It's easy to make a decision on what video card you want to buy in comparison to the difficult time the manufacturers have creating the products you want, while making a profit and remaining competitive. There is a choice, as a manufacturer, that you must make before beginning production on any new video solution: whether you're going to strive to be the absolute best, or be the best in a certain price range. If you pick the former, you're in for a rough ride, as the competitive nature of manufacturers in the video industry will keep you on your toes.

This is the path companies such as 3dfx and NVIDIA have stuck to, and as you can tell by the intense competition that exists between their products (as well as between their users). If you are to choose the latter option, times are a bit less fast paced and competitive, however the challenge is equally as great if not greater. Basically, as a manufacturer looking to produce a low-cost, high-performance video solution, you are placed under the same expectations as the big boys, but you're now limited by cost.

Case in point is the formerly dominant force in the video industry, S3. Originally on top of the game before the 3D revolution in the mid-90's, S3 controlled a large portion of the market simply because they could produce competitive 2D accelerators that performed well, and could be molded to fit virtually any desktop situation. With the dawn of the 3D gaming era, S3, like a number of other former heavy weights such as Matrox and Number Nine, seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Last year was the return of the former heavy weights to the market and comparatively speaking, they did not achieve the same status that they once held prior to the transition towards standardizing 3D accelerators.

S3's Savage3D, on paper, was a high-end solution capable of winning the elusive title of "Voodoo2-killer," the most sought after champion of 1998. Unfortunately, in practice, the Savage3D turned out to be one of the biggest failures of the industry. While the Savage3D did manage to find its very own niche market with Super7 users as well as some lower end Slot-1 users, the product itself (as well as its drivers) were quite immature and the product never really attained its full potential. Most manufacturers such as Diamond Multimedia dropped their Savage3D based products, leaving a relatively few companies, mostly Taiwanese OEMs, to buy out the remaining Savage3D parts and make low-cost 2D/3D AGP accelerators out of them.

The only big-name to boast a truly reliable Savage3D solution was Hercules, a company whose devotion to quality led them to a discriminating process of hand picking Savage3D chips for their accelerators, which made Hercules' Savage3D boards undoubtedly the best in the industry. But in the grand scheme of things, it would take much more than Hercules, a company much smaller than the Diamonds and Creatives out there to save S3's rear with the Savage3D. What S3 needed was another chance, should the market give them another chance and more importantly, is it worth re-visiting S3 after what they pulled with the Savage3D? Let's find out as AnandTech takes an in-depth look at S3's latest shot at a low-cost, high-performance video-solution.

The Savage4 builds on the stack of the Savage3D's original features, adding such important features as single-pass multi-texturing and bringing back the old strengths of the Savage3D such as the texture compression that filled so many screen shots last year. As with most other 3D accelerators that are just now hitting the streets, the Savage4 provides compatibility with both AGP 2X and 4X specifications, with the 4X versions of the parts hitting the streets towards the end of the year with Intel's release of the upcoming AGP 4X compliant 820 chipset (aka Camino).

The Savage4 allows for a number of different memory configurations, allowing for manufacturers to custom make their products fit the price and performance needs of their target market. At first, only 16MB and 32MB boards will be seen on the market, however there is always the option of pursuing a cheaper 8MB alternative for OEMs and other such cases where price is a very delicate issue. After discussing the topic with a couple of manufacturers, it seems like the 32MB Savage4 based products won't be too big of a rarity in the low-cost isles at your local computer hardware store.

Also, mimicking the latest from 3dfx and NVIDIA (and soon to be Matrox), the Savage4 also supports the "oh-so-marketable" digital interface for flat panel LCD displays, a feature which will slowly gain popularity and eventually pick up as the desired output port on video cards when digital LCD monitors drop to a more reasonable price point.

Here are the full specs for the S3 Savage4 and the Savage4 Pro, the two are distinguished apart from each other by essentially the memory clock of the product, with the Savage4 Pro operating at a memory clock of 143MHz.

