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S3 Graphics Comes out of Hiding with Chrome20
Steve from Hexus writes "S3 Graphics, having been quiet for a while, has today announced a new graphics solution, Chrome20, with which they intend to take some market share away from ATI and Nvidia. From the article: 'We were offered a chance for some hands on play with a mid-range Chrome20 series desktop board - the machine was loaded with over 40 top games. A quick run of Half Life2 , Far Cry , Halo and a couple of other titles demonstrated that S3G's new 90nm mainstream card was working without any visual problems and with very playable frame rates.'"
{blink}
UTF-8: There and Back Again
So, how about Linux drivers? Free ones?
The picture of the fan sink was the best part.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Will it run all my "S3D" games that came with my 4MB Virge card 10 years ago?
You'll see me at Fry's....
Is it a "graphics solution" or a PCI card? Sheez.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Please stay dead you suckered many a poor fools back in the mid ninentys if you wiki Hell you should come back with S3 + Cyrix 686
you were never loved always loathed Please return back under your rock.
... when S3 will adopt the Quantum-Optical technology!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Because you'll need that to view the slideshow that S3 cards produce in 3d games.
I've heard these will be bundled with a 6.8GHz 1TB RAM and 2TB HDD Laptop.
Yah I know, call me Mr. Run-on
How bout you actually release a version of the real card without 1TB of memory onboard for the people who just want to play every once and a while.
Read: Nowhere near the performance of ATI/NVIDIA.
Unless they plan on taking over the integrated graphics, $300 PC market, why bother?
Isn't waiting for a high performance video solution a lot like waiting for a flawless shuttle launch? It has been a long time, a VERY long time since S3 could compete with any of the other major players in performance. They have always been the cheap integrated solution, or the cheapo get by with the bare minimum expansion card type of product. Not gonna hold my breath waiting for S3 to run the next generation video games, let alone current ones.
you don't just wake up one christmas morning and have a card that can compete with the big boys
did you forget to take your meds?
Apologies for going off on a tangent, but precisely what the fuck is with all those links on the linked article? Pop-up windows were bad: pop-up divs and layers are worse. Now we have companies like IntelliTXT vomiting multiple tiny pop-up divs in pages, waiting to dazzle you with scores of sponsored links every time you accidentally mouse over one of their keywords.
Blech.
No one I know is going to buy something from a company that disappears for a few years at a time and then pops up with some midrange stuff...
Com'on these guys will be done selling video cards by Christmas, if they last that long... then they'll disappear again.
Back in 1995, SGI should have dumped its proprietary hardware: specialized graphics chips and MIPS. SGI should have created the following dream box: Linux + ARM + commodity graphics chips from NVIDIA, S3, Chromatics, etc.
The special sauce that greases every component is OpenGL. SGI should have leveraged its software technology and dominated the graphics market for decades to come.
Yet, no one at SGI listened.
The critics warned that x86-plus-commodity-graphics-chips would eat SGI's lunch. The critics were right.
NVIDIA hired all the employees away from SGI
Solid support is *much* more impotant to me then politics. I use Linux because it works for me and works well, same reason I use Nvidia cards under Linux.
Quack, quack.
*in head-to-head comparisons against high end ATI / NVidia cards in Windows Safe Mode.
If you think
OK, did they have 40 CD-ROM drives installed on the system? Because I'm sure that most of these games use SafeDisk which requires the CD as a key. Oh, they wouldn't rip them to HD and then use a cd clone program, would they? :-)
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Isn't this the way S3 does it every time? Let's see:
Step 1: S3 introduces a new graphics card. The name is similar to one they've previously made, but you've never seen that card before because no-one wants to produce and sell one. Specs seem similar too. As usual, it's supposed to be a mid-level card that won't "take on the big boys" but is supposed to have mainstream performance.
Step 2: Hardware review sites get a prototype board. They either experience a number of driver glitches, or performance that is vanilla enough that no-one is all that excited.
Step 4:Joe Gamer reads the review, and buys a tried-and-true midrange solution from ATI or nVidia that doesn't have the driver issues S3 was famous for in cards that actually made it out the door.
Step 5: S3 has teething troubles with the GPU, or the drivers, or production, delaying the chip's release until its performance is at the low-end, yet priced $20-40 above others' low-end cards.
Step 6: The lackluster performance of the GPU relegates it to boards made by one dinky little vendor nobody has heard of and doesn't trust, with nonexistent support. S3 has to lower their prices on the GPU to get any sales at all.
