Alternative Discusion: OTHER video cards only!!

[zack]

Are there any other cards out there that perform reasonably well with today's games? I know Matrox was supposed to have a new 3D card not too long ago. How has this been doing ?

It would be nice to see some more competition in the 3D graphics market. I'm glad that ATI has stepped up to the plate, but we need 3 or 4 competitors, not just two. Right now it's like having the Bucs and Raiders at the super bowl each year. We need some fresh competition.

[poursoul]

we hear you man. Where are you bitboys? ;)

[jAkUp]

well that matrox card did suck monkey balls... but its too hard to make a good video card. you need too many resources, and money. companies dont have enought of either.
it would be great though.

as it stands right now:
bucs= ati
raiders= nvidia


:D

[StealthHawk]

it's a two horse race.

here's the state of the competition of nvidia and ATI

Matrox: the card doesn't perform all that great, and it's expensive. not an option for most gamers because of the high price coupled with less than state of the art performance. they are leaving the 3d market.

SiS: poor performance and degraded image quality. some people might say it performs well for the price. once you turn on trilinear filtering performance drops a goo 10-20% across the board.

Trident: making claims about high performance and sub $100 cost since Summer of 2002. no chips have materialized in retail nor have any final product reviews shown up. doesn't look like the cards will be released at this point.

S3: bad track history. rumored chip to come out soon.

PowerVR: rumored chip to come out later this year? it's been a long time since Kyro2.

BitBoys: with their chip never to go into production, they're focusing on cellphones right now.

so we can safely say 2 of the players are out. Trident hasn't brought jack to the table. SiS produces junk. PowerVR may come out with something good.

[eL_PuSHeR]

What about the new S3's deltachrome (is that the name?) chip? I will give it the benefit of doubt by now. Who knows? I remember when S3 was the (2D) speed king.

[Raptorman]

Yeah, but S3 will definetely not be the 3D speed king with their next card. Then, you have the issue of support for the card.

They probably won't get support (support for the card in games) from game makers for about 4 - 6 months after the card is released. By then it's time to upgrade again for a lot of people.

[ragejg]

Seems like we're only talking ATI & nVidia... There are others... and this is the place to dicuss them...

Let's talk about:

S3

PowerVR

3DLabs

... I'd like some actual thoughts, not incomplete half jokes with Bitboys references...

Some of us have picked up little bits and pieces of info on the cards being developed by these companies...

Who has specs? Who knows of the tape-outs? Core speed? Memory type? Memory availability? Earnings reports? Demonstrations? New technologies? CEO statements? Rumors? Facts? Rants? Raves?

Ready, set, go:

[saturnotaku]

I've been confused about the S3 Delta Chrome. Is that chipset only going to be in notebooks or will it make its way to the desktop market?

[ragejg]

apparently there's alphachrome and deltachrome, but i thinkt they're in th betachrome stage right now:D:D:D... Yeah one's for desktop, the other's for notebooks... The demo images look pretty nice, but I'm worried that they're taken from slideshows, not full motion... One can hope, though.

[Darth Rancid]

Being a long-time S3 fanboy, (you didn't think that possible, did you? :) ), I have digged up as much info on the Deltachrome as I could:

Basic features:
You can probably find those at www.s3graphics.com, but here are the interesting parts:
DX9+ compatible, with 2.0+ shaders
8 single texturing pipelines.
Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 acceleration.
HDTV output.
fairly low clock, probably 300+ core.
Suprisingly low Transistor count, probably less than 100M.

Most likely its performance will be somewhere between R300 and R350. Much due to the fact that it will use its avalible bandwidth very economically, something S3 has always been good at.

Deltachrome IS BEING targeted at mobile, integrated and standalone graphics. However, mobile has the highest priority, and will appear first. This is a little sad, but makes buissness sense from S3G's point of view, since mobile and integrated are where they make their money. If nVidia and ATi move too fast, I suppose the desktop version will be scrapped, this would be sad indeed.

Alphachrome, AKA SavageXP is dead, they said so in an interview. Rumors has it that a flaw was found in the chip just when volume production was to begin, and they decided to scrap it and concentrate on Deltachrome. Good call, probably.

