Thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply
Concluding on the current state of S3 Graphics Chrome S27 is pretty easy. There are better products out there for the same or less money from ATI and NVIDIA. And while it's not nice to say so, since another executing competitor in the mid-range and low-end consumer space would be brilliant, it's the current reality. Seems we have to wait yet another generation before S3 Graphics brings something to the table worth considering, versus what's out there from the top two.It's behind in a DirectX Shader Model, can't match the absolute IQ of NVIDIA and ATI (especially) boards, has driver bugs that really shouldn't be driver bugs and, most importantly for the target market, isn't quite there on price/performance.
While the board itself seems cheap at £55/$99 all in, Radeon X1300 PRO is as cheap or cheaper, performs as well, has a better driver and possible IQ, and scales much better in multi-GPU mode.
The GPU itself is frugal, largely by virtue of its tiny size and production process used to build it, and the cooling solution provided is excellent, but even if that were enough to spark a purchasing notion in someone interested, it remains mostly unavailable outside of the US and the Far East.
MultiChrome doesn't work as well as SLI or Crossfire, leaving the purchase of a second board a far away notion. Lastly, video playback is currently flawed, despite some excellent software adjustability, and without the quality of its competitors.
The open-mind tactic didn't elicit the response I was hoping for with Chrome S27 and MultiChrome, sadly, and therefore we wait for the next gen to see if they have something that can better compete.
From what we've heard from S3, they have something pretty sweet on the cards for Vista's timeframe (whatever that may be) and D3D10, but can't elaborate on it too much, especially publically. We caution S3 that, should the next lot of hardware be as good as we hope it is, giving us a 3rd 3D IHV to consider, they make sure the driver and supporting software doesn't have the rough edges the current driver and software does.
So an interesting product, one that improves on the old GammaChrome product generation pretty significantly, but one which doesn't move the game on enough to challenge competing (and massively more available) products in the same price space.
Too many flaws in silicon and software to recommend, we're sad to say.
HEXUS Awards
