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

To: Ski who wrote (10921)	5/11/1998 8:28:00 PM
From: ToolManInc	Respond to of 14577

Got this off the Yahoo Thread 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 comparisonof 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. ÿ