• Floating point triangle setup engine
• Single cycle 3D architecture
• 8M triangles/second setup engine
• 128-bit rendering pipeline
• 140M pixels/second trilinear fill rate
• Full AGP 4X/2X, including sideband addressing and execute mode
• S3 DX6 texture compression (S3TC)
• Flat panel desktop monitor support
• High quality DVD video playback

• Single-pass multiple textures
• Hardware bump mapping
• Full scene anti-aliasing
• Anisotropic filtering
• 8-bit stencil buffer
• Single cycle trilinear filtering
• 32-bit true color rendering
• Specular lighting and diffuse shading
• Alpha blending modes
• MPEG-2 video textures
• Vertex and table fog
• 16- or 24-bit Z-buffering
• Sprite anti-aliasing, reflection mapping, texture morphing, shadows, procedural textures and atmospheric effects

• High quality up/down scalar
• Planar to packed format conversion
• Motion compensation for full speed DVD playback
• Hardware subpicture blending and highlights
• Multiple video windows for video conferencing
• Contrast, hue, saturation, brightness and gamma controls
• 60MHz VIP video port allows HDTV resolutions
• Digital port for NTSC/PAL TV encoders

• 125/143 MHz memory interface
• 2 to 32 MB frame buffer
• 1Mx16 or 2Mx32 or 4Mx16 SDRAMs
• 256Kx32 or 512Kx32 or 1Mx32 SGRAMs
• SO-DIMM memory upgrade
• Block write support

• Highly optimized 128-bit graphics engine
• Full featured 2D engine for acceleration of BitBLT, rectangle fill, line draw, polygon fill, panning/scrolling and hardware cursor
• 8, 16, and 32 bpp mode acceleration

• 24-bit digital interface for flat panel encoders
• Auto-expansion and centering for VGA text and graphics modes
• Support for all resolutions up to 1280x1024

• 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 (Warp^TM), Direct3D^TM, DirectDraw^TM and DirectShow^TM, OpenGL^TM ICD for Windows 9x and NT]
• Comprehensive SDK, utilities and ISV tools
• ISV and bundling programs

• 300MHz RAMDAC with gamma correction
• I²C serial bus and flash ROM support
• ACPI and PCI power management
• Hardware and BIOS support for VESA timings and DDC monitor communications
• PCI 2.2 bus support including bus mastering
• 27x27mm PBGA with 336 balls
• 2.5V core with 3.3V/5V tolerant I/O

As you can tell by the specs, the Savage4 already features a fully functional OpenGL ICD under Windows 9x and NT, a definite plus. The 300MHz integrated RAMDAC is seemingly standard among the big four manufacturers, 3dfx, NVIDIA, Matrox and S3, and it provides for an increasingly sharp 2D picture in comparison to the old Savage3D.

There isn't a computer gamer out there that hasn't heard the term AGP, or Accelerated Graphics Port, used in a requirements listing on the back of the latest game they've been eyeing. But what is AGP? It isn't rare that our favorite three letter acronyms quickly become lost in their household connotations and we eventually forget what it is they are actually providing us with, if anything at all (the letters MMX come to mind). So what is AGP? (If you're already familiar with the basics of AGP you'll want to skip past this part)

AGP is, according to Intel, a "high performance, component level interconnect targeted at 3D graphical display applications and is based on a set of performance extensions or enhancements to PCI." Basically it is a specialized bus whose sole purpose is to provide "housing" for 2D/3D accelerators in your AGP compatible system.

When operating in its currently standard 2X transfer mode, the AGP bus allows for peak transfer rates of up to 528MB/s up from the 132MB/s of the PCI bus. Using the faster transfer rates the AGP bus allows your AGP compliant computer can store those extremely large textures that games may use in your system memory and retrieve them quickly instead of having to use your graphics card's limited local memory for texture storage and retrieval. What happens when a non-AGP graphics card receives a texture that is larger than its local memory? The same thing that happens when your system runs out of local memory, it begins swapping, but in this case, instead of swapping to your hard disk, your graphics card will perform texture swapping with your system memory which, with the absence of the high speed AGP bus, slows performance down tremendously. This concept of AGP texturing is made possible by the hardware behind it, which is commonly referred to by the acronym GART, or Graphics Address Remapping Table. The function of the GART is basically do allow for the hardware to access large texture maps as single data objects in system memory, permitting your AGP card and software using the AGP bus to access the same memory addresses.

