Savage 2000 to DeltaChrome

Too little, too late

Of course, we all know by now that history didn’t end up the way S3 had envisioned it. Poor yields at the 175MHz clock frequency S3 was shooting for resulted in a chip that ultimately shipped at 125MHz (nearly 30% lower than the product that was initially announced) and shipped later than it’s biggest rival: NVIDIA’s GeForce 256, which supported many of the same features. But what really killed Savage 2000 was its poor drivers and lack of hardware T&L.

S3 promised to correct this with a driver release that ultimately never came, instead S3 became SONICblue; while the graphics division of the company (S3 Graphics) is jointly owned by both S3 and VIA Technologies. S3 Graphics has stayed out of the desktop graphics segment, focusing instead on mobile and powering the graphics behind VIA’s integrated chipsets. To date S3 Graphics has released the SuperSavage, ProSavage, and SavageXP for the mobile segment.

DeltaChrome is born

Now S3 Graphics is set to release its first desktop graphics chip, DeltaChrome, along with its companion chip for the mobile segment, AlphaChrome. Both of these graphics cores list 2.0+ pixel and vertex shaders among their long list of features, making them bona fide DirectX 9.0 cards.

Internally codenamed “Columbia”, DeltaChrome and AlphaChrome have been in development at S3 Graphics for the past two years. Actually, we’re not quite sure if that directly applies to DeltaChrome, as S3 executives confirmed that the mobile part actually came first. S3 Graphics has always wanted to get back into the desktop space, and they’ve decided that now would be the best time to do so.

With NVIDIA’s current weakness at the high end, this certainly makes sense from a strategic point of view. Like us, S3 probably didn’t envision ATI coming out of nowhere to claim the graphics throne from NVIDIA.

In any case, this means that DeltaChrome’s roots lie in mobile, unlike most contemporary graphics cores which start life in the desktop segment before that technology is scaled down to mobile. As a result, DeltaChrome sports a die size that is considerably smaller than other DirectX 9 cores (S3 wouldn’t give us an exact figure, but they claimed it will be nearly twice as small as RADEON 9700) as well as boasting lower power consumption.

It remains to be seen if DeltaChrome will ship with the frequency scaling found on the mobile chip (which will also be present in GeForce FX), but it’s a bit refreshing to see a DirectX 9 graphics card that doesn’t need an external power source. This is due in part, to DeltaChrome’s 0.13-micron manufacturing process and low transistor count.