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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.'"
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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?
Is it a "graphics solution" or a PCI card? Sheez.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
... 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.
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.
AC - meet Mr Period (.) and his friend Mr Comma (,). They make writing fun! They have a cousin you know - She's called Miss Dictionary. All of these fun people are here to help you be understood. Enjoy them, embrace them and above all use them.
If you don't, you'll give people the impression that you are a dribbling fool who married his sister by mistake.
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.
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
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.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"if you wiki Hell you should come back with S3 + Cyrix 686"
Does this mean that S3 = - Cyrix 20?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
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
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.
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...
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 you don't, you'll give people the impression that you are a dribbling fool who married his sister by mistake.
Now, now, let's not be too harsh. I'm sure he married her on purpose.
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.