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S3 DeltaChrome S4 Graphics Chip Reviewed
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has a preview of S3's budget DeltaChrome S4 graphics chip for PC graphics cards. While not the fastest option for games, the S4 looks like a credible alternative to ATI and NVIDIA's dominance of the graphics market - there are some handy analysis graphs comparing performance in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Far Cry. Better still, the S4 has component HDTV output built right into the chip, making it an intriguing option for home theater systems."
we're all going to go broke upgrading these things
Being in the market for a new graphics card (Doom 3 anybody?) I have to admit this wouldn't even show up on the radar. I have enough concerns about ATI stability, or the fact that I need to buy a separate minitower and nuclear power supply to power the nVidia cards.
The component out is a major selling point however, for home theatre people anyway who might want to play the occasional game.
This is more interesting for being the graphics technology that will be incorporated in upcoming VIA integrated chipsets however.
I'd still get a low-end ATI or nVidia card above this however. What will S3's support be like for Linux?
Not a top score, but an alternative more credible than XGI, IMHO.
Bye!
SeqBox
But does it have Dual Data Link output?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I thought S3 was bought out or disbanded or something quite a while ago. Is my memory playing tricks on me? Since when did they start making chips again?
And making decent graphics chips, no less. As someone who used a S3 ViRGE for much more time than anyone should have to, this is a certainly a surprise to me....
While not the fastest option for games, the S4 looks like a credible alternative to ATI and NVIDIA's dominance of the graphics market
As far as I'm concerned, as a Linux user, I will dump my nVidia card and buy you a cartload of S3 cards the day you contribute a full-featured GPL driver to the Linux kernel, and GL stuff for X released under the GPL as well.
I wish those graphics card companies realized there isn't much to lose in opening up a driver's code (no, it won't release trade secrets if the hardware interface is generic) and everything to gain by grabbing the emerging hi-perf graphics card market for Linux.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Will they be nice and provide specifications to programmers who ask for them?
open source video drivers? I'm sure the underdog would be more than happy to please.
It's is always good to have alternative manufacturer on the market. For example I still use Geforce 2MX and do not need any faster video card. It fast enough to play QIII from time to time with coworkers :) So I bought radeon 9200 for all new comuters in my office and they are perfectly used for web programming, UNIX administration etc.
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Just programming specifications, the community will do the rest.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I think all 9xxx series and newer Radeons have component out capabilities. No need to resort to S3 for an HTPC. The 9000, 9200 and I think several 9600 models are fanless too, making them better choices for home theater use. It does require an adaptor though, I think it is $20 to $30 direct from ATI.
It's not that I don't welcome another challenger in the graphics arena, I still have a bad taste from their previous sad attempts to compete.
Why I can get PDFs or books full of info about AMD, Intel, ARM or TI processors so I can program them, avoid the "errata" problems, target new CPUs better or whatever, but ATI or NVidia can not provide any basic info now? Do they have anything to fear from others programming their chips?
I doubt the validity of these benchmark:
unless the radeon 9550 is radically different than 9600 pro (which I own), the 9550 should destroys in any benchmark test the nvidia 5200 fx(which I also own). 5200 is in fact just a little bit faster than a gf4mx440.They are two very low-end by today standard. 9600 (and so is 9500) is a mid-range card. So why in most test the 5200 got better result than 9550? Even more,I'm not even sure than 9550 exist. I know for sure 9500 and regular 9600, but these two are two close in performance for worthing a half '50 version.
Does anyone know more about the component outputs?
from the pictures it looked like it was an adapter that went to the svideo port, however from the small picture they had it was hard to tell.
I really don't know all that much about the video standards and wiring capacities, but I thought svideo couldn't cary hdtv signals.
also important is visual quality. Most in the industry have gone simply for frames per second. Actual text is often blurry, colours bad, etc. Has S3 done well in this department?
(My next graphics card purchase is going to be an SLI-capable PCI-Express card.)
...and I'll say it again.
XGI, S3/Via and anyone else who wants to get into the 3d card market, write full featured DRI drivers for linux and GPL them. They will become the geek's choice standard in no time. Especially with all of this xorg/dri/composite/glitz/cairo stuff coming along.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I recall that when the XGI graphics cards came out, they were touted as being a third competitor in the field dominated by ATI and nVidia. I haven't heard (or seen a mainstream product) any XGI news since. Can this really be another competitor for ATI/nVidia? I think the two major companies have a huge advantage in terms of product noteriety and also in the R&D fields; they have been producing mainstream cards for a long time now, and have most likely tried a lot of new methods and solutions to boost performance. I applaud this card as a choice, but it seems more like a niche card; it'll certainly be good for Media Center-type computers. We'll just have to see where this goes.
because thats 5200 Ultra.
5200 Ultra - Chipclock 325mhz, Memoryclock 650mhz
5200 - Chipclock 250mhz, Memoryclock 400mhz
for example 5200 Ultra is faster than 5500.
I just put a delta chrome spoiler on my Neon.
