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Technology Stocks : ATI Technologies in 1997 (T.ATY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NTT who wrote (2683)	2/5/1999 11:04:00 AM
From: Sleeperz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5927

I don't think S3 bought out Exponential Extremely cheap since they did put in the highest bid. It must have been a great feeling for the new CEO to have Intel by the balls. :-) They bought those out extremely cheap from the defunct company and held it over Intels head in order to get the financing as well as the right to say that they are Intels first validation partner for AGP4x. I can't see Intel being extremely pleased with S3 after they threaten them like this, but they had no choice because of the liability against Merced. 1) The Savage 4 does have 4X AGP, 2) if they can pull off true single pass trilinear not like the TNT. 3) same chip supports Flat Panel Displays, Good for S3 4) As Far as CPU utulization during DVD, well thats not a real problem, Intel likes the solution, Buy a faster Pentium chip. 5) the S4 does support an 8-bit stencil buffer which you were unsure of. 6)Full Software Support Drivers for major operating systems and APIs: [Windows® 9x, Windows NT 4.0/5.0, Windows 3.x and OS/2® 2.1/3.0 (WarpTM), Direct3DTM, DirectDrawTM and DirectShowTM, OpenGLTM ICD for Windows 9x and NT] Comprehensive SDK, utilities and ISV tools ISV and bundling programs Where ATI or others do not even support Win 3.x anymore and the RAGE Pro Drivers are still in Beta. Asus or Aopen TNT might support Win 3.1, but officially from Nvidia no Win 3.1 support. 7) Additional Features 300MHz RAMDAC with gamma correction I2C serial bus and flash ROM support !! Upgradable????? ACPI and PCI power management Hardware and BIOS support for VESA timings and DDC monitor communications PCI 2.2 bus support including bus mastering So the Savage 4 has a few things more going for it. Plus it looks like it will be cheaper than a Rage Fury. Thus if it runs quake, Unreal, etc at a decent frame rate with very good image quality and is cheap. Then it is a good buy. I'll see how it runs games on my old 486-DX4-100 with Dual boot Win3.1/Win98. But as you say the Savage 4 is almost feature Identical to the RAGE 128 and has the advantage of being cheaper US$25 vs US$30-35?. As you can see with S3 announcing the Savage4, they don't have anything to offer in terms of technology since the R128 already has all those features. s3.com Product Description The newest member of S3®'s SavageTM product family, Savage4TM brings high-end graphics performance to the mainstream PC by integrating leading-edge 2D, 3D and DVD video acceleration into a cost effective package. Based on its capabilities, Savage4 is an ideal solution for the consumer, corporate desktop user and entry level professional. The industry's first AGP 4X solution, Savage4 combines AGP 4X with S3's DX6 texture compression (S3TC) to deliver unprecedented 3D performance and image quality for the mainstream desktop PC market. Supported by many of 1999's top 3D games such as Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena, S3TC enables software developers to use up to 8x the amount of texture storage and AGP bus bandwidth.