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S3 Jumps On GPGPU Bandwagon
arcticstoat writes "It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia, and the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it's now even developed its own GPGPU technology. S3 claims that its Chrome 400 chips can accelerate gaming physics, HD video transcoding/encoding and photo enhancement. To demonstrate the latter, S3 has released a free download called S3FotoPro, which enhances color clarity and reduces haze in photos. However, the company hasn't yet revealed whether it plans to support OpenCL in the future."
The Tech Report also points out that this could allow S3's parent company, VIA, to compete with Intel and AMD in graphics processing technology.
This is definitely not the first time in recent years that we hear S3 can compete with ATI and Nvidia again. As much as I'd like to see that, I certainly won't believe it until I see some decent independent benchmarks.
How is enhancing photos the business of a video card? That can be done in software at a perfectly acceptable speed without hardware acceleration.
I vaguely remember them, and here I though they had gone out of business.
GCS/S d-x s+(+): a C++++$ UL+$ P+ L++$ !E--- W++@ N++>$ !o !K-- w++$ !O !M !V PS++>$ PE !Y PGP+ t+ 5++ X++ R tv b
It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia
That's right. Intel own it too.
Looks like VIA is really serious about this whole x86 business - they are the little (compared to Intel and AMD) thorn in the side to the big boys. With so many bald decisions regarding their own x86 roadmap, it's a miracle they're still around!
What I mean is: AMD has been on the razor's edge for many years already, always in danger of unprofitability due to the thin or sometimes non-existent margins they had in order to keep with the top-dog. And AMD has a substantial slice of the x86 market, definitely way bigger than VIA. Imagine what sort of creative management it takes for VIA to stay competitive.
S3's role in VIA's x86 plans could be crucial. I can definitely see them help VIA into the emerging netbook market. Cheap and low-power, is what VIA and S3 are good at, and that's exactly what netbooks are all about.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The linked wikipedia article says that OpenCL will be introduced in OS X Snow Leopard. According to a post by DigiShaman above, Nvidia cards are GPGPU with their Cuda API. I don't know much about the technology, but maybe this is what Apple had in mind when they put Nvidia cards in all the new Macbooks?
All I know about VIA is all my past bad experiences with their chipsets, slow CPU's (but low power, I guess) and other garbage. About 5 years ago I swore off VIA completely. It's weird, I have always thought the same bad things about S3 and I didn't even know they were VIA till now. Now all I need to hear is that VIA owns or is owned by Goldstar and/or Acer and the circle of crap will be complete.
Hey, give them a chance. If their excellent 3D graphics chipsets are anything to go by this could give you the power of a 386 processor ON YOUR DESKTOP! Imagine it: DooM running in practically real-time. This baby could render the teapot POV example in 3/4 mins rather than the hours it would take on the older XT class machine.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Seriously, I've never heard of S3. Are they not sold at normal stores like Best Buy?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Typically not. Standalone S3 based cards do exist; but they survive primarily in the form of embedded video on VIA boards.
I can't say I'm wildly optimistic about the likely power of an S3 GPGPU setup, given the history of S3 GPUs. On the other hand, because their performance is likely to be somewhat mediocre, and they certainly don't have the marketshare or power of someone like NVIDIA, they are more likely to do things like release documentation in order to attract development for their platform. In general, the dominant player has the greatest incentive to go it alone, keep things proprietary, and generally try to leverage their power, while the second stringers are much more likely to be helpful in their attempt to build marketshare.
Is it me or is there "S3FotoPro Enhancement" in TFA looks like nothing different than mere contrast adjustment?
You just got troll'd!
America really has gone downhill.
Long ago they used to be, back when ATI and Trident were big names in the video card business.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
No, I'm not trying to be funny (or annoying, if you prefer).
I'm seriously asking.
so far, S3 has the worst performance and support for Linux. At least VIA is beguining to open their drivers:
http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action
For me at least, even if S3 starts a video revolution, I will stick to NVidia, ATI and even Intel until I hear about decent Linux performance.
(Sorry about the link not being clickable. It seems that ACs can't post in HTML, and I don't need an account just yet)
I recently had to RMA my desktop video card due to some blown caps and in the time waiting for the replacement I ended up using the onboard S3 Chrome graphics on my motherboard for the first time. It's not very fast, as I expected, but it's much better than I thought it would be. It supports shader model 2.0 and can actually run a surprising number of pre-2005 games at playable framerates with various adjustments to resolution or details. It seems to do a better job than any integrated Intel graphics I have ever used, which isn't saying much, but it seems like it may be slightly better than the integrated Geforce 6150 in my laptop also.
