The Return of S3

flynn_nrg writes "Just saw this article on ExtremeTech about S3's new graphics card. S3 is back on the scene with its first new GPU architecture in five years. Rather than take aim at the high-end, S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category, which is currently dominated by ATI's Radeon 9600 XT and nVidia's GeForce FX 5700, both of which are under $200. Today S3 unveils the DeltaChrome S8 GPU, which represents the midrange of its upcoming line of DeltaChrome GPUs."

Wow

[Bruha]

Welcome back S3..

Maybe it'll drive the prices down a bit.

Been there done That.

[rkz]

Yeah! Just like the S3 ViRGE!
And the ViRGE GX2!
And the Savage!
And the Savage4!
And the Savage2000!

Seriously...they've said the same *damn* thing every time. The only inroads this chipset *might* make would be in low-cost laptops, where S3 already had a sizeable market until the GeForce 2 Go and Radeon Mobility started kicking butt.

Re:Wow

[after]

If they are going to be making pricy cards, then they might as well make them superior to the home user (think ATI, NVIDIA) aimed cards. This is just like SGI with their high-priced chips.

S3 hasn't been cool...

[pw700z]

...since VESA local bus (VLB) video died. Now THOSE were the days. Even AMD was really, really cool in a mainstream sort of way - anyone remember the 486DX2-80MHz? Or the 120MHz which was faster than the Pentiums at the time? A DX4 120 + a fast S3 VLB video kicked serious butt, at least in 2D and text modes.

Give us drivers...

[Just Some Guy]

...and we will buy. I mean that. Provide either Open Source drivers for X, or the full specs required to implement them, and you will sell hundreds of thousands of cards to those of us who are more interested in non-proprietary kernel modules than raw performance.

Right now, I have an NVidia card in my workstation and I hate it. Why? Because I have to choose between using the OpenGL renderer and staying true to my beliefs about software freedom. This basically means that I paid extra for a card that I can only halfway use.

S3, take heed. Give us a product that we can use and we'll support you. Do it. It's the right thing.

Re:Wow

[toddestan]

Prices are already pretty reasonable. Unless you play cutting edge games, a $75 video card will do everything you want.

Heck, even if you play cutting edge games, even that $75 card will serve you well unless you absolutely must have 1600x1200 resolution with 32bit color and 435FPS.

Driver Issues

[miracle69]

So they're releasing a card with serious driver issues, where the top of the line model is expected to compete in the mid-price range market.

Wouldn't this be the perfect situation to open the source and getting the community to squeeze every last bit of performance outta their chip? It helps them save money on paying people to code the driver, and it gets the most outta their hardware. IN addition, it would also give them a healthy community that would reccommend this solution to friends/family that aren't into the bleeding-edge gaming machines.

Re:Give us drivers...

[JanneM]

No "freedom tax". It is a somewhat lower performance card, with a lower price tag.

This may come as a bit of a chock, I know, but there are some of us out there actually _not_ willing to have the bleeding edge in graphics performance at great cost (in money, noise and power draw). My main machine is currently a laptop with an NVIDIA GF4 420 GO with 32Mb memory. It can handle anything I throw at it with no problems. True, I do not play the latest "QuakerDoom 40,000 - Bloody Dismemberement" - if gaming was the primary focus for me, I'd have a Windows partition (or, preferably, a PS/2).

Oh, and about "the right thing": you are right - they are a hardware company. Their business is selling hardware to people. Drivers are a cost, not a source of revenue. Anything they do is geared towards driving hardware sales and lowering the cost of providing said hardware. If releasing drivers or specs for Linux will increase sales more than it costs them to do the release, it is a net win.

Re:But wait!

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that the vast majority of cards are sold to OEMs, such as Dell, HP, and Gateway. What these guys care about above all else is price, so if S3 can make a card that performs as well as the type of midrange Nvidia and ATI cards that the OEMs usually use at a cost that's $10 less, S3 will sell a huge volume.

