thing is OEM sales to Mainboard producers. Doesn't it seem obvious that the inclusion of passable 3d and the ability to output to HDTV natively is positioning this for the set top box market?
How many discussions have there been of the new set top box market, or how to build your own PVR, on Slashdot in the last couple of months?
This chipset isn't for playing doom 3 on your dual monitor winxp system (though it might do that too), it is for using as a capable midrange chip in mini-itx systems, etc.
Just my $.02.
K
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
S3 Graphics Inc., a leading supplier to the 3D graphics accelerator market, today announced that Club-3D is the first PC board partner in Europe to announce graphics cards featuring S3Graphics' DeltaChrome Hi-Def DX9 graphics processor... I don't know if I would call S3 a leading supplier of anything!
Then they should have negotiated better licenses for those parts so they could release specifications and/or source code under a free software license. Or perhaps they could have made their own parts so they wouldn't have to work under another's licensing. Apparently other manufacturers do just this. They prove that it is possible to make a business selling video cards and release specifications or free software drivers. I'd rather buy from and recommend manufacturers like that so I can retain my software freedom.
Digital Citizen
By my interpretation of their website, they're primarily competing in the mobile video chipset market. The desktop video card is kinda an afterthought/marketing stunt. In the laptop market (particularly the low end laptop market), S3 has been huge, and NVidia and ATI are the upstarts. The customer base is getting more demanding for 3D capabilties. This is S3's response to prevent the recent erosion of their main market.
;-). (PS: S3, please remember Free Drivers)
I like S3, I've been happy with their equipment and staff. I wish them luck in moving forward into the 3D world
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category
Yes, aim low so that today's product has to be reinvented every 6 months. That's why S3 has always been synonymous with cheap (as in broken). NVidia/ATI figured this out a couple years ago when they started marketing high-end AND low-end products within the same chip families. So then you make one set of drivers that works for the gamers as well as the budgeters, and at one point you can even sell your aging overstock for a lower price because it's still good enough to sell.
S3 making cut-rate low-performance hardware is nothing new, and it always shoots them in the foot. By the time the product is released, it's already obsolete and they have to start over for the next. Bigger R&D costs for low-margin sales, that makes no sense!
Besides, people are now used to NVidia and ATI as household names, because they've partnered with Nintendo and MS Xbox. But S3 ? I'm sure most non-gamers will think it's a taiwanese OEM supplier, and they will be damn right!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Also at http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/s3_deltachrome _s8_preview/
Tech Report's was the best of the previews I've read.
Personally I found S3 with the crashed alien spaceship to be a lousy module. Bring back the village of Orlane!
At worst, that means you'll have to adjust options to possibly 'dumb down' the card a little to get the game in question working. So long as the game doesn't use pixel shaders or require hardware T&L as a runtime check instead of letting DirectX emulate it, the Kyro2 runs the game fine, especially OpenGL games.
And even the most problematic games can be forced to run correctly, though that involves effectively turning the Kyro2 into a 64MB TNT2 by disabling the tile buffer entirely, an option which isn't hard to enable when it's needed.
Then they should have negotiated better licenses for those parts so they could release specifications and/or source code under a free software license. Or perhaps they could have made their own parts so they wouldn't have to work under another's licensing. Apparently other manufacturers do just this. They prove that it is possible to make a business selling video cards and release specifications or free software drivers. I'd rather buy from and recommend manufacturers like that so I can retain my software freedom.
Well, you're in the minority. Most people are willing to accept binary drivers as an alternative to no drivers. Honestly, it makes no business sense to pay extra for licensing in order to sell to the 500 or so zealots that would otherwise not buy your card.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Gasoline is not a secret. It is octane for the most part
Erm, no. Very, very wrong. For starters octane isn't actually a chemical as such, but a group of 18 different isomers with the chemical formula C8H18. The octane that people talk about when talking about gasoline is usually 2,2,4 trimethyl pentane, or iso-octane. This is the thing that has an octane number of 100. n-heptane has an octane number of 0. (Just to add fun to the whole thing there are two commonly used octane numbers - RON and MON for research octane number and motor octane number repectively).
Anyway, back to gasoline. Station gasoline typically has about 300 major fuel components in it, and thousands, if not millions, of minor components. These vary from depending on the time of year (slightly different refinery streams are used for "winter" and "summer" mixes), and from feedstock to feedstock (different crudes will produce different gasolines). This is the stuff that is the rw fuel, and to be specified as gasoline of a particular standard it needs to meet certain tests (octane number, vapor pressure, density, total aromatics, and some others).
When a refinery produces a stream that meets the specification then it generally sells it to all and sundry - this is why you see Exxon fuel trucks in a Shell refinery. Then the oil company adds the additive package - for gasoline this will contain (usually) a detergent, anti-foam additive, wear inhibitors, and a possibly things like anti-hazing, a valve-seat recession inhibitor, surfactants, dyes, and lubricity additive. Also, in some markets, there are anti-couterfeiting additives (which definitely are secret).
Small changes to the mix can cause big effects. For example in the early nineties there was a big drive to reduce the level of sulphur in fuels (from 40ppm to 10ppm). This was no big deal to do chemically, but when low sulphur fuels were first tested there was a problem with wear in fuel pumps. This was eventually traced to the fuel not sticking to the exposed pump surfaces and providing lubrication, and so lubricity additives were invented.
If I had pure octane, and mixed it with ethanol on a 87-13 basis, I'd be able to run my car without a problem.
Highly unlikely - if you had a fuel injector car the nozzles would quickly wear (iso-octane and ethanol have very poor lubricity). You would get coking problems in your engine (probably - a good oil may keep these at bay) due to a lack of detergents. And loads of problem in the long term. Nightmare.
I think that's why we need to teach more people about the ethics that started our community and keep the Free Software community going strong even in the face of SCO questioning the validity of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Microsoft's CEOs going on speaking tours talking about how the GPL is a "cancer". I believe that people will choose to take a demonstrably ethical route to doing something when that route is also convenient. Similarly, in another vein, I think that as more people learn about Wal-Mart's employment practices and how they maintain low prices, more people realize that shopping there is sealing one's own fate.
To that end, if we had a hardware database that only listed hardware you could run entirely with Free Software, and if this database were very easy to use (even for novices), we could more easily steer people to companies that work with us. We have the beginnings of such a thing now: lists of video card chipsets that work with XFree86, scanners that work with SANE, printers that work with various Free Software drivers, but some of these are still too hard to use and they're not all found in one place. I'm not sure exactly how this new database would work, but I think one-stop-shopping is one of the highlights. I believe the Free Software Foundation wants to work on something like this, but they don't currently have the funding to do it. Perhaps someone with the hosting and space could work with them to get this going?
Digital Citizen