Since the Chrome 400 series are discrete parts that are much higher powered than the Chrome9 HC IGP on my desktop motherboard, I would not be shocked to find out that they can compete with ATI and Nvidia on their mid-range cards. The S3 Chrome 440 GTX 256MB seems to be their highest end card for $59 and they show it beating out a Radeon 3470 in 3dmark 06.
I'm certainly not ready to give up my Nvidia cards yet, but it will be interesting to see if the gaming market can once again become a place of competition among more than just 2 companies.
I had an S3 Virge about 11 years ago, they were pretty popular back then. I don't recall hearing much about them since, I assumed they'd gone the way of 3DFX.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
While the press release doesnt make this terribly clear, I think it may be that this applciations automatically processes all image data and adjusts as needed before it sends it out to the monitor. So i a way its an image 'normalizer', like how you have audio normalizer that make all sounds have about the same volume. This actually would make sense (if its what I think it is), because this would, for example, mean that all your photos 'look good' without an touching up, all your homemovies dito, and dito the rest. Not a bad idea, if this is the idea.
3Dfx got bought by Nvidia, so no.
S3 is from the age of 3dfx cards and pre Nvidia Geforce cards. I don't remember any of their cards being very successful? Other than some late Savage cards, but even then, not equal to 3dfx, ATI, or Nvidia offerings.
I still have stuff with 3dfx logos.. i miss them :(
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
If i remember correctly, it was Diamond that first brought us the Diamond EDGE cards which used Nvidia's first 3d chip. It was the same chip used in the Sega Saturn.
I believe S3 Virge came after. As far as i can remember... the Diamond EDGE PC cards were the first 3D accelerator cards. ... And that would make Nvidia first no?
After Edge flopped, Matrox gave us the Millenia cards which had terrible 3D support on them. Voodoo then took the entire market for a while until Nvidia launched the TNT2 which was a great card for its time.
Voodoo held on to the lead for a while longer but ultimately we all know what happened and Nvidia became king. ATI is still very solid but Nvidia has better opengl support and their cards just perform a lot better 3D animation production software.
First we need to see a video card that performs well. Serious. The whole reason that nVidia (and ATi) cards can do well at GPGPU stuff is that they are fast at gaming stuff.
Gaming graphics are at their heart a whole lot of parallel single precision floating point math. Thus, that is what modern video cards are good at calculating. Well the GPGPU idea was just someone saying "Hey, these things are amazingly fast as number crunching, and graphics aren't the only sort of thing this is relivant to. Let's get an API on there to let people use it as they wish."
Well that worked out great, however the whole thing was predicated on good hardware. Since the hardware does it's job very quickly, much quicker than a CPU can, it is worthwhile to use it for other things. That wouldn't be the case if the hardware were slow. If the hardware didn't really do anything faster than a CPU, well then why not juse use a CPU? Easier to program for, more readily available and all that.
So if S3 wishes to be taken seriously for GPGPU, they need to show they can be serious for games first. Show some serious vertex/pixel crunching capability. If your card is capable of that, it should be capable of generalizing that to any parallel FP task (provided the API is there and the hardware is designed right). However if you lag ass at graphics, I'm not going to believe you are worth a shit for other stuff. Graphics are more or less the ideal case: Embarrassingly parallel, not much branching, etc. This is no surprise, GPUs were designed to do graphics well. However it also means, if you aren't good at graphics, you aren't good at GPGPU.
*Click* *Spining Logo* = Time for some eye candy! Happy memories :-)
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Solid Snake Simulation?
The original name for "DXTC" was .... "S3TC"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_compression
No sig today...
The only proposed usage that is even remotely general-purpose is the physics thing, and even then if the physics capabilities are tuned for graphical processing rather than general vector handling, that may or may not qualify as GP.
Overall, this sounds like another misuse of the GPGPU moniker. GPGPU does not mean using GPU acceleration for non-game apps. It means using GPU like a CPU, i.e. for completely arbitrary purposes like implementing traditional data structures (sorting lists and that kind of thing) that have nothing to do with generating visuals and may not even be visualized data. That you can use GPUs for something other than games is nothing new. The only thing that is kind of new is that this functionality used to be the exclusive domain of high-end workstations and production-level graphics cards.
The next time you are about to post a story with "GPGPU" in it, ask yourself, can this technology be applied to a text editor? If not, it's probably not GPGPU.
I actually think I've seen some of their hardware before; but, I didn't know they were still around, so I guess I'm in a similar boat as you.
