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.

Comments

not the first time we hear that S3 can compete...

[squisher]

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.

Re:what

[Poltras]

Not true. Some filters which took minutes in Adobe Photoshop CS2 only took half a second in CS4. Just doing a low-pass filter or a blur to get noise reduction would, of course, be doable by a single cpu correctly. But once you go professional, the time saved through using GPGPU is amazing, and means you can see results in realtime, so you can make adjustments much much faster.