Preview: S3 Graphics DeltaChrome S8 Nitro

The Test

For this preview, we will be using a subset of our game test used in our fall round up series, and we will be using the same test platform as in the budget GPU shootout. In fact, we will simply be dropping our DeltaChrome data into the budget GPU shootout graphs since this is simply a preview and not a real test of final performance -- we should only expect to get a fairly general idea of where things are and where they may go. Here is a list of the hardware we used:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-51
ASUS SK8V (VIA K8T800 chipset)
2x 512MB Registered DDR (2-2-3-6)
Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer)

As far as drivers go, midrange cards used the ForceWare 52.16 and Catalyst 3.8 drivers, while the budget cards made use of the 53.03 and 3.9 versions. The driver revision we will be using for the S8 Nitro is 15.08.09.b driver.

We have chosen not to do a full image quality analysis at this point becuase we feel it would be a waste of time. These drivers are very early and things are still very much in flux. There are already internal drivers that fix parts of the problems we will note in the following tests, and issues pointed out in previews such as this will most likely be addressed by S3 as well. We have seen how final WHQL certified drivers can change image qulaity between revisions, but fluctuations are even more dramatic on preview hardware and software. We will mention any visual issues we had when running certain tests, but beyond that we will wait for the actual release of the product to post our full analysis on uncompressed screenshots in all their glory.