The second major feature of AGP which will briefly be alluded to will be the ability of AGP compliant graphics adapters to manipulate the textures it stores in the system memory directly as opposed to retrieving them and processing all the manipulations locally. This process, known as Direct Memory Execution, or DIME, allows memory intensive texture-mapping procedures to be performed within the spacious system memory rather than in the restrictive graphics card's local memory.

If you can think back to the release of Intel's first AGP chipset, the i440LX, one of the most commonly voiced criticisms of the move to AGP graphics accelerators was that no games would take advantage of AGP or AGP texturing for that matter. Although the design was wonderful in theory, in application it boasted a relatively small performance improvement in the real world tests of the time. Even today, playing a game of Quake 2 doesn't really stress the amount of memory on most current generation 3D accelerators. It is because of this assumption, that the current wave and the next generation in 3D games won't truly require support for AGP texturing (the ability to use the AGP bus as a means of transferring textures to/from system memory) that companies like 3Dfx have stuck to either 100% PCI solutions (i.e. Voodoo2) or poorly implemented AGP specifications (i.e. Banshee/Voodoo3) that don't allow for AGP texturing in light of keeping costs down. Is that how things truly are?

Here's a reality check, they aren't. It's very easy to understand, more detailed textures simply look better and, unfortunately, more detailed textures do take up more space than those of lesser detail. This brings up the whole image quality vs performance debate, however that's something that we won't get in to for now, instead we'll leave the discussion at this comparison: regardless of how beautiful a sunset is, if you're blind to a point where all you can distinguish is general color changes, the sunset has virtually no effect on you. That may be an extreme example, but it's a quick end to an argument that could take pages upon pages to even come close to resolving. After playing a game that has extremely detailed textures on a single 12MB Voodoo2 at 800 x 600, then playing the same game at 800 x 600 on an AGP nVidia Riva TNT based graphics card, you can truly begin to notice the difference. Remember when you heard all of the industry analysts talking about how AGP would eventually be put to good use in the gaming industry? That time is almost upon us, and it's time for companies to realize that AGP texturing and taking full advantage of the specification's capabilities is something all of their video products should do. The technology is there, and it's about time that we start using it. Luckily companies like nVidia, Matrox, and S3 have already taken the first steps in that directionbut it seems as if there is more that could be done

So we have these larger textures being stored in system memory after being transferred over the AGP bus, and these textures are put to work using the DIME specification, but where does S3 fit into this all? Instead of relying solely on the benefits of AGP to allow for game developers to toss incredible amounts of textures at the graphics subsystem, S3 realized that although AGP allows for a large portion of your system memory to be used for texture storage and manipulation, there is still a limit to the effectiveness of the technology. Primarily, the amount of system memory available for AGP to make use of. The next logical step in this progression would be to somehow compress the textures to a point that even larger, and higher quality, textures could be stored in the same amount of system memory, therefore giving us step two, to better texture quality: S3's Texture Compression.

8-bit Texture

S3TC Compressed Texture

S3's 6:1 compression ratio provided for by the S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) technology allows for the seamless integration of compression technology, with no noticeable visual penalty, due to its full support in Microsoft's DirectX 6.0. S3TC isn't something S3 cooked up on the side, it is a fully licensable and readily available compression algorithm that is supported in DirectX 6.0, it's about time a company realized that proprietary isn't the way to go to make your presence known in the market. Just to get a vague idea of the capabilities of S3TC, while the Voodoo2 is limited to texture sizes of 256 x 256 bytes, a S3TC texture is limited to 2048 x 2048 byte textures.

Copyright 1999 S3