S3 Savage

Savage is a name of the company S3 Inc. and S3 Graphics for several 3D graphics chips. S3 Inc. had with these chips only moderate success, as there were a lot of driver problems.

  • 2.1 Twister
  • 2.2 ProSavage
  • 2.3 ProSavage DDR

Graphics chips

  • S3 Savage 3D ( 1998): 8 MB, AGP 1.0, two versions: 390 and 391 ( Macrovision )
  • S3 Savage 4 (1999 ): 32 MB, AGP 2.0, multiple versions: LT, GT, Pro and Pro
  • S3 Savage 2000 ( 2000): 32 MB, AGP 2.0, incorrect T & L unit
  • S3 Savage XP ( 2002): 64 MB, AGP 2.0, revised Savage 2000

Savage 3D

Presented to the Electronic Entertainment Expo 1998 S3 Inc. Savage the first chip before: Savage 3D. Compared with its predecessor, the descendant of the ViRGE family Trio3D, he was a great technical progress. Among its innovative features counted the following:

  • "Free" ( single-pass ) trilinear filtering
  • Hardware Motion Compensation and subpicture alpha blending (MPEG -2 Video)
  • Integrated NTSC / PAL TV encoder, Macrovision ( at 391 )
  • S3 Texture Compression ( S3TC ), texture compression
  • BITBLT and overlay video acceleration

To the chagrin of S3 Inc., the production yield of the Savage 3D was too bad, just a few graphics chips could be delivered. Only Hercules brought a greater amount of graphics cards with the chipset on the market. Along with bad drivers failed Savage 3D on the market.

Savage 4

Beginning of 1999, S3 Inc. Savage 3D from the market and replaced it with the Savage 4 family. Many negative points of the Savage 3D have been revised: An additional TMU enabled multi-texturing in a single pass. It was more of video memory is addressed and AGP 4x was supported. In spite of everything, were the new chips as 3dfx Voodoo3 or TNT2 nVidia Riva faster, but the Savage offered four unique combination of 32- bit rendering and S3TC (texture compression).

The Savage 4 was built by many manufacturers, including by Diamond Multimedia and Creative Labs. The 32- bit rendering, S3TC and trilinear filtering provided the best quality at the time. Even with DVD acceleration it was after the ATI Rage 128 second. Despite everything came Savage 4 too late to the market.

Savage 2000

In August 1999, announced S3 Inc. Savage 2000, which was exclusively built on the Diamond Viper II. From the specifications it was the chip on par with Nvidia's GeForce 256, but the Savage 2000, many hardware bugs, so worked example T & L unit not. The drivers themselves were very poor again and so the Savage 2000, the GeForce 256 was far inferior. This meant that the chip barely sold and as a consequence of this failure rose S3 Inc. from the graphics business from.

Savage XP / Alpha Chrome

Only the company S3 Graphics newly founded reported back in 2002 with the developed as Zoetrope Savage XP. In the notebook section of the chip as Alpha Chrome was known, but was completely identical to the Savage XP.

Also Savage XP was only a repaired and slightly redesigned Savage 2000 and therefore much too late on the market in principle. He was therefore never really sold. Only with the S3 Graphics Chrome Delta successor could hold something back foot.

IGPs

S3 Graphics was also the order began to integrate Savage 4 graphics cores in chipsets from VIA Technologies. These integrated graphics processors ( IGP) have been sold numerous and only after some time replaced by the UniChrome IGP.

Twister

The first result of this work were the Twister chipsets with SDRAM memory controller for AMD and Intel processors. In these IGPs a pure Savage 4 graphics core has been integrated.

ProSavage

As a next stage ProSavage the 2D part of the Savage 2000 was combined with the 3D part of the Savage 4 and integrated into appropriate SDRAM chipsets. Thus, the 2D features have been greatly enhanced. Above all, the DVD playback and the like has been significantly improved.

ProSavage DDR

ProSavage GDR was a ProSavage graphics core with DDR - SDRAM memory controller. Otherwise, there were no changes.

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