S3 Graphics Chrome 400 Series Graphics Processors

See, that's why NVIDIA should buy VIA - that way they'll actually have DX10.1 GPUs to sell! More seriously, that's pretty nice stuff, will news it in a minute.

 

S3 launches DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 GPUs

Despite losing more than half of their GPU/IGP market share in the last year according to Jon Peddie Research, VIA/S3 is hoping to change that situation with a new family of 65nm/DirectX 10.1/PCI Express 2.0 GPUs. The Chrome 400 Series will become available in late February 2008.

Read the full news item

 

Their DX10.1 whitepaper seems interesting. It looks as if they're doing something nice WRT AA:both custom resolve filters a la R6xx and a form of edge detection(unless I'm reading it wrong, it's poorly worded).

 

Does this chip have any oomph? Because that's what will make or break it in the end.

 

I could find no performance related information on their site.
Realistically, they probably aren't interested in going for the high-performance, high power draw market, rather aiming for inclusion into portable/HTPC systems. Goes better with their new CPU and its design criteria.

So it probably won't find much favour on these boards.
In the real world - depends on how well they can negotiate deals with OEMs, which will partly depend on how anxious these are to have alternatives available.

 

Well at least i heard S3 open up their driver or its API for Hardware Video acceleration with VC-1 and H.264.

Which should prove popular for some.

 

I know it won't be high-performance, the question was actually "is the performance sufficient to compete with the ATI/NV counterparts".

 

The answer is no. I'd eat my own shit if S3 released a competitive part at this point. They arguably never have, any most likely never will.

 

They would be better off not targeting any NV/AMD counterparts at all, or only at the lowest end.
The low end DX10 chips are quite astoundingly underperformant, so anything S3 offers at a power envelope below 40W is going to be just as attractive or more as anything AMD or nVidia produces. At that point it will boil down to contacts and price.

VIA/S3 do not have a range of existing manufacturer contracts to build on, thus they will have a bit of an uphill struggle to beat out the established players for contracts. On the other hand OEMs like to have more than one source, as it keeps the dominant source(s) at least somewhat honest. This could play to S3s advantage, particularly as they have their headquarters locally. I can see both their CPUs and GPUs being used for systems that do not target the USA/EU markets at all.

They are quite clear in what they promote - low power and and good video performance. The complete lack of performance info or hype can probably be taken as an indication that they aren't going for the 200W+ bracket, and thus will not produce 3DMark scores that give bragging rights.

 

Power consumption is more important in the laptop market; albeit a very subjective POV if I go out and research for a new laptop the first thing I'd personally look for is the CPU, the system ram amount and where the GPU comes from. A good reason to have second thoughts for anything Intel or S3 at this point would be driver quality/stability, unless proven otherwise.

 

Chrome 400 Series (Preview) - Chrome 400 Series
What a hell are "Execution Units"?
It's a small summary about S3 400 Series.

 

64-bit memory interface, so the target market is clear.

 

Just put some extrafast GDDR5 there and you could get quite ok'ish membandwidth even with 64-bit memory interface

But yes, they're clearly lowend/htpc material, but I don't see them offer anything over ATI HD-lowend, in fact they seem to offer even less, so don't see much room for HTPCs either.
The only place I could really see them appear to be popular would be in IGP for Intel, if they will put one in such, as AMD/ATI isn't offering HD-level IGP's for Intel platform.

 

Looks like thier perf/watt slide needs updating!

 

Because you're at 55nm or due to something else?