Step 7: S3 doesn't profit.
I'm just curious...how does S3 manage to keep their graphics card business afloat? Aside from a few integrated solutions on VIA chipset mainboards, I can't see any products they manage to make money on.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
Hardware awaiting those sent to hell:
S3 Virge
VIA KT chipsets
Creative Labs 3DO Blaster
Iomega ZIP
Iomega Buzz
IBM Deskstar
Tandy CDR-1000
HP 5L
Cyrix 386 to 486 CPU Doubler
Anything Belkin
I'm sorry you clicked on this :)
I wonder if this is Cell-based--
its 8 pixel pipelines, 90nm process, low voltage, "highest core clock of any GPU to date" . . .
That sounds a lot like Cell.
It's a small market, true, but what exactly would S3 lose by opening up its drivers? They'd instantly become the graphics card for anyone running Linux. It's a small but real benefit---and what, then, would be the cost to them?
Apple users are a small market, but they're incredibly loyal. Why wouldn't S3 get in on that action?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
After reading the article and seeing that S3G has stated "No comment" after being asked about including HDMI on their cards, perhaps they may want to shoot for the, ummm, grey market where people who DO NOT want their computers controlled by outside forces buy their equipment? Maybe even supply areas of the world that want HDMI but without the annoying HDCP that goes along with it so they can still use older monitors/TVs _AND_ still get high definition video - not "oh, that's not a registered device with Central Command Authority! Thou shalt have only 480i. No HD for you!!"
Personally, I'm getting beyond tired of technology companies who, some singularly and definitely collectively, make more money than Holly-hood, err, Hollywood bending over backward to placate them. Yes, I know that the studios/**AA control the media/content for the most part but if the _major_ technology players stand up and say "Well, we control the technology everyone uses to your content and there is no other tech company(ies) large enough to challenge all of us so THIS is how we're going to play ball." then WTF would Hollywood do except try to get more laws passed? Then all the technology companies that opposed Hollywood could band together to fight that off as well - dollar for dollar and then some. What would happen to the products that those companies that stood up to Hollywood do - especially when the tech-oriented crowd started praising them to friends/family/etc? Sell multiple, multiples of items that are free of DRM and friendly to the CONSUMER? Wow, what a frigging concept! Make products friendly towards the consumer, don't treat them like a dollar with a body attached, treat fair use rights as they should be treated, don't treat the customer like a criminal from the get-go, tell the **AAs to fuck off and fight piracy where it counts (you know, those media distributors in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Russia, etc), and make millions upon millions of dollars.
Whew, I've had a very long day.. I think I need lots of sleep now. Sorry for the rant.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
I'd like to see S3 expand the market into the general purpose processing market. If their new GPUs were supported as GPGPUs, they might get people to buy their cards to increase all performance, without relying only on Intel and AMD to push CPU performance.
I've been waiting to see "coprocessor" PCI cards become popular, especially among gamers. I remember when we could buy "math coprocessors" to augment relatively slow/cheap math onboard the x86. That was before CPU manufacturing/marketing economics selected for all CPUs to have fast math sections, but with cheaper ones leaving the circuit lines "cut" to the fast part. Maybe that marketing hustle has inhibited the addition of "redundant" coprocessor chips.
GPUs are really just fast math coprocessors, optimized for graphics math and fitted with video coder chips. Gamers are the primary performancemongers and live at the bleeding edge of cranking performance. So they're the natural demanding market for pulling GPGPU products across the bleeding edge into mainstream architectures. Especially since GPGPUs aren't "Central", they're more likely to be "stackable", scalable processing units dynamically allocable for whatever's found at boot.
What we really need are GPUs that have "public" interfaces, either HW or SW (open drivers) that others can harness for GPGPU. Let's see if that kind of competition expands the market for these GPUs, instead of just fighting ATI and nVidia for the current market.
--
make install -not war
"Chrome20 is by no means going to take on the high-end cards, instead looking to provide good performance for your more average user."
Average users don't tend to replace their cards very often. If they do, they'll go with a 6-month-old card from a major player, not a formerly-OK company that basically seems to be saying "Look at us! We're as good as anything else! w00t!"* And until computers run on $3/gallon gasoline, I don't think "lower power consumption" is going to move a lot of cards.
As for "better performance" when it comes to HDTV... huh? Lots of rigs today can play HD video just fine, and unlike games, video does not benefit much from an ability to show more FPS--once you get past 30, you're pretty much done. Besides, video playback--a series of raster images--has not been much of a problem for years now. It's rendering polygons that's hard.
