Wow,
Everybody has news on this one today. S3 did a really good job of getting this one "out and about." (That's "aout and abaout" for you, Ski.)
From: gamecenter.com
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It's been a long year for S3. The semiconductor designer that introduced one of the first 2D/3D graphics accelerators to the market--the ViRGE--has served as the butt of countless jokes among hard-core gamers. But that's all in the past, according to S3. With today's announcement of the all-new Savage3D at the opening of this year's Computer Game Developers Conference, S3 says it will no longer have to make excuses for the 3D side of its 2D/3D technology.
"Working in the graphics industry is like sitting with your competitors around a spinning lazy Susan with a big mallet on it," said Glenn Schuster, S3's director of mainstream marketing, in an interview with Gamecenter last week. "Once each year, the mallet stops in front of someone who gets to pick it up and beat everyone else on the head with it. This year, the mallet is going to stop in front of S3."
Those are mighty big words to live up to in a market dominated by the likes of 3Dfx and Nvidia. Can S3 really deliver on such a boast? The Savage3D (a 128-bit 2D/3D graphics accelerator manufactured using a .25-micron process) will be publicly shown for the first time at this week's CGDC, so all we have to go on right now are paper specifications. Here's a look at what S3 is promising, but stay tuned for a follow-up report on what we see at the show.
Promises Made
The Savage3D sounds a lot like the Nvidia's RIVA 128 series of products, but it won't have the RIVA TNT's (or the 3Dfx Voodoo 2's) dual texture-processing engines. Because of this, the chip will resort to making two rendering passes to perform multitexturing. According to Schuster, however, the Savage3D's other features will make the chip so fast and powerful that multipass rendering won't exact a performance hit.
"The Savage3D," said Schuster, "is going to be significantly faster than the Voodoo 2 at trilinear filtering, and only slightly slower than the Voodoo 2 at multitexturing. And with a price of $35 in quantity, our BOM [bill of material] is going to be half that of the Voodoo 2."
Schuster said he bases his performance claims on the Savage3D's support for single-pass trilinear filtering, 4X AGP with sideband addressing, and S3's own texture-compression algorithms (which Microsoft recently licensed for incorporation into DirectX 6.0) in hardware. By compressing textures, game developers will be able to utilize more textures--and more complex textures--without requiring more host or frame-buffer memory.
"And if what we've heard about [3Dfx's] Banshee is true," Schuster added, "we'll be significantly faster than that part." 3Dfx has kept quiet about the unannounced Banshee, which, like S3's Savage3D and Nvidia's RIVA TNT, is expected to ship in the third quarter. Industry scuttlebutt has it that the Banshee will deliver 3D graphics performance equal only to the Voodoo 1 (because the chip will have only a single texture-processing unit), and that the chip's 2D performance is not exactly breathtaking. Considering 3Dfx's commanding lead in today's market and its customers' voracious demand for the Voodoo 2, however, the chip designer can afford to keep mum about its future products. And when was the last time gamers cared about 2D performance?
AGP Support
S3 claims the Savage3D will be more than a fast graphics processor--it will produce good-looking graphics, too. This is an area in which Nvidia's RIVA chip is often criticized. To that end, the Savage3D will support 24-bit textures at 800 by 600 resolution, 16-bit textures at 1,024 by 768 resolution, and 24-bit Z-buffering. Internally, the chip will render all graphics--even those produced with 16-bit applications--in 24-bit color.
Schuster said the part has been optimized for Intel's 440LX/BX AGP chipsets, and that it features an S3-developed "AGP Texture Look Ahead" scheme that enables the graphics engine to compensate for AGP latency by requesting textures from host memory before they're actually needed. Using AGP sidebands, the chip pipelines its requests for textures, then pipelines the textures themselves in the AGP data path. This technique, according to S3, means the Savage3D will never be left idle waiting for the AGP bus to deliver textures.
S3 promises the Savage3D will deliver a rich set of DVD features, too. This is one area in which ATI's 3D Rage series of accelerators has long dominated the market. The chip will offload from the CPU much of the processing required to perform DVD playback, which makes software DVD decompression more feasible. The chip will also feature an integrated NTSC/PAL encoder for TV out, a Macrovision 7.1 decoder for playing back DVD titles, a flicker filter, and the ability to display video on a CRT and TV monitor at the same time.
Assuming the Savage3D is a hit with OEMs, S3 shouldn't have trouble keeping up with demand. Although considered a "fabless" semiconductor manufacturer, S3 does own 16 percent of one fabrication facility, and that, according to Schuster, entitles it to 33 percent of that fab's capacity. The Savage3D is sampling now, with volume production expected in the third quarter.
Stay tuned to Gamecenter for an extended hands-on preview once S3 provides us with a reference board for testing, and reviews of finished product later this year.
My past experience with this stock has, if anything, taught me not to trust any good news whatsoever, but despite my best efforts they've got me as giddy as a schoolboy with all of this news.
Good job, P.R.!
Unh, wait, I am a schoolboy. Hmmm.
Bollmonster |