An interesting point is that no S3 chip ever has used active cooling, not even the 166Mhz Savage4Xtreme, or the Savage2000, which was the biggest S3 chip so far. I really hope they get this one to run silent as well, I hate fans. :)

Old S3 always had a hard time delivering what had been promised, this started with the ViRGE and continued with the Savages, and while drivers were being blamed by most people, I think the real reason was hardware all along. S3 were obsessed with lowering transistor counts to make their chips cheaper and to make them run cooler. It seems like they pushed this too far in the GX3 core, (thats Savage3D), and the core became hell to write drivers for, hence the trouble with the S3D and the S4. Then they pushed it too far once more with the S2K, which gave it all the troubles of the S3D and a whole set of new quirks associated with the TCL engine and the QuadTexture pipeline.
Lets hope they DON'T overdo it this time around...

There are two main reasons why I have liked S3 since I bought my ViRGE/GX back in 1997:

Great Image Quality
Silence is Golden

Back to Deltachrome, last I heard its mobile incarnation may appear in beginning of Q2, while the desktop version may not come around untill beginning of Q3... :(
They say it will be competitive with equally priced chips on the market by then.

www.savage2k.com is a good place for Deltachrome rumors.

[Darth Rancid]

And S3G promises to support their products better than old S3 did :)

If you didn't allready knew, S3 had a nasty habit of dropping support for chips that didn't sell well...

Savage3D sales were dissapointing, it had active support for
about a year.
Savage4 sales were very impressive, basically, its STILL supported.
Savage2000 sales were a disaster, officially, it had support for almost a year, but most of us who owned one would argue that it was never supported in the true meaning of the word. :)

I was one of the lucky ones however, my S2K got along with the rest of my hardware, and worked fairly well until DX8.

[Darth Rancid]

S3 Deltachrome might be worthwhile even though it will not be top dog even when it launches... they say it might be <i>spectacularly</i> cheap... and it will probably perform better than R300, and thereby alot better than non ultra GFFX

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Darth Rancid
S3 Deltachrome might be worthwhile even though it will not be top dog even when it launches... they say it might be <i>spectacularly</i> cheap... and it will probably perform better than R300, and thereby alot better than non ultra GFFX
across the board or just in major games used for benchmarking :rolleyes:

i still remember Savage2K. should have been a great chip. it was reasonably fast in Quake3 and UT for its specs. it sucked in everything else. not to mention the horrible T&L that never worked correctly.

[Raptorman]

I really don't think DeltaChrome will beat the R300 or GF FX. We will see though.

[Darth Rancid]

StealthHawk,
Well.. that remains to be seen doesn't it? :)
But personally I think, or hope, that S3G has finally learned from its repeated mistakes. If ATi can learn, then S3 should too.

If you haven't read it allready, we discuss this matter in this http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7520 thread also.

Shouldn't these threads be merged or something?

[StealthHawk]

yes, and i'm going to merge them. they are the same discussion.

[ATI LoVeR 9700]

What about MeTaL? Will that be around?:dance:

[Darth Rancid]

I think MeTaL was specially written to work with the GX3 architecure, and the GX4 wich was very similar to a twin GX3 with a broken TCL unit on it.
So in short, I think MeTaL is just as much history as Glide. Deltachrome is supposedly not based on the old Savages at all...

[Gator]

SIS315 likes to advertise itself as the first AGP8x video card on the market. I hear it's not bad, but a TI4200 can blow it out of the water :rolleyes:

And ya, I heard S3 is making a comeback

[ragejg]

yah, I'm actually a little bit excited about S3...

... I wonder what "other" card will have multiple core support? I'm not understanding why that's not implemented more these days...

[ErrorS]

after the crap with trident i just wont get excited about a video card from other then ati/nvidia until its released.. tired of this bullshiet hype without a good product being delivered..

but! i do hope this deltachrome ends up being at least a good midend card.. im getting bored of ati vs. nvidia..

[saturnotaku]

ATI and NVIDIA keep raising the bar so high (GF FX not withstanding) it's really hard for these smaller companies to get out solid product, much less a competitive one. Lord knows SiS tried, but have failed miserably thus far. Same with Trident. S3 better have all of its ducks (hardware and software) in a row before it unleashes its next product on the public.