Sorry, S3, but I don't think this will do much for you.
* except for the fact that it's not actually shipping yet, and those other cards have had drivers out for years, and games are already optimized for them, and...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
... your "employment solution" for just a month and half post-"educational solution"?
I for one hope that S3 is successful in their attempt to get back into the market. More competition is a good thing. While I don't see them necessarily competing with nvidia or ATI at this point, one can only hope that they use this as a foothold to break back into the higher end markets in a few years. It can only mean faster and cheaper videocards for everyone. I understand that the cynics have a bit of history on their side when making fun of S3, but it ticks me off a little when I see people practically rooting for them to fail.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
I work for one of the major two major players in this market so I am probably a little biased.
The way I read this is yet another small player wants to run with the big boys. What makes this one different? Well they admit up front that they can't compete in the high end so they will target the low end. Is this going to make a difference? I highly doubt it. I predict a flop.
I'm not trying to be too harsh. I'm just stating it like I see it. Personally I'd like to see another player in this market, but I doubt it will ever happen unless someone like Intel decides to make high end graphics cards. Both ATI and NVIDIA spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D to make their high end cards and all that R&D is applicable to the lower end discrete cards. The lower end cards now days use most of the great ideas we've come up with for the high end cards, but we just do fewer pixels in parallel thus using fewer transistors. Our lower end cards are also fairly power effience even though this article didn't mention it (almost like want people to assume our low end cards use 100W just like our high end cards do). Unless another company spends that kind of money I doubt they'll compete. I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely.
I think the graphics industry is becoming less and less likely to have a major revolution (i.e. to something other than triangle based rendering); which would make it much easier for a new player to get into the market. Graphics for the PC with all its legacy software is becoming more like the irreplaceable x86 platform everyday. If we do change to something completely different it will probably come to a console first, but the longer we go on optimizing algorithms and hardware for these triangle based systems the more unlikely such a revolution will come.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design, but Intel and AMD have spent so much time/money optimizing it that nobody can seem to come up with a new general purpose CPU that is better. I think the same thing is happening with graphics. The weird coincidence is that both of these fields have 2 major players...
S3 has an almost perfect track record of making ok hardware and then allowing it to die off quickly due to virtually non-existant after sales support.
Even if a new S3 card showed a 15% performance increase over the fastest card on the market I wouldn't buy one for that reason alone. I can't readily think of another company that has dropped the ball as many times with its buyers having lived to tell about it for as long as S3 has.
With Windows Vista requiring hardware acceleration (or at least requiring it for a decent user experience), there is a large amount of pressure on GPU manufacturers to produce well performing cards. Over the last 10 years there has been a clear divide between performance cards and cards that are simply good enough for people to "browse the web and send email." Furthermore, with the advent of programmable GPU's, cards are becoming much more complex to produce; transistor counts are higher than the latest CPU's and designing competitive CPU's requires experts. Many low end GPU's emulate much of the programmable GPU functionality through hardware, which isn't going to be acceptable in Vista which requires a SM 2.0 (DX9) capable card. It's time for the GPU makers to put up or die.
I bought an AMD64 cpu to run a 64bit operating system, namely FreeBSD. Had I chosen a NVidia card I'd be SOL, since their stupid proprietary driver isn't available for the FreeBSD/amd64 platform. No thanks, for my limited use a Radeon 9200 does fine. NVidia can take their proprietary hardware and shove it up their ass.
Thank you for expressing what I've been trying to say for years.
-- $G
Even on powerful systems, decoding and displaying HDTV content can be tough. The current S3 "Unichrome" integrated video processors include MPEG decoding capabilities. This goes well beyond MPEG acceleration in XvMC / DxVA.. It does most of the MPEG processing in hardware, rather than only the iDCT/MC.
Hopefully these new cards will continue to support MPEG decoding.. If so, I'll buy one & ditch my Nvidia with their closed source binary drivers.
But, I would need to understand a few issues before taking the plunge:
- Are the specs & source code for the card fully open? (VIA / S3 have had some issues on this front in the past).
- Are these cards available for purchase? The S3 DeltaChrome & GammaChrome cards were not available as far as I could tell. Only the unichrome was available, as an integrated video option on VIA motherboards.
- Does it have full MPEG2 decoding support?
- Does it have MPEG4 accel support? How about MPEG4.10 / AVC accel (or full decoding)?
