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

The Obligatory Question

[mjrauhal]

So, how about Linux drivers? Free ones?

Re:The Obligatory Question

[LnxAddct]

Last I checked, Linux's desktop share was higher than Apple's which puts Linux over the 3% mark. Desktop numbers are highly biased againt linux simply because a) Most linux machines were previously windows, and b) Windows machines tend to be replaced more often, i.e. if i buy a windows computer today and another one in 2 years, both will be considered to be active and the nuber will be twice what it really is.
Regards,
Steve

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: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: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?

[fossa]

This is S3. I thought competitors *already* know how to make products better than theirs?