Re:Why buy mid-range?

[cK-Gunslinger]

Well, the Radeon 9700s have been out for over a year now, and they are still well over $200. I think that a mid-range 9600 Pro for $130 or so is a good investment. You usually get 70-80% the performance of the high end, but at less than 50% the price.

When you talk about "buying a 6 month old top-end card for a fraction of the price" you are talking about buying a Radeon 9800 for $290 that cost $450 six months ago. Yes, it's a lot less than it was, but that's still too much for the above-casual/below-fanical game. That's not exactly a bargain to them. It's like a $9.5M estate selling for $6M. Yes, that's a huge savings, but still out of most buyers' league.

Re:But wait!

[Peridriga]

Maybe their not aiming for the high-end market.

Imagine how many video cards are purchased off the shelf at computer stores. Then imagine how many video cards are purchased in new computer sales. I would imagine more video cards are moved by unit in new/refurb(card replaced) sales than individual sales for LOW/MID range cards.

Now I know people purchase high-end cards from stores (I did) but, to sell mid-range cards you usually don't sell to the consumer you sell to the manfacturer.

I would rather spend 'x' amount of money to produce a cheaper and comparable card to the current market norm and get a contract providing Dell w/ cards for their mid-range systems then spending '3x' the amount of money making the "newest and the greatest" card then having to spend another '2x' just marketing the damn thing to a niche market..

I'd rather sell mid-range and more units.

Re:Why buy mid-range?

[Peridriga]

Why do people buy used cars?
Why do people buy refurb'd computers?
Why do people goto yard sales?
Why do people goto dollar stores?

Maybe the secretary down the hall doesn't need a Radeon 9800?
Maybe I don't want my kid to use 'this' PC for gaming and only for school work?

There is a market for mid-range cards...

Don't just assume everyone wants to buy the best of everything. (Why isn't Mercedes-Benz the largest car manufacturer in the world?)

$200?

[John Seminal]

S3 has set its sights on the midrange price/performance category, which is currently dominated by ATI's Radeon 9600 XT and nVidia's GeForce FX 5700, both of which are under $200.

Since when is $200 and under the midrange? Isn't that where video cards top out for most of the market?

I only purchased one video card in my life that was over $100 and it was noting spectacular compared to video cards in older systems I had around the house with half the video memeory. What are you people doing with video? Heck, I had a system with a 16 meg voodoo card that can play DVD's. And they are selling on ebay for 10 bucks.

Re:But wait!

[Hanji]

Maybe their not aiming for the high-end market.
Of course they're probably not. His point, however, was that *not* having a high-end card to show off and impress people with will decrease their visiblity, among other factors, and make it harder for them to sell midrange cards, even if they are comparable to or better than similarly-midrange cards from NVidia or ATI.

If you see some truly stunning demo from NVidia or ATI on their highest-end card, you're more likely to buy from them, even if you're not shopping for a card anywhere near what you saw. It may not be completely logical, but it's true.

Re:Why buy mid-range?

[gehrehmee]

Because the outdated product has recieved that extensive beta-testing program card manufacturers like to call "first year of release". That many extra months of public eyes give that older product's drivers more time to mature, not to mention more time for people to find hardware defects that only crop up after more time.

The good old fashioned S3 -- perfect for servers

[billsf]

Don't us computer professionals deserve a usable video card for Eur 10,-- or so? Gamer/lamer crap and 5.1 Dolby sound has no place in the bulk of the computing world.

Re:$200?

[Naffer]

In all honesty, why shouldn't video cards be that expensive? Tons of people are willing to pay upwards of 3 to 4 hundred dollars on an Intel CPU, and thats just the chip.
My 5900 Ultra has twice as many transistors as my Pentium 4 (both .13, Twice the surface area right?) and came with 256Megabytes of 2.2ns DDR. Add to that the costs of the PCB, memory controller, VIVO-functionality chip, and Cooling solution and you have an expensive product.

