S3 is back on the scene with its first new GPU architecture in five years. Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category, which is currently dominated by ATI’s Radeon 9600 XT and nVidia’s GeForce FX 5700, both of which are under $200. Today S3 unveils the DeltaChrome S8 GPU, which represents the midrange of its upcoming line of DeltaChrome GPUs.
The Return of S3
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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that I am never buying a laptop with no 3D acceleration again.
I have an s3 twister in my laptop and it not only uses main memory for video, but it has no hardware acceleration.
S3 failed with the Savage not because it wasn’t a good chipset, it was, but because driver support was abysmal. Support for 3rd party driver development was non-existant. A little openness in their documentation, and the Savage could have been a contender. Instead it remained a could-have-been. Let’s see what they’ll do now.
Now I wonder if they would update their original S3 drivers for best perfomance under XP. I have an old S3 Savage video board which is on my laptop. Makes you wonder.
Well it’s always good to see others trying to take on Ati/Nvidia. Hopefully this will prevent Nvidia from releasing something as useless as the FX5200 again, and hopefully it wil push Ati to release some more decent drivers
If S3 wants to make waves, they should allow access to full hardware documentation to people wanting to write drivers for other operating systems (especially Open Source ones).
Open Source programmers and a majority of the Linux community would warmly embrace a fairly high quality 2d/3d hardware video accelerator with open documentation. High quality drivers would appear fairly soon I’m certain. I know Open Source drivers aren’t a guarantee, but it sure makes life easier for developers.
I bet the drivers are not only closed but horrible.
Common thing with S3. Too bad, they used to be one of the best videocard vendors in the DOS era, and the first ones to support vesa 2.0 natively.
Good news indeed, a couple of months ago, S3 open sourced it’s driver code for the savage product line.
Currently work is been done to make it work with recent dri code and mesa.
3D hard ware support is under way for X…
i have a sega DC and i like powervr
are they coming out with a DC9 chip?
s3 look like they have a nice chip. they need to stay competitive over ati+nvidias coming release cycle tho. hopefully that will mean more than boosting clock speed of the gpu.
at least their re-entrance into the gaming gfx market is far better than matrox’s dodgy parhelia entrance… (and i had such high hopes for parhelia! i still have a 64mb g400max at home… nice card…)
My other computer has an S3 card
Good to see some competition 
Silly question, they are not at s3.com. Where are they? Are they supporting XFree86?
From the article and from the one at Firingsquad, it seems that the drivers are giving problems in games, with tearing, flashing textures, and so on. Its still a beta driver, so that’s to be expected. Let’s hope that their drivers aren’t in a permanent ‘beta’ stage.
I don’t know there website.
For supporting XFree86: I don’t know they will support there new chip(s). But at least they have released the full code for 3D and video on linux against the XFree86 4.2, work is currently been done to support the savage on 4.3 and the upcomming 4.4.
http://www.s3graphics.com/
Old chipmaker comes back. Makes a new GPU for the “midrange price/performance category”. This basically means that companies assembling computers will get it for cheap and sell it off along with other random cheap hardware in a closed box. Probably to some poor guy who doesn’t even know how to open the case up, much less about GPUs.
Company survives, keeps making such trash, because there are plenty of consumers to whom to sell these things.
Boring news really. I would love to see someone challenge nVidia and ATI instead of making more junk. But I guess the risk isn’t worth it.
I would love to see someone challenge nVidia and ATI instead of making more junk.
I thought that 3D Labs could chalenge ATI and NVidia when they were acquired by Creative … but no chalenge to date.
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I had a laptop with an S3. For the purpose it worked ok. (Who expects powerfull hardware accel on a laptop ?)
I also saw some news about a new chinese budget VGA card some time ago (was osnews or tomshardware ?) S3 better watch out those chineses.
I remember not so long ago when 3D Labs promised they were going to crush ATI and nVidia. They hyped the card like it was Segway, and when it was eventually released the hardware review sites shredded it.
I think S3 could only fill a small niche, they can’t make the cards powerful enough to beat ATI or nVidia.
They can’t promise driver compatibility or out-price current integrated cards.
In order to get people to buy they card they would have to one up the existing vendors in at least one area or come in to the market at a much much cheaper price and they don’t seem to bring to the table the ability to do either of these things.
The company will struggle to get by, cut back on R&D, fall behind, and become nonexistent once again.
S3’s 2D visual quality was pretty poor, especially compared with Matrox. No matter how good it is otherwise, I’m not touching one of these cards unless they’ve done some work on that side of things.
since analog requires a RAMDAC?
The Matrox video cards have always had the best 2D picture quality. I remember going from my G200 (which was terrible at 3D acceleration) to a Voodoo 3. I noticed a serious drop in picture quality.
That would be nice. I got rid of my PowerVR. Support wasn’t all that good even under Windows, and non-existant on Linux.
Nice picture quality though, and interesting technology.
yeah, I got an s3 twister in my HP laptop…..NEVER AGAIN.
I will buy a laptop with a frigen 3d accel in it. Macs do it, why not PCs?