If S3 introduces supported, GPL-compatable licensed drivers, I will buy your board. Linux support is really the #1 criteria in all my hardware purchases these days - since I now use Linux both at work and home and pretty much never reboot to windows anymore.
I've got a shuttle XPC sitting next to my monitor with a GF6600GT sounding like a vacuum cleaner. I'd buy anything with comparable performance for $200 if it didn't have a fan or any funny "2 slot heatpipe to the back blocking PCI cooler. That said, I don't think my card is available yet. Nor am I a large market.
The big guys have given up on fanless cards. If S3 says they're low power, I hope they don't need one. Fanless actually is a market.
S3 works by a two-part stratgy:
1) They pay their programers and assembly-line workers as little as possible
2) They don't have that many workers
Combine these two facts with the deals they signed with Toshiba in the late 90's and early 00's, and you'll have gotten enough money to keep a small company going for a few more years.
I think S3 makes lousy cards (I had all hell getting any 3d games to run on it; mine(S3 Supersavage 16mb card) won't work at all on windows 2000, and there's no support for their cards on linux (offical or Xfree). BUT, the problem is that ATI and Nvidia have pretty much locked in the video card market. We need alternatvies to these companies, so that if one sues the other to death, we won't have a Microsoft situation on our hands.
got a little off topic there, but the bottom line is that S3 keeps their profit margins high by having a small company which relies on their pact with Toshiba (one of the largest laptop makers) to get money. They'll be gone in a few years, I bet.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
So you know the fully open driver, for a fully accellerated video card? Available today? Can I get it on a laptop?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I have a geforce4, and I've had several recent nvidia drivers that didn't work, and sometimes the older drivers don't get along well with newer kernels. Fortunately, there's a reasonably recent driver that works well with fedora core 4, but about a year ago I had to spend a few days getting Fedora Core 3 to work with an old Nvidia driver. (I had to patch both my kernel source (to un-deprecate a function that the nvidia driver needed) and the source code of the part of the nvidia driver that interfaces with the kernel.)
I frequently see posts like the Grandparent asking why hardware vendors don't open up their video card drivers. The reality is these are HARDWARE vendors. They have outsourced much of the SOFTWARE development of drivers to third-party companies that have strict licensing requirements about how their code is going to be used. It isn't even so much about "know how to make their product perform better than yours" as it is keeping their lines of code in-house and private so they can get a contract to do another video card driver in the future.
For the video card companies to get unrestricted use of this code would cost them piles more cash than what they paid for the limited usage.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Not a troll. Sorry that nobody here has any common sense. Why should S3 be breaking their back to release a driver for an incredibly small share of the market? Their first goal is to get the hardware out the door with a set of stable Windows and Mac drivers.
Why is that funny? I don't get it. Maybe I'm just too tired after a day of classes... But it seems to me like the guy loves linux and is also really political. They aren't mutually exclusive you know.
Oh wait is that because he's contradicting himself? I think I get it now. Sorry.
We always used to refer to S3 as "Shit Cubed".
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Every now and again we here from S3 and these lesser companies and its always the same bullshit. We have a card that will compete. Never seems to arise though does it. Even the onboard industry is starting to be dominated by the big two.
Not that I'm against competition, I'm all for it. I just don't feel anything but skepticism when I read these reports now.
...and bought MS-DOS. Look what happened. Maybe it was a bit of luck, but that doesn't mean it's impossible it can't happen again.
SGI also partnerred with nVidia and shared some technology that went into the GeForce chipsets.
Then they started using nVidia cards in their low end systems. So, in a way, they adopted commoditized hardware.
They have low end Itanium and possibly Xeon systems with nVidia graphics and SGI boards, bandwidth, etc. And MIPS workstations with nVidia graphics or possibly custom SGI stuff. And they still got their high-end which the commodity market can't touch because nVidia has no interest in building industrial strength graphics tech for the PC.
Gamers don't care if a few pixels are off color by a few bits, as long as they're close to the right place and the right color. PC users care more about frame rate than quality, etc.
Most PC users, like the market for these S3 chips, are happy if they get graphics at all. They don't care if they're 800x600 or 1280x1024, as long as they're somewhat readable and mostly flicker free. They'll skimp on a monitor because their computer is nothing more than an internet enabled type writter for them.
I, personally, want good 2d and video and open drivers for multi-display cards. TV-out would be awesome. I also want good 3d with open drivers, but that is not as important. I can settle for closed 3d drivers as long as I have the option of getting a fully functional open 2d card.