Yawn. SiS video bridges have had YPbPr output since 1999, and that S4 doesn't seem any faster than any current non-ATI/NV mainstream card (Parhelia, SiS Xabre, Via, SiS 66x/760, XGI - yes, there are XGI cards available, even with a linux driver, not entirely open source, though). Why exactly is this news?
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Spend less than 30 bucks an add a component HDTV adapter to your Radeon card:a sp?desc ription=14-999-204&depa=0
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Actually, VIA (who own S3) were very nice to me. I told them that I wanted to write an X driver for their graphics chip (the CLE266 northbridge with integrated graphics). They sent me an NDA and then the register documentation.
And they did actually already write their own driver which was released as opensource (although I'm not sure of the license) for XFree86 including all of the "GL stuff".
IMHO S3/VIA are very appreciative of opensource work and are very supportive of opensource developers.
I do not represent myself.
sorry but you are certianly wrong on the geforce fx 5200.
I have both here. the geforce 4 MX440 and a FX5200 both 128 meg ram and the 5200 kicks the crud out of the geforce 4 in ut2004 and other games.
I get better framerates and overall better looking output.
the 5200 is horribly underrated, it is a kicking good budget card to get ($68.00 at my local comuter superstore).
side by side on the same hardware platform the 5200 is certianly faster than the geforce 4.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I also own a 9600 Pro ;)
Another poster already mentioned that it's a GeForce 5200 Ultra, but still the results a re somewat strange.
Their test system is an Athlon 64 3200 with Corsair XMS3500 DDR SDRAM.
I'll compare their results with this summary (sorry it's in russian, but the numbers should be clear enough).
Their system is a p4 3.2Ghz, 2x512 RAM.
TechReport 3DMark scores at 1024x768
Radeon 9550: 2191
GeForce FX 5200 Ultra: 1990
DeltaChrome S4 Pro: 1781
And 3Dnews 3DMark scores, same resoulution:
Radeon 9550 XT : 3115
Radeon 9500: 2687
GeForxe FX 5200 (non-ultra): 1294.
They don't have the exect same cards, but this should give the overall idea.
The problem with the video card market can be seen right here. Look at the Slashdot section this is in: Games.
Video card manufacturers have stopped marketing their products to normal people, and have focused on gamers. Your MeshBlitter 99900 FireCore+ selling for 599 dollars and 99 cents isn't going to do a damned thing to improve my word processing. Heck, it will probably make it worse by driving me nuts with the attached Hoovermatic cooling system.
Yeah, all you gamers living in your parent's basement are going to mod this down for heresy, but the truth cannot be ignored, and that truth is that most people don't need more RAM for their GPU than their CPU.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I remember my s3 stock got bought out by somebody a few years ago.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There are 64 and 128bit version of the fx5200 out there, most of the new ones are 64bit and they are fairly slow, this confuses a lot of people. The model reviewed is an fx5200 _ultra_ 128bit, the ultra is considereably faster then the non ultra. The Radeon 9550 is identical to a 9600 except the gpu is clocked at 250 instead of 325 (both 400mhz memory).
know about the current situation. The new iMac is based on the G5 processor. We could not secure the necessary supply of G5 processors to launch our new iMac on schedule: and as we indicated a few weeks ago, we now plan to announce and ship it in september.' Apple made $61 million dollars profit on $2.01 billion dollars in Q3/04 and had the highest CPU shipments in three and a half years."
The goal for S3's execs, though, is to get it on the map and make enough noise for one of the big boys to buy it out.
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doesn't mean it's a good thing to do. "Amateur" Linux 3D market is so minuscule, writing and GPLing a driver will never pay off.
...that I have with this review is its continued emphasis on 3DMark 2003. I thought it had been established a long time ago that the benchmark was skewed strictly toward the companies which funded its development, and that abundant evidence existed to suggest that it was deliberately designed to perform poorly on competitors' hardware. Being dismissive isn't something I really enjoy, but seeing everyone forget about a well-publicized debacle and go along with the flow is a little sad... ...but in any case, I'm damned happy to see S3 coming back. If the S4s are inexpensive enough I'll pick one up for my Thunderbird 1.3 to grind a little more life out of it. The multimedia functionality's appealing, the drivers seem to be "with-it," and it's an alternative to ATI and Nvidia's offerings that doesn't trip over its own incompetence. What's not to like?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
3dfx did open their drivers and last I checked, they never caught up with the performance of their closed source win drivers. Plus there were some other issues that always cropped up with 3dfx and linux.
This is a situation where I thought open source would shine.
How many people need more than a 400mhz plaintext machine for their word processing.
Not many.
Never underestimate the power of marketing and the will of rich people to get richer.
Hopefully this TV out isn't like the one on my IBM laptop and fv25 shuttle motherboard. Those are sparatic, they shut off the monitor, they don't correctly align on the screen, they go blank randomly, and they reduce the monitor resolution when you have the option turned on. They are absolutely terrible.
I do security