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Technology Stocks : S3 (A LONGER TERM PERSPECTIVE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ski who wrote (10315)	4/1/1998 9:35:00 PM
From: Mark Zavist	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14577

S3 and Rocky - 1:15pm MST- Billy "Wicked" Wilson Had to make that comparison -- remember when Mr. T. was just working Rocky over like nobody's business? Seems like that is about where S3 is right now, but maybe this little gem can help them out (although I would of ditched the Virge name myself and maybe I wouldn't fall for something on April Fools Day :) make sure you check out the picture of it too :) )...this was blatantly ripped from the damn spiffy Op3dfx: From their press release: The S3 MediaXchange2 multimedia processor is the first in a family of highly integrated graphics products that will revolutionize both the business and gaming market. Through the use of an advanced 0.25 micron manufacturing process and a pipelined superscalar processing unit, the S3 MX2 line of graphics processors will redefine the state of the industry. Key features include: - S3's MultiView Multiple-Display Technology Multiview allows the use of multiple display adapters to display different images on separate monitors or to provide a larger desktop area. This feature significantly improves the functionality of applications and games, such as multiplayer games, web browsing, CAD, and video conferencing. Microsoft has incorporated multimonitor support in Windows98, and S3's drivers fully support it. - Support for Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) The ViRGE/MX2 accelerator provides support for Intel's AGP standard to deliver new levels of visual realism to the PC while helping to contain solution costs for memory intensive 3D applications. Active participation in AGP Implementors forum has allowed S3 to develop the first fully integrated AGP-enabled PC/TV graphics solutions for the home PC market. - Advanced 3D Performance The ViRGE/MX2 accelerator delivers a full set of 3D rendering features including MIP mapping, trilinear filtering, fullscreen per-pixel antialiasing, a full triangle setup engine, and multitexture capabilities. A preproduction board was clocked at six million triangles per second on an Intel Pentium-2 running at 300Mhz. - Revolutionary Architecture The 0.25 micron processor operates over twin 128-bit busses, for a total of 256-bits of processing power. It is the world's first 256-bit graphics processor, and comes standard with sixteen megabytes of fast Window RAM (WRAM). Video in/out as well as TV-tuning capabilities also come standard, meeting Microsoft's (MSFT) PC99 specification, and a dedicated DVD decoding daughterboard will be available upon release using the MPact media processor. Pricing and further board configurations will be announced in 2Q 1998. The S3 reference board is very clean... just their huge MX2 chip (around 3 inches square) and four 4MB WRAM chips. This board, being prerelease, did not offer any video in/out or TV tuner options. I have taken it out for a quick testdrive... and let me say one thing... 3Dfx, Matrox, and nVidia should be very very afraid! Using the Direct3D OpenGL wrapper provided by S3 (their OpenGL ICD should be available upon official release) I got an astonishing one hundred forty two (142) frames per second in Quake2 on my P2-375 at.... get this.... 1600x1200 resolution!!! I fell out of my chair!! I would expect this board to be targeted at the consumer audience, so I'd guess a price of between $200 and $300 upon its release. And well worth it! For a quick picture that I scanned in of the card, click here