But these graphics companies intellectual property is too valuable to them to give us specs. We should punish them financially for it, but we won't. We'd rather have shiny graphics than stability, performance, features, fair and balanced benchmarks for real tech comparisons, etc. Its so much easier to not think about anything and outsource everything to the lowest bidder.
ATI's annual R&D (Aug 2004) was $270 million. NVidia's (July 2005) was $85 million.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
except he's not.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
The Virge was definitely a dog back in its day, probably even worse than an ATI Rage II, but I would be impressed if any of its better-performing contemporaries (e.g, Rendition or Mystique) would be capable of that feat... I just did a search, and couldn't even find any evidence of Virge drivers for 2000/XP. I had thought that trying to get dual monitors to work under 98 was pretty touch-and-go.
That's probably the future. The plug-in graphics card is rapidly headed for the same fate as the plug-in math coprocessor chip, the plug-in MMU chip, the plug-in DMA controller chip, the plug-in serial port board, the plug-in network adapter, and the plug-in disk controller.
Add to that the buggiest disk controller chipset evar. Linux had to include a software workaround in the driver.
"Playable Framerates"? ATI nad NVIDIA compete to see who can run Battlefield 2 at maxed setting,and resolution the fastest. Do they realy think that "playable framerates" is going to get the market share? Unless they are offering their cards a lot cheaper than ATI or NVIDIA I dont think that their going to go anywhere.
on the notoriously buggy Via chipsets? Has Via cleaned up it's act? I remember for ages not being able to use the nvidia agp port driver because of a timing bug on my mobo (which nvidia, not Via fixed). I also had nothing but trouble on a couple of ~2ghz class KT boards I tried to build with (one cheapo, and a really nice Soyo after that), and finally gave up bought an nForce. The boards worked fine in windows after loading via's 4in1, crashed like crazy in linux (to be fair, the Soyo worked fine until you put something in a pci slot :) ). The nvidia board had some trouble that was quickly fixed in a bios update.
I miss cheap Via hardware, and later gen S3 cards rock for the money, but I can't deal with the instability.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"you don't just wake up one christmas morning and have a card that can compete with the big boys"
NEC with the latest PowerVR chip (Kryo) actually could keep up. The problem was that it was fundamentally different, and most didn't want to program for something different.
These seem to be competing at Wal-Mart (just like Linux was at one time).
1) Use adblock
2) Learn to use "Find as you type" with Moz or FF
Regards
Me thinks that if you really had a 3d card like that in 1990 you would be filthy stinking rich by now. Oh, and locked in the gaming market with a fully developed 3d engine before quake was written. And I probably spelled shenanigens wrong. Sue me.
Shh.
Never had that problem. If its tit-for-tat you want try *not* to tell me an ATI horror story, because until you or one of the other idiots creates a serious video card with an open specification that meets or exceeds the current offerings all your doing is blowing smoke.
Of course its fine to flame about drivers but you don't even question the hardware...I guess software counts differently somehow...hmmmm.
Quack, quack.
With political freedom, there's something seriously wrong...and I'll give you a hint, its with you.
I'm sure your just a mouth-piece but Linux (and to a lesser degree Solaris) is my bread and butter. So before you get your panties all in a knot why don't you sit back down before you find some *more* stupid to point out. Like that hardware hypocrisy...but then you wouldn't be able to use computers so you'd have nothing to complain about.
Get over it.
Quack, quack.
I would have loved to see those cards with today's technology. Too bad they didn't support Linux kernels beyond 2.4. "Due to the change in the API" they said. Aren't they competent enough to adapt? ATI and NVIDIA did.
I think possibly the real benefit here is the low power consumption. If they can incorporate this chip in laptops, I think it would be a good move for S3. Laptops have already begun outselling desktops this past year. If this trend continues, low power solutions are going to become the norm. Just look at the Apple/Intel deal and it is all about performance per watt. If most people are buying laptops, this means the majority of people do not buy high end video cards for their pcs.
He's talking about being willing to pay *another* $5 for drivers that work. E.g. if the card costs $100, it comes with Windows games and windows drivers. He is willing to pay $105 (but not $120) to get the card with Linux drivers.
I mean, how much do you pay for your windows drivers?
Just like Nvidia to 3Dfx and ATI to Nvidia (almost
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Causes people to open up R&D budgets a little more, like what AMD did to intel. Only much smaller.
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?