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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.'"
So, how about Linux drivers? Free ones?
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
Recently I scavenged my old computers to find a PCI card to use for my second monitor (my ATI 9700 Pro could only hardware accelerate one output at a time, leading to slow graphics, even on 2D applications like Firefox, on the second monitor). But, all my newer cards were AGP, even the one in my 266mhz Pentium II computer. So I went even farther back, to my Pentium 166mhz non-MMX. This was mistake #1.
The card in the machine was a 2MB Virge. Things I found out about the card over the next few minutes included:
1) It supported no resolution higher than 1024x768 60hz 16-bit color.
2) The output looked so bad even on 2D that looking at the monitor hurt my eyes.
3) The instant I dragged any 3D game window, even older ones, to the monitor with the Virge card, they started going at about 10 frames... per minute.
The Virge was the worst graphics card I have ever used. A while back I even tried to run Homeworld on it (as a primary card). Lowest detail levels--check. Lowest resolution--check. Lowest memory allocation--check. End result: D3D hardware acceleration mode goes slower than software mode, at about 2 frames per minute.
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...