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.'"

Comments

Solution, or a card?

[DavidNWelton]

Is it a "graphics solution" or a PCI card? Sheez.

S3 dear god

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"Playable framerates"

[vasqzr]

Read: Nowhere near the performance of ATI/NVIDIA.

Unless they plan on taking over the integrated graphics, $300 PC market, why bother?

Re:"Playable framerates"

[Brain_Recall]

Because it's a start. ATi and nVidia just didn't come out of nowhere with a card-to-rule-all-cards. It took them time, and I imagine, it will take S3 some time too.
The point is competition. Far too long have we been stuck in a dichotomy of two-superpowers.
But, this isn't their first try, either. The S3 Delta Chrome was just average at release, and even segmented off into integrated graphics by a few VIA chipsets.

Trident tried to dive back into the graphics realm. Their card didn't go up to the hype (mostly because of some major engineering cutbacks) and they haven't tried again. Maybe S3 will keep it up.
But also remember, the integrated graphics market isn't bad at all. Intel makes no stand-alone cards, but they rule the video market (in terms of sales) because of their integrated graphics.

S3 video

[highmaster]

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.

Re:The Obligatory Question

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, i'm sure as a business their first priority is getting _free_ drivers out for an operating system that less than 1% of desktops use (desktops, mind you, i'm not talking servers), an operating system that doesn't run 95% of the games out there.

mod me down, but you know I'm right.

If you mean like ATI's I'll stick with Nvidia..

[msimm]

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.

Re:If you mean like ATI's I'll stick with Nvidia..

[arose]

Exept when they break their drivers for months on old and low end cards. Solid support my ass, polictics are important for a reason.

Re:If you mean like ATI's I'll stick with Nvidia..

[mjrauhal]

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.

I find it funny that you immediately followed this up with:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

Re:If you mean like ATI's I'll stick with Nvidia..

[Cyclops]

Sorry, you're an idiot.

How can you have solid support when only one company can maintain the driver for all GNU/Linux versions you may be running in the future?

Go away, ye false pragmatist.

Re: The Obligatory Question

[jejones]

Obligatory qualifier: "open source Linux drivers with, as a minimum, feature and speed parity with the Windows drivers."

Yet more magic pixie dust...

[L0neW0lf]

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.

Re:How Much

[mrchaotica]

On the bright side, with S3 it must be the current generation because there isn't a "last version" to relabel!

Unless they're relabeling a Virge, in which case we're all obviously in Hell.

Cool!, Whats mine say?

[Transdimentia]

I'm sorry you clicked on this :)

A tiny market, but a loyal one?

[Grendel Drago]

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

Re:A tiny market, but a loyal one?

[myslashdotusername]

what exactly would S3 lose by opening up its drivers?

Several lawsuits, as technology used in writing those drivers is patented, and they've likely cross-licensed the patents to even be able to write a modern 3-d driver.

now you could strip all the patented code, and fix it into a working driver, and provide source for it, but ATI already has been doing that for years, yet all I see from the /. community is a bunch of Nvidia fanboy ravings of how good the closed source Nvidia drivers are.

So I hope this answers your question, as to why they cannot do what you seem to think would be so easy. And hey, even if patents were a non issue, the drivers would still be a 'trade' secret, giving that away to your competetors for free means that they will always know how to make there product perform better than yours.

Re:A tiny market, but a loyal one?

[Grishnakh]

Why is this modded insightful? It's outright wrong.

Ok, so let's assume you're right and the technology is patented. So what? This means that there are NO secrets allowed by the government in this product. The whole point of getting a patent is that you have to disclose your invention fully in order to obtain legal protection for it. If I want to see this patented technology, I can just look it up at www.uspto.gov. So this cross-licensed patents argument is a pile of BS.

Strip the patented code... why? Again, if it's patented, there's no secrets. Now maybe the companies holding the patents won't license them in such a way as to allow open-sourced drivers, but this is a licensing issue, not a patent one.

Trade secret: well, are they patented or aren't they? You can't have a trade secret on something that's patented. The two are mutually exclusive.

You might want to learn about the various IP protections and how they differ before running your mouth.

Re:A tiny market, but a loyal one?

[JLF65]

A considerable number of patents have been issued for common 3D operations. For example, using polar coordinates for 3D camera operations is patented. What scares the 3D companies is the fact that they probably violate a hundred different bogus patents. If they release specs for their chip, these patent holders may came forward and start demanding money. Even if they are bogus, it'll cost many millions to fight.

Look at what happened to MS - they had to release specs on VC1 to get it into running as a codec for HD-DVDs. Once they did, more than a dozen companies popped out of the woodwork claiming VC1 violated patents they held. THAT is what keeps nVidia and ATI (and everyone else) from making specs or code available for the cards.

Until the patent madness ends, don't expect anyone to release any specs or code.

I hope they're successfull

[OzPhIsH]

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.