Graphics chipset market share, help please

[Gollum]

Could anybody help me in pointing out any freely available market share data for graphics chipsets of the past couple years? I googled up some good data on Jon Peddie's site for 2002, but I'd need some info about the 2-3 years before that too since our target audience is not exactly folks with the latest hardware. Also, how much of VIA's market share represent S3 chips at the moment, is VIA shipping any other graphics chipsets too and if so what kind of chips are those?

We have to convince our publisher that our 3D engine refusing to run properly on a S3 Savage chip isn't that much of an issue (other older chips like the TNT or Voodoo3 work fine) and that they don't really represent a significant enough market share for us to worry much about (we're already on a tight budget anyway). We're only licensing the engine and are currently stuck with this incompatibility.

I've been googling for a while and will continue to do so, but I figured since there's many industry people here, maybe one of you can help me out here much faster and better. I'd really appreciate the help, thanks.

 

[indio]

You could try and find the total number of S3 chips sold and then deduce the rest from that. Email S3's marketing department and ask them.

 

[AzBat]

Could anybody help me in pointing out any freely available market share data for graphics chipsets of the past couple years? I googled up some good data on Jon Peddie's site for 2002, but I'd need some info about the 2-3 years before that too since our target audience is not exactly folks with the latest hardware.

I worked for Jon for about 5 years. I still keep in contact with him and others that work for him. If you will send me a PM I'll give you an email address to someone who could possibly give you the data. I could have given you the data myself, but I threw it all away a couple of months ago. They may not give you actual shipping numbers, but they may give you percentages of total market for the years the Savage3D chip shipped. That in itself should be enough to prove to your colleagues that Savage3D compatibility is nothing you need to be concerned about.

Tommy McClain

 

[OpenGL guy]

They may not give you actual shipping numbers, but they may give you percentages of total market for the years the Savage3D chip shipped. That in itself should be enough to prove to your colleagues that Savage3D compatibility is nothing you need to be concerned about.

Except that the Savege3D is not the volume product I'd be worried about as an ISV. Of more concern would be the integrated and mobile Savage products that VIA has shipped.

"S3 Savage" could be any of Savage 3D, Savage MX/IX, Savage 4, Savage 2000, Super Savage, Savage XP and so on.

 

[AzBat]

Except that the Savege3D is not the volume product I'd be worried about as an ISV. Of more concern would be the integrated and mobile Savage products that VIA has shipped.

"S3 Savage" could be any of Savage 3D, Savage MX/IX, Savage 4, Savage 2000, Super Savage, Savage XP and so on.

Excellent point. Had forgotten about the integrated products. You'll want to make sure you make that point when asking for market numbers.

Tommy McClain

 

[Gollum]

I've been wondering about that too, are all those based onthe same old Savage technology and hence share the same driver problems? I guess I'll have to look into that a bit more, but thanks for the replies so far!

 

[chavvdarrr]

AFAIK all integrated chipsets which VIA sells are Savage4 based.
Except SavageMX/IX which are based on Savage3...

Anyway, incompatibility with Savage4 is a shame , after all games like warcraft3/JediKnight2/UT2003 run on it (I have an old K6-2+500 machine...)

 

[Gollum]

Believe me, I'd prefer that we could make it work, but currently its outside of our control. The engine developers told us its some issue with the S3 driver's DX8 support they can't find away to work around, I'd have to ask about the details though, as I've not been in contact with them personally (hey, I'm just the artist after all). Neither they nor we have anywhere near the resources or influence of bigger studios, I doubt S3 devrel really cares much about the issue...

 

[ET]

Haven't checked any S3 based MB lately, but testing a SiS integrated chipset a couple month ago, it had only DX6 level driver, which would indeed limit DX8 function availability (and disallow DX9 completely). TNT has DX9 level drivers, Voodoo DX7, AFAIK. If S3 is still at the DX6 level, that would indeed be a problem. But if that's the problem (which you could probably tell easily by running DX9's dxidag on such a board), then you could ask S3 if they're planning to update the driver.