S3 Savage

S3's yield problems forced Hercules to hand pick usable chips from the silicon wafers.

And while an integrated TV encoder was dropped, the DVD acceleration was commendable, and the chip supported an early version of the DVI interface for LCDs.

The Savage4 gained numerous design-wins with board-vendors, including Diamond Multimedia (Stealth III S540) and Creative Labs.

The Savage4 series' single cycle trilinear filtering and S3TC texture compression created a 3D card with exceptional image quality.

However, by continuing with a bandwidth-constraining 64-bit memory bus, S3 guaranteed this graphics card would never be a performance part under 32-bit color.

Within Direct3D titles such as Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Savage 4 scored almost 50% slower than TNT2 and Voodoo3 even at a low resolution such as 800x600.

[1] The chip was very popular for budget machines, with many generic retail products based on it and OEM PC wins.

Only the high-quality texture capability from its S3TC support gave it good mind share with the gaming community.

Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena, two popular games at the time, shipped with built-in support for S3TC.

The MX had many similarities to Savage4 but had reduced clocks and added an integrated TV out function with optional Macrovision.

The Savage IX was very similar to the MX, but had 8MB SDRAM directly integrated into the chip to make it even more compact.

The final graphics card was released late that year as the Diamond Viper II Z200.

The initial pre-release specifications had called for a 175 MHz core clock rate, with a resulting 700 million texels/second fillrate.

Seemingly unwilling to invest the time and effort required to set up a structured internal driver development team, S3's graphics division was sold to VIA for $321 million in 2001.

The dominant GPU market share once held by S3, now fell primarily to NVIDIA with its GeForce line, and ATI's Radeon series.