Having lost all my money by investing in S3 stock,<GG> I was sleeping in the trash dumpster behind S3 offices and came across this in the trash.
< ext Generation Magazine
GDC: S3 Surprise of Show
While S3 has largely sat on the sidelines in the 3D accelerator wars, the company's new Savage 3D was the most pleasant surprise at the show.
May 6, 1998
Boasting fill rates of 125 Mpixels/second and advanced features such as texture compression and single pass tri-linear filtering, the Savage 3D seemingly came out of nowhere to be a major contender in the 3D accelerator market. The chip shown at the show was only two weeks
old running on drivers that had been whipped up in the last five days,
an amazing feat to say the least.
Rendering quality on the board was excellent and on par with the likes
of Matrox's G200 and Intel's I740. The texture compression scheme
used is the S3TC method that should provide compression ratios of
around 6:1. This compression scheme is the same one licensed by
Microsoft to be used as a DirectX6.0 standard, thus making the chip
even more attractive.
Like the Riva, G200 and I740, the Savage is an integrated 2D/3D
solution. Details on the 2D performance are not yet known, but the
numerous demos of D3D games like Forsaken and Turok put the
board's 3D performance slightly above that of a single Voodoo2 card.
In addition, extremely high resolutions are supported in games as
Forsaken was demoed running at 1280x1024 at a reasonably playable
frame rate.
Among the chip's features are:
Singe Cycle Trilinear Filtering
S3 Texture Compression
True color rendering
Void and Cluster dithering for 16-bit modes Specular lighting and
diffuse shading
Alpha blending
MPEG-2 Video texturing
Edge anti-aliasing
Vertex and table fog
16 or 24-bit z-buffering
Sprite anti-aliasing, reflection and environment mapping, texture
morphing, shadows, procedural textures and atmospheric effects.
The chips should become available in products shipping in the third
quarter at prices between $150-$200 depending upon memory
configuration and features.
Booth Highlights:
The following is from a summary put together by Scott Taylor in the
ISV group:
First, the show. It can truly be said that S3 and Savage3D was the talk of CGDC 1998. From customers to competitors, everyone has been
very impressed (and maybe even a little shocked) with Savage3D and
the demos that we have shown. One of the most popular and certainly
the most controversial demos has been our side by side comparison
of Savage3D, Voodoo2, nVidia NV3 and Intel i740. In this area we
have four identical machines running one of the industry's benchmark
games (Turok) and beating the ALL of our competitors in quality and
frame rate. Below are the average frame rates for this benchmark:
Savage3D 55 fps
Voodoo 2 45 fps
nVidia NV3 35 fps
Intel i740 29 fps
This was only one of many incredible demos at the S3 booth, but it
was certainly the one that caused the most jaws to drop - in particular those of our major competitors.
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