S3 GammaChrome Specs

Yeah, of course! S3 currently offers the best trilinear and anisotropic filter quality. With the enhancements of the GammaChrome-chip, 5x and 9xSSAA should be possible, perfect for old games ( DeltaChrome couldn't handle it, although the driver supports it in some way).
And the Ultra part should be fast enough to fight with X700!
 
Stefan said:
Yeah, of course! S3 currently offers the best trilinear and anisotropic filter quality. With the enhancements of the GammaChrome-chip, 5x and 9xSSAA should be possible, perfect for old games ( DeltaChrome couldn't handle it, although the driver supports it in some way).
And the Ultra part should be fast enough to fight with X700!
Click to expand...
The GammaChrome S18 has only 4 pixel pipes. They should be more efficient than the DeltaChrome pipes, and the ram is faster, but if the ultra actually beats a X600XT, let alone a X700, color me surprised.
 
Basic:
:LOL:
However, that doesn't come near of beating this:
I on good hoped not good �� big ventilator......... I am not want under the wind tunnel........ . attendance my �� d not to cause too quickly only am think the brain calmly user.....
Click to expand...
I mean... WTF?

You remember now, only am think the brain calmly! Alright? :LOL: Who knows what else might happen if you don't!
 
Stefan said:
Yeah, of course! S3 currently offers the best trilinear and anisotropic filter quality. With the enhancements of the GammaChrome-chip, 5x and 9xSSAA should be possible, perfect for old games ( DeltaChrome couldn't handle it, although the driver supports it in some way).
And the Ultra part should be fast enough to fight with X700!
Click to expand...
I don't know anything about S3's trilinear or aniso filtering, but how could a four-pipe card compete with an eight-pipe X700?
 
Oh, sorry! That was my fault!!

I have confounded GammaChrome S19 with S18!!

The Specs are for S18 and I have thought this is the high-end part, but this will be S19. So, sorry for this mistake!
 
If I consider possible size and power consumption of DeltaChrome in general, I'd rather think it had it's primary target for the mobile/notebook market. I don't know if VIA/S3 were able to land any significant deal in that market, but I'd imagine it would be a very decent competitor there.

Of course it would had helped if it wouldn't had been as bandwidth constricted and if it would have (initially claimed) Multisampling (2x/4xRGMS would had been enough).
 
So is S19 a four pipe (single quad) card? With two PS ALUs per pipe?

If it is anyone know if :

The instruction sequence is fully duplicated in both ALUs or are they distrubuted between them?

Can it co-issue Vec3 and Scalar ops?

Can it dual-issue?

OR is the S19 a eight pipe (two quad card) with a single PS ALU per pipe?
 
nice to see S3 continuing build up, though Deltachrome wasn't so big success. :)

EDIT: hmmh... based on benchmarks, I could see myself buying S3 based card next. my gaming has been decreased quite lot (or I am playing not so graphically intensive games) and it looks like med end is closing my Radeon 9700-nonpro performance figures. But
 
You will want to see if S3 is updating and making decent drivers before you buy anything from them.
 
S3 has made a huge step forward in the last months! The latest DeltaChrome-Driver works fine, but OpenGL is still crappy...
 
swaaye said:
You will want to see if S3 is updating and making decent drivers before you buy anything from them.
Click to expand...
There used to be a time when people were happy with the drivers that shipped with their purchased hardware on a floppy disk or were included in the operating system and that was it. What happened ?
 
no_way said:
swaaye said:
You will want to see if S3 is updating and making decent drivers before you buy anything from them.
Click to expand...
There used to be a time when people were happy with the drivers that shipped with their purchased hardware on a floppy disk or were included in the operating system and that was it. What happened ?
Click to expand...
Microsoft started defining APIs.
 
zeckensack said:
no_way said:
There used to be a time when people were happy with the drivers that shipped with their purchased hardware on a floppy disk or were included in the operating system and that was it. What happened ?
Click to expand...
Microsoft started defining APIs.
Click to expand...
Haha....um, no. New drivers became necessary when people started to use hardware as coprocessors. For example, early video cards were nothing but dumb framebuffers with a DAC: just a bit of memory to store the frame before it was sent to the monitor. Essentially no driver would have been needed for such a design.

Later on, when cards started shipping with acceleration for the Windows desktop, recognizable drivers became necessary. But since there really wasn't much problem with inefficient drivers, and since bugs were really easy to check, well, there just wasn't much need for driver updates (side comment: S3 had some fantastic products for 2D stuff...such as the Virge, for instance).

But with the advent of 3D acceleration performance optimization and bug checking became a whole lot more challenging, and thus poor drivers really started to become a problem.

Edit: Yes, sorry, I neglected overlays and such. Don't feel like going into it, but the above argument is still valid, if the example isn't exactly correct.
 
swaaye said:
You will want to see if S3 is updating and making decent drivers before you buy anything from them.
Click to expand...

It's not the first S3 card for me, eventhough during the time of the previous one, S3 Grahics was very different company. after the Sonic Blue sold the S3 completely to VIA, they hardly had anything, so the company has been basically built from scratch since.

In any case, if my most played games right now are OpenTTD, Settlers 3, Track Mania and Race Driver 1, I doubt that none of those are using something most of here would call "latest 3D tricks available" (especially when 2 of the games are complete 2D)
 
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