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Anyone with
even the slightest interest in PC graphics is aware that
NVIDIA and ATi have had a virtual stranglehold on all
segments of the add-in card market for the last few years.
For hardcore enthusiasts, the names "3dfx" and perhaps
even "Matrox" may come to mind as well, when talking about
the dominant players in PC graphics of the recent past.
However, there is another company that once reigned
supreme for a short period of time as an early gaming card
evangelist. That company was
S3
Graphics.
Many of the
veterans among you will surely remember the day when your
first Diamond Stealth64 Video arrived. Powered by
the S3 Vision 968 controller, the Diamond Stealth64 Video
line of cards was once the pinnacle of performance.
In fact, we burned through the Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 days with
a Diamond Stealth64 Video 3000 pushing the pixels in our
main rigs. But those were the days of
low-resolutions and 2D acceleration. The game
completely changed when it became time to accelerate 3D.
They tried, but back then S3 produced what was to be
dubbed the first "3D-Decellerator" by some, the ViRGE
series of graphics processors. While they had
excellent 2D performance and quality, their 3D performance
was simply not up to par, when compared to competing
products of the time. Sometime later, S3 followed up with their
Savage line of 3D accelerators, which were far better
performers, but by then it was too late. 3dfx and
NVIDIA were embattled at the high-end, and S3's reputation
had be tarnished so badly by the ViRGE, that many
enthusiasts simply wouldn't purchase another card powered
by an S3 processor. S3 ultimately ended up getting
acquired by VIA, who then incorporated S3's technology
into their line of IGPs.
So here we are
in the current day. 3dfx is dead and gone, NVIDIA
remains strong, along with the now dominant ATi, and S3 is
trying to break back into the business with a new DirectX
9 compliant architecture, dubbed "DeltaChrome".
We've seen and heard quite a bit about DeltaChrome for the
last few months, and were eager to see the technology in
action. On paper, DeltaChrome seems to have what it
takes to be a winner. The 'S8' models sport eight
DX9 class pixel pipelines, just like ATi's R3x0 line of
GPUs, and they fully support Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0
specifications. We all know that paper specs
certainly aren't what push polygons, however. We
need hardware in our hands to draw any kind of meaningful
conclusion. So, today on HotHardware, we're going to
take two pre-production DeltaChrome evaluation cards for a
spin, to see just how far S3 has come with DeltaChrome.
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Specifications & Features of The S3 DeltaChrome
S8 Nitro |
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DirectX 9+ Specs |
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Vertex Shader 2.0+ and Pixel Shader 2.0+
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DirectX 9.0 VS/PS hardware
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128-bit (4xFP32) vertex precision and 96-bit
(4xFP24) pixel precision
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PS - 16 concurrent texture map references per pass
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Shadow Volume acceleration with two-sided stencil
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Unconditional non power of 2 textures
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Floating point render target / texture formats
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High accuracy floating point render target for
cinematic quality image rendering
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High quality advanced 16x anisotropic filtering
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High performance anti-aliasing with 4x
multi-sampling up to 1024x768
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Volume and cube maps for photo-realistic
reflection
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Programmable per pixel gamma correction (PS 2.0+)
Advanced Deferred Rendering
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Hierarchical Z
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Front-to-back, Back-to-front Z occlusion culling
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Incorporated zero-cycle clear
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Reduced Z buffer write and read
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Triangle mask optimization (Vertex elimination) V8
Pixel Pipeline
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Full 8 pixel pipeline
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2.4 Trilinear filtered Giga pixels per second fill
rate
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Full floating point calculation precision
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Programmable cache for engine speed and efficiency
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Unified super wide pipeline for seamless
2D/3D/Video context switching
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Optimized advanced shading dependency read
pipelines
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Programmable render target blending (PS2.0+)
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Programmable depth shader (PS 2.0+)
Chromotion Programmable Video engine
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IDCT hardware support
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Motion compensation
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S340 uncompressed format support
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Per pixel adaptive de-interlacing (PS2.0+)
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MPEG -2/-4 hardware acceleration
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Windows Media Video hardware acceleration
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4x4 programmable kernel filter video scaling
(PS2.0+)
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Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer support
