S3 has led the PC graphics industry creating the fastest most full-featured graphics accelerators. We could see that S3 ruled in the past years with their ViRGE chipset.

Nowadays, S3 is in competition with other chipset manufacturers to come out with the fastest 2D/3D chipset. The days of expensive cards will be over soon when S3 releases their S3 Savage 3D chipset !

With a totally new 3D architecture, Savage3D offers a complete feature set, including AGP 2X support with sideband addressing and execute-mode capability, a 24-bit color rendering pipeline, and the capability to do trilinear filtering in a single clock cycle. Also supported in hardware is S3's texture compression scheme, which Microsoft will adopt as a standard in DirectX 6. The chip will support a maximum memory configuration of 8MB of SDRAM or SGRAM.

In terms of performance the chip was again solid. One of the first tests we benchmarked was a custom made large texture Quake 2 demo running at 640x480. The test is designed to show the benefits of S3's texture compression. The level in question consisted of 20MB worth of textures (more than a 12MB Voodoo 2 card can hold without swapping) and the results were surprising. The Voodoo 2 clocked in at 23.2 frames per second due largely to the constant texture swapping. The Savage came in at 37.1 frames per second. Is this how an average Quake 2 game is going to function? No, as they generally don't take advantage of so many textures, but as games begin to push the boundaries of texture caches (e.g. Unreal) the benefits of texture compression are clear.

The next test was a D3D test with Incoming. Initially, the 16-bit rendering of the Voodoo 2 wasn't quite as clean as the 24-bit rendering of the Savage. Lens flares didn't suffer from some of the cheesecloth patterns that Voodoo 2 offered. Both ran extremely fast. When both cards were set to 16-bit (for purposes of being consistent) the Voodoo 2 turned 58.98 frames per second while the Savage posted 65.31 frames per second.

The next test was another D3D test using Forsaken. At 800x600, the S3 pulled 73.87 frames per second while the Voodoo 2 hit 72.54. We then ran the demo again with the S3 at 1024x768 where it managed 55.09 frames per second. A single Voodoo 2 doesn't support resolutions that high thus there is obviously no corresponding score.

The editors also witnessed some software MPEG2 decoding for DVD which was nice. Motion compensation reduced CPU usage significantly (from 60% to 30%). Naturally, there is also support for hardware MPEG2 decoding should an OEM be so inclined.

All in all, the tests were impressive and boards using the chip should cost less than the editors had originally thought, making it an even more viable competitor in the low-end market. According to S3, consumer products should cost between $99 and $150 depending upon the RAM configuration.