However, 30 years ago, they were popping up everywhere, like moles in an arcade game.
Their products were so popular that almost every PC sold in the early 90s sported their technology.
Join us as we pay tribute to S3 Graphics and see how its remarkable story unfolded over the years.
Prices for such extras could start at $900 and often go much higher than this.
Reviews werequite favorableat the time it wasn’t the fastest accelerator out there, but it was competitively priced.
There was even acceleration for MPEG video files.
Again, those chips weren’t the fastest available, but they were significantly cheaper than the competition.
At the least, one was needed for the primary clock and another for the digital-to-analogue conversion (i.e.
Given how well they had mastered 2D and video acceleration, how hard could 3D be?
However, console owners were being treated to 3D images, similar to those being generated in arcade machines.
So the pressure was on for hardware makers to provide acceleration in this area, too.
The “S3 ViRGE” was generally a little faster than the best CPUs of that time…
There were a number of reasons for this, but two aspects stood out against the others.
It would be unfair to be overly critical of S3 at this stage, though.
In 1998, S3 Inc announced a completely new graphics processor: the Savage3D.
On paper, it should have been a huge hit for them.
But it wasn’t.
It was the first graphics processor to be fabricated on a 250nm node, by theUMC Group.
Long term partner, Diamond Multimedia, eschewed the processor altogether.
But more importantly, the competition was now in full swing.
But even in single texturing games, the performance of the Savage3D wasdisappointing.
Thus Savage4-powered cardswere no betterthan models from the previous year and once again, OpenGL performance was dismal.
At least Diamond were back with S3, and plenty of other vendors churned out numerous models.
The only saving grace for the Savage4 was S3TC.
S3 Graphics wisely chose to keep things somewhat simpler andearly signsof its performance were encouraging but somewhatmixed.
Why this phone manufacturer would buy a GPU vendor may seem to be somewhat of a puzzle.
The purchase was purely to expand their IP portfolio, to generate income from licencing the patents for S3TC.
HTC has done nothing with the IP since purchasing them all those years ago.
But these could have been solved in time, as the overall designs were fundamentally sound.
Their products are no more, and the name is gone, but they’re certainly not forgotten.
We cover the most prominent part of their history, innovations, successes and controversies.