You can't expect a fast video card for $80 because you can't assemble fast chips and fast ram for $80.
Midrange is $200-$260. Top end goes from $350 to $550. You can't get any decent DX9 hardware under $100.

Re:I'm A Little Disappointed

[Saville]

The question is how long will it take? How about all the 3dfx owners that never got decent drivers? Did Matrox ever get around to decent OpenGL drivers for the G400 or did they just have their Quake OpenGL->d3d wrapper? Did SiS ever give good drivers for their Xabre? Did Trident ever release good drivers for its products? Are the Kyro drivers good enough to run all applications? Only recently has ATI started producing stable drivers, and even then 7x00 users seem to be experiencing problems sometimes still.

What if you get card X with bad drivers, but it takes 11/2 years for good drivers? By the time you finally get decent drivers your card is obsolete. Why not get a card you know has good drivers and then when brand Y produces good drivers buy their card?

IMO if you buy a card with bad drivers because it gives you a slightly better price/performance ratio and its bad drivers *might* get fixed you are an idiot :P

I hope S3 gets their drivers fixed soon and they become the 3rd most popular 3d company, but until this happens I have to tell everybody to stick with nvidia or ATI hardware.

Re:Wow

[bonehead]

$200 to me seems like WAY to much to pay for a graphics card

Especially in a day and age where a hundred bucks more can buy you an entire PC.

ATI and NVIDIA

[Saville]

http://www.digitimes.com/NewsShow/Article.asp?date Publish=2003/12/19&pages=A7&seq=47

I don't know when the deltachrome will be on the market, but it looks like ATI and nvidia will have some new cards on the market possibly by April which will push the price of the 5900 and 9800 way down, which will in turn push the price of the 5700 and 9600 down which is going to put some serious pressure on everybody else.

I see XGI's Volari as the biggest compitition to S3's DeltaChrome.

Funny, I never really cared that they left :)

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Seriously... who really misses S3? :) I'm sure this product will be of the highest standards ;)

Market forces that be, please start working

[t0ny]

OMG, you mean S3 isnt dead yet? I would have hoped their crappy products would have driven them out of business long ago.

Oh well, as cheap, junky, consumer-level computers are being made, S3 will always have a customer. Its all about the profit margin.

Re:But wait!

[Mawbid]

My MPEG2 decoder card from Creative had the same problem. The manufacturer can say "we can't give you the specs because we don't own the rights". They're not lying, but I don't think they're being completely honest either. The statement implies that they would like to give you what you want, that they're on your side.

That's bullshit.

If they really wanted to their hardware specs to be open, they would not license other people's technology under terms that prohibit that. If they had a historical dependency on such technology, they would negotiate a new license. Is there any indication they even tried to do that? If relicensing didn't work out, they would phase out their dependency on closed technology. Is there any indication they tried that?

If nvidia wanted to satisfy your demand for specs, they would. They haven't, so they don't. Any talk about how they can't do that is just talk.

Personally, I do not expect companies to give out specs to their hardware just because a small portion of their customers wants them to. I also do not expect companies to be truthful or to value their customers. Therefore, I'm not upset when they don't. There's a low grumbling disagreement with the whole situation, but I don't get excited any more. My advice to those who do: lower your expectations to the level of reality. "Jaded", I think you call it. It's easier.

HDTV set top box

[Cuchullain]

I think that everyone who is comparing this chipset with the high end ATI and Nvidia chipsets is missing the point.

The stated market for this thing is OEM sales to Mainboard producers. Doesn't it seem obvious that the inclusion of passable 3d and the ability to output to HDTV natively is positioning this for the set top box market?

How many discussions have there been of the new set top box market, or how to build your own PVR, on Slashdot in the last couple of months?

This chipset isn't for playing doom 3 on your dual monitor winxp system (though it might do that too), it is for using as a capable midrange chip in mini-itx systems, etc.

Just my $.02.

K