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Real time post processing (PS2.0+)
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ArtisticLicense real-time video effects (PS2.0+)
Highly Integrated Mobile Features
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7th Generation DuoView (extended desktop)
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Up to 128 MB of integrated frame buffer memory
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2 channel LVDS transmitter for LCD panels up to
2048x1536
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2 Channel 165MHz, 12-bit digital TMDS port
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Full Clock gating for major functional blocks
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Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling
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Pulse width modulation for panel lighting control
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High quality bilinear LCD panel scaling
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CRT display up to 2048x1536 75Hz resolution
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DVI display up to 1600x1200 resolution
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AGP 8X
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256 MB frame buffer
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128 bit DDR memory interface
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Integrated Hi-Def HDTV & Standard TV Encoder
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480p/720p/1080i/1080p component (YPbPr) output
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4:4:4 conversion with 10 bit DAC resolution
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Full desktop view in HDTV mode
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480i standard TV output (S-video, composite)
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Macrovision enabled for 480i/p mode
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2/3 tap flicker filter with programmable
coefficients
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PC2001 specification support
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NTSC/PAL support for standard TV mode
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Vertical over-/underscan compensation
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2x Oversampling for premium image quality
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Adaptive aperture correction
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Full range RGB to YUV color space conversion with
Hue, Saturation and Contrast adjustment
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Smooth vertical overscan compensation with
programmable contraction factor
High Performance 400MHz 10-bit CRT DAC
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1+ billion colors (Giga-Palette)
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2048x1536 QXGA (3.1M) display resolution capable
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Ultra low power consumption
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Excellent INL/DNL characteristics (+/- 1 LSB)
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Dual mode compatible (HDTV/CRT)
Advanced Display Features
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Hardware display rotation for TabletPC (90°, 180°,
270°)
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Dual CRT support
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Hardware color cursors
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Up to 256 MB frame buffer
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First class utilities with S3 Screen Toys
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S3 DeltaChrome
Chipset Gallery
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CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN
ENLARGED VIEW
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S3
DELTACHROME S8 NITRO:
325MHZ CORE - 2.6GP/S
325MHZ MEMORY (650MHZ DDR) - 10.4GB/S
| The card
pictured above is a pre-production S3 DeltaChrome S8
Nitro. This is the faster of the two cards we'll be
looking in this article. It is built upon a 6-layer
PCB which is populated by 128MB of Samsung DDR RAM
(8x16MB) clocked at 325MHz (650MHz DDR). The exact
part number of the RAM is Samsung K4D263238E-GC2A.
A quick trip to their site reveals that these
particular chips are rated for operation at up 350MHz, so
once the tools become available there should be some
overclocking headroom with these cards. The GPU,
which incidentally is also clocked at 325MHz on the Nitro
model, is actively cooled by a relatively simple orb type
cooler, which never got excessively warm throughout
testing. We suspect that S3 has clocked these
pre-production boards conservatively for the sake of
stability, but we think that final retail samples may be
clocked a bit higher.
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN
ENLARGED VIEW
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S3
DELTACHROME S8:
300MHZ CORE - 2.4GP/S
300MHZ MEMORY (600MHZ DDR) - 9.6GB/S
| Although the
label on the rear is this card says otherwise, this
particular DeltaChrome is not a "Nitro" model. The
card above is the standard DeltaChrome S8. This part
is built upon a less complex 4-layer PCB, and is populated
by 256MB of less expensive TSOP memory chips (Hynix
HY5DU561622CT-28 to be exact). The core and
memory clock speeds for the standard S8 are a bit lower as
well, coming in at 300MHz / 300MHz (600MHz DDR)
respectively. We
should mention that at 300MHz, the DeltaChrome S8
generated very little heat. In fact, when we removed
the simple active cooler, we found that our sample didn't
have any thermal paste applied to GPU. Even so, it
didn't exhibit any heat related issues whatsoever.
With lower clock speeds and a less complex design, it
should come as no surprise that this is the cheaper of two
cards showcased here. Both cards do have some
features in common, like the three video outputs (DVI,
DB15, S-Video). And both cards can also output directly
to an HDTV, using the included dongle.
A Closer Look at
DeltaChrome
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