May 04, 1998, TechWeb News
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S3 has high hopes for Savage3D
By Mark Hachman
Silicon Valley- After trailing the graphics performance pack for more than a year, chip maker S3 Inc. is seeking to reclaim its title as king of the jungle with the launch of the Savage3D accelerator.
Its first new multimedia desktop controller since spring 1997, the Savage3D may be a make-or-break part for the Santa Clara, Calif., company, which has seen its market lead come under constant threat from higher-performance graphics ICs.
The new device could distance S3 from its rivals, according to the company, by squeezing several graphics functions into a single processor cycle and adding a new texture-compression method to increase performance in the AGP pipeline.
"We don't want to get in a situation where we fall behind again," said Michelle Belusar, a product marketing manager at S3.
Once known for performance leadership in the 2-D graphics market, S3 rose to prominence in 1996 when its ViRGE family of 2-D/3-D graphics chips moved it into the spot as the market's top volume manufacturer.
But the following year, the company missed a key product cycle, and the ViRGE fell in relative performance to the low end of the market. But S3 continued to lead the market, selling 41% of all desktop graphics chips during the fourth quarter of 1997, according to Mercury Research Corp., Scottsdale, Ariz.
Acknowledging the need to regain its graphics performance edge, S3 earlier this year announced that it will discontinue its audio and communications products. The company then used its resources to fight back within its core market, Belusar said.
For the OEM market, however, sheer performance may ultimately matter less than the ability to deliver products in volume. And on that score, S3 has generally fared well, said Geoff Ballew, multimedia analyst at Dataquest Inc., San Jose.
"Say what you will about the ViRGE's 3-D performance ... S3 still can supply volume, and it maintains the appropriate contacts at top-tier OEMs," Ballew said. "If you put an S3 chip in a socket, it will work."
Even though the Savage3D is designed to propel S3 back into the performance graphics market, S3's volume manufacturing capabilities should result in a mainstream price, said Glenn Schuster, director of graphics product marketing.
"Though our success will be predicated upon increasing performance, we will continue to drive costs down into the volume segment very quickly," Schuster said. "There's a lot of competition in the high-end space."
The chip employs a proprietary texture-compression algorithm that S3 has licensed to Microsoft Corp. The "lossy" technique shrinks 3-D textures by a factor of six as they pass along the AGP connection to dramatically increase the available AGP bandwidth, Belusar said.
At the same time, the new device employs a proprietary look-ahead mechanism for fetching textures in advance of their actual use. S3 said the technique improves on the speed of conventional graphics chips, which can take as long as 200 milliseconds to process a texture request from the graphics chip through the core logic to the main memory and back.
The Savage3D has peak rates of 125 million pixels/s, and, save for one test requiring a 32-bit Z-buffer, performs all of the 41 tests required by the 3DWinBench 98 benchmark.
Features such as alpha blending, trilinear filtering, sprite anti-aliasing, 16-bit or 24-bit Z-buffering, vertex, and table fog can all be calculated during a single processing
cycle or pass. Bump mapping, anisotropic filtering, and reflection mapping may take multiple passes, Belusar said.
The chip supports up to a 125-MHz SGRAM frame buffer memory. Manufactured on a 0.25-micron, 5-layer metal process, the chip is $35 in 10,000s. Volume production is scheduled for the third quarter.
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S3's Multimedia Chip History
Product: Savage3D
Date Announced: May 1998
Product: ViRGE/GX2
Date Announced: March 1997
Product: ViRGE/DX, /GX
Date Announced: October 1996
Product: ViRGE
Date Announced: November 1995
Source: S3 Inc.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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