S3 Graphics
Thats all great and all, but we do not use anything unless we can write stuff in C that will run on it.
Seriously - we recently started using nvidia chips because CUDA is very much C.
Also, we just started to use FPGAs, because we can write algorithms in C and compile it to HDL or netlist (look up FPGAC on sourceforge).
On the software front - we just started looking into website interface to our hardware because we ran into Wt ( http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt ) library. This way we can reuse our C/C++ knowledge and write websites.
So, again, does it run C?
Because if it doesn't, or if its some weird sorry excuse for C (think Brook or objective-C), we are sticking to CUDA.
And S3 got bought by VIA, so yes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I want to work as a GPU designer for S3 and put my heart and soul into a product that will be laughably pathetic compared to nVidia and ATi's offerings.
I also want to fight two MMA champs at the same time, just so I can push my body to the limit and get utterly humiliated and destroyed anyways by two laughing guys drinking beer while they are beating me up.
ATi, Trident, Matrox, S3, the good old days... I remember when I worked in a computer shop, we used to burn through S3 Virge and S3 Trio cards like they were going out of fashion.
Unfortunately they were left for dead when people no longer needed a 2D card to go with their 3DFX card - the combo cards from Diamond were killer cards and removed the need for the usual S3 Virge/Trio or Trident.
i thought in a recent /. interview with the VIA open source rep he said that VIA didn't own S3 (not entirely at least):
personally, i don't know too much about S3 (other than the fact that they were a popular name when i was playing Quake III and Unreal Tournament). but i do have great interest in VIA's product line, especially as they relate to PVR/HTPC applications. perhaps we'll finally see those cheap Chrome 4 + EPIA low-power multimedia platforms we've been promised.
As I stated in an post further up - the Trio and Virge cards are what S3 made a killing on.
I actually remember a server board that basically required a Trio - other cards would cause the system to hang mid use. They were great little cards and even were able to have expanded memory added.
DOA.
with HD video acceleration and decent 3D for compiz eye candy / simple games.
If they release good quality linux drivers I think S3 could make a name for themselves once again. The netbook and low-end pc market is growing. AFAIK even nVidia does not have any kind of HD video acceleration with their linux drivers.
Otherwise most windows geeks already have a preference of either nVidia or ATI, so this would largely go ignored and only end up in the laps of those who don't know the difference or who just got the latest hot deal.
Actually, my Matrox Impression Plus had 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. That was um... 1994?
The tricky thing then was to find *anything* but the 3 matrox-made sample (and crappy) games that would use it ;) It was a real killer in 3D Studio and CAD though.
Mind the frickin' laser...
way to cover your tracks, you got lucky... this time. Better watch your back you fucking drunk indian. Enjoy your firewater and poverty.
Captcha: apparent, as it is apparent you are a fucking retard.
The original Rage chip is pretty old. I believe it was available on a VLB card and that win95 shipped with drivers for it.
Anyway, Sega designed their own chips for the Saturn. The early nVidia chip was only related in that it also rendered quadrilaterals rather than triangles.
I think the Matrox G200 and G400 chips were competitive. The G200 being a little faster than a Rage Pro, and the G400 being about as fast as TNT2. I don't know when the S3 Virge showed up but I know that it was used on an Amiga VGA board (the Cybervision 3D) and, like its PC counterpart, was notorious for having slower 2D performance than the S3 Trio 64.
The ViRGE & Trio cards were everywhere (& Microsoft Virtual PC still emulates an S3 Trio), and the SavageMX chips were in quite a few laptops at the turn of the century. The Savage chips were actually quite nice, full Open Source drivers and everything.
It was one of the big players at the infancy of 3D accelerating video cards for the desktop.
IIRC it was actually _the first_ vendor, still in the MS-DOS era, and Quake (one!) was the first application to use it.
My S3 ViRGE sitting in my Gateway 2000 G6 Pentium II-300 weeps.
Ah, what the heck am I talking 'bout. I kicked that turd and its 4GB HD to the curb years ago.
Program Intellivision!
If they do that and release documentation for Linux, they can pwn the netbook market.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
... have a lot to offer and a lot of potential benefit to realize from one another: agree or disagree? If "agree," any reliable info on why S3/VIA have not thus far been more open to assistance from the Open Source community?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
I was thinking the same thing.
If it's not a super-dooper-insta-matic-graphics-o-tron-buzzword-overclocker-massive-profit-maker-by-stupid-customers cheapo graphics card, Best Buy doesn't want anything to do with it.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
was that amazon s3 is using gpgpu
developer http://flamerobin.org