Concluding thoughts
We're pleased to see a former industry heavyweight back in the scene after a marked absence. S3, however, needed to get its architecture right first time. The costs and loss of reputation for not delivering is just too high. That's the problem right there. Ask any person who has kept an eye on comings and goings of the consumer-level 3D accelerator world over the past few years and you'll hear just two names - ATI and NVIDIA. S3's one advantage is that it knows the industry ropes, having been a key player just before the turn of the millennium.We've generally liked what we've seen from the DeltaChrome S8. It's possesses decent image quality in 2D and reasonable 3D IQ. The S8 is also positioned to be more than just a pure pixel cruncher. We appreciate the effort that S3's engineers have put in into making it appeal to a broad cross-section of possible buyers. Even though it's now a finished product it does still resonate with a feeling of work in progress. The drivers, in particular, need more development input. Then there's the ever-present question of allying an 8-pipe design to a 128-bit memory bus. There's plenty of oomph in our test card, evidenced by the excellent multitexturing result in 3DMark03, but that's sure to be compromised when the sub-10GB/s of potential bandwidth is cut to pieces with higher resolutions and FSAA / Anisotropic filtering.
ATI and NVIDIA have decided to concentrate, or at least appear to be mindful of, the need for enhanced gameplay. Using copious amounts of FSAA and AF will help, of course, but it taxes the cards' abilities to sustain acceptable framerates when all manner of eye candy is switched on (pixel and vertex shading to the fore). That's another area in which the DeltaChrome S8 appears to be lacking, sadly. Any attempts to invoke FSAA above 1024x768 resulted in repeatable program terminations. Harping back to ATI and NVIDIA, and with due recognition that both companies don't always produce drivers with the kind of image quality one would naturally expect, they still manage to update on a regular basis and be generally stable.
There's matters that need resolving, that's for sure. But we still feel optimistic about S3 chances of capturing a small portion of this lucrative market. There's always room for competent products, and S3, if it can iron out some of the problems that we have made reference to, can provide competent architectures that partners would be willing to put their name to. That's a big if, and time will tell whether S3 has been able to surmount the obstacles that are presently in the way. There's a chance that S3 can be a real player again, but that's just what it is - a chance.
Bottom line: There's certainly promise here. The problem for S3 is that both ATI and NVIDIA are established players in the DX9 game.
