S3 Savage 3D          07 Jul 1998

From Bootnet: S3 is putting its bumbling ViRGE fiasco behind them, and is looking to regain its former glory with their newest chip creation: a 2D/3D solution dubbed the Savage 3D. Like Matrox's MGA-G200 architecture, the Savage3D is a 128-bit video adapter featuring full AGP 2x with sidebands. It's pin-compatible with S3's older Trio3D chip, but this time out, S3 is aiming to take down all comers, including 3Dfx's Voodoo2.

The Savage3D's technical specs are typical next-generation fare:

• Full AGP 2x with sidebands or PCI 2.1
• 128-bit dual-rendering pipeline (64-bits x 2 running from 85-125MHz)
• 5M triangles/second triangle set-up engine
• 125Mpixels/second trilinear fill rate
• 8K on-chip cache
• 125MHz SDRAM or SGRAM
• 250MHz RAMDAC
• 64-bit sychronous memory bus
• 2/4/8MB frame buffer configurations
• Software DVD

Additionally, the Savage3D utilizes a tile-based architecture for rendering, (as does PowerVR's second-generation hardware). However, whether the Savage3D will take a performance hit--normally associated with tile-based rendering--remains to be seen. Nonetheless, S3 is projecting a lock down at 60fps for all your gaming needs, and in any case, its 3D performance--at least on paper--looks mighty promising:

Single cycle trilinear filtering True color (24-bit) rendering until the final stage 16 or 24-bit Z-buffering Triangle strips and fans Void and cluster dithering for 16-bit modes Specular lighting and diffuse shading All alpha-blend modes MPEG-2 video texturing Edge anti-aliasing Per-pixel MIP-mapping Vertex/Table fog D3D, OpenGL ICD compliant Hardware assisted bump mapping, anisotropic filtering, shadows, texture morphing, reflection mapping, environmet mapping, procedural texturing

The Savage3D will also be one of the few next-generation 3D accelerators to support DirectX 6.0's texture compression in hardware. Of course, since S3 created the specification that Microsoft chose to incorporate into the next DirectX iteration, it should come as no surprise that S3's latest chip would support the algorithm, which allows for the hardware decompression of textures. And although there's always a risk of losing visual quality due to compression algorithms, S3 is promising a minimal loss of visual quality when the feature in engaged. As well, S3 is hoping to include the texture compression feature as a user-adjustable option.

The Savage3D is now sampling to prospective OEMs, with full production ramping up in Q3 of this year. The chip will cost $35 (in lots of 10,000). At press time, no OEM deals have been announced.

4May98: It finally happened: S3 had announced another 3D accelerator, one it hopes will be competitive with the next crop of 3D chips.   The Savage3D is AGP, 32-bit color, 125 MPixels/sec, one-pass trilinear filtering, texture compression, specular and diffuse shading, alpha blending, multiple textures, palletized textures, edge anti-aliasing, vertex and table fog and 16/24 bit Z-buffering, bump mapping, anisotrophic filtering, reflection mapping, shadows, texture morphing and procedural textures. The regular features for the next generation.

Cards:

Hercules Terminator Beast