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Preview: S3’s DeltaChrome S8 Nitro GPU

Scott Wasson
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WHEN WE PREVIEWED the DeltaChrome S8 chip late last year, we saw a promising new GPU with a few of the customary glitches one might expect from an all-new graphics chip and all-new drivers. Since that time, S3 has been hard at work refining its graphics drivers, and now the company is ready to show the world the S8’s big brother, the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro.

For those not familiar, we’ve covered the S3 DeltaChrome at length here at TR. If you want to understand the basic tech behind the chip, go read our DeltaChrome preview. If you’re lazy, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version. The DeltaChrome is an all-new GPU from S3, a former player in the graphics biz that’s back in the game after a longish hiatus. DeltaChrome is a true DirectX 9-class graphics part, with support for floating-point pixel formats and pixel shader revision 2.0. Despite the fancy 3D features, S3 is adamant that the DeltaChrome isn’t intended to rule the benchmarks—that is, we all know, a very tough thing to do against the likes of NVIDIA and ATI. The DeltaChrome should provide a solid gaming experience, though, and S3 hopes its 2D and video features will help it carve out a chunk of the market for itself.


The DeltaChrome S8 Nitro is fabricated by TMSC on its 130nm process

As you have probably guessed, the S8 Nitro plays Ultra or Pro to its little brother, the DeltaChrome S8. The two chips are the same, but run at different clock speeds. In this case, our DeltaChrome S8 Nitro sample card runs at 325MHz, as does its memory. That’s 25MHz faster than the S8 in both cases. (Core and memory speeds on final S8 Nitro cards aren’t set in stone yet, however.) S3 says the target list price for DeltaChrome S8 boards is between $139 and $149, while the S8 Nitro’s target price is about $169. At that price, the S8 Nitro will be positioned squarely against the Radeon 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. I suspect DeltaChrome street prices will be considerably lower than list, because S3 will probably have to undercut ATI and NVIDIA on price in order to win sales.

The toughest part of the equation, though, may be getting board makers to sign up. DeltaChrome S8 Nitro boards should be available in a week or so, maybe sooner, in Europe and Asia. PowerColor is one of the few card manufacturers S3 is willing to name, but apparently several companies are preparing S8 Nitro-based products for these markets. In North America, don’t expect to see cards available until early in the second half of the year. S3 is in talks with one of the big board makers for North America, but arrangements aren’t final yet.

Saddling up the test mule
Our DeltaChrome evaluation sample is a fairly tallish AGP card with a relatively small cooler.

The fan on the cooler is loud and doesn’t appear to be temperature controlled, but it also doesn’t represent production S8 Nitro coolers. The eval board also has a four-prong floppy-disk-style power connection, which S3 says it doesn’t use, isn’t necessary, and in all likelihood won’t be on final cards.

So yeah, there’s a picture, for all the good it will do you.

 

Our testing methods
There’s much to say about the S8 Nitro, but before we move on, let’s get our testing methods out on the table, because much of what we’re doing from here on out will be affected by our test platform and the like.

As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test system was configured like so:

System MSI K8T Neo
Processor AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.2GHz
North bridge K8T800
South bridge VT8237
Chipset drivers 4-in-1 v.4.51
ATA 5.1.2600.220
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Corsair TwinX XMS3200LL DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
Hard drive Seagate Barracuda V 120GB SATA 150 
Audio Creative SoundBlaster Live!
OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

The S3 driver revision we used was version 6.14.10.1632-15.08.09.b. We used ATI’s CATALYST 4.2 drivers on the Radeon card and Forceware 56.56 on the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. One exception: at the request of FutureMark, we used NVIDIA’s 52.16 drivers for all 3DMark benchmarking and image quality tests.

The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

 

Pixel filling power
To best understand how the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro relates to its competitors, our handy-dandy fill rate table is helpful, because it shows the theoretical pixel-pushing power of each card. Although these numbers aren’t fate, they do help dictate how a graphics card will perform overall.

  Core clock (MHz) Pixel pipelines  Peak fill rate (Mpixels/s) Texture units per pixel pipeline Peak fill rate (Mtexels/s) Memory clock (MHz) Memory bus width (bits) Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s)
Radeon 9600 325 4 1300 1 1300 400 128 6.4
GeForce FX 5600 325 4 1300 1 1300 500 128 8.0
Radeon 9000 Pro 275 4 1100 1 1100 550 128 8.8
DeltaChrome S8 300 8 2400 1 2400 600 128 9.6
Radeon 9600 Pro 400 4 1600 1 1600 600 128 9.6
Radeon 9600 XT 500 4 2000 1 2000 600 128 9.6
GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 325 4 1300 1 1300 650 128 10.4
DeltaChrome S8 Nitro 325 8 2600 1 2600 650 128 10.4
GeForce FX 5600 Ultra 400 4 1600 1 1600 800 128 12.8
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 475 4 1900 1 1900 906 128 14.4
GeForce FX 5900 XT 400 4 1600 2 3200 700 256 22.4

The extra 25MHz doesn’t boost the DeltaChrome S8’s performance potential all that much, but the S8 Nitro has fill theoretical peak fill rate numbers that are more than competitive with the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and Radeon 9600 XT, especially in single-texturing.

At 10.4GB/s, the S8 Nitro leads the Radeon 9600 XT in memory bandwidth, but both cards are behind the class leader, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. Remember, though, that DeltaChrome doesn’t have a crossbar memory controller like the ATI and NVIDIA chips do, so it may not be able to use its memory bandwidth as efficiently in real-world applications.

Of course, we can put these theoretical peak numbers to the test fairly easily using 3DMark.

Hmm. The S8 Nitro’s multitextured fill rate is faster than the competition, as expected, but its single-textured fill rate is well below what we’d expect from an eight-pipe design. This low performance raises red flags for us, because both NVIDIA and SiS have misled the press and the public about the pipeline configurations of their GPUs in the recent past. NVIDIA led us to believe its NV30 was a 8×1 pipeline configuration, but it turned out to be a 4×2 design—that is, it had four pipes with two texture units per pipe. Similarly, SiS said its Xabre was a 4×2 design, but it turned out be a rather unorthodox 2×4 configuration.

S3, however, is adamant DeltaChrome S8 is an eight-pipeline GPU. I inquired about this issue pointedly and repeatedly, and the answer was consistent. S3 says the pipeline config doesn’t switch to 4×2 at any point.

The folks at S3 raised some interesting questions about how 3DMark’s fill rate test works and whether it’s structuring its test scene in a way that maximizes performance from the DeltaChrome GPU. The S3 engineer I talked to said a test using a large triangle with single textures would get eight pixels per clock out of the GPU, because DeltaChrome S8 can operate on eight pixel shader instructions in parallel. All rendering on DeltaChrome, it seems, translates to pixel shader instructions. The test would have to have a very high pixel-to-vertex ratio in order to extract eight pixels per clock. (I’m fairly certain FutureMark has covered that base.) Also, the test would have to use instructions with a single cycle of latency in order to work.

The net effect is that DeltaChrome is much slower in 3DMark’s single-texturing test than in the multitextured test, but it also shows that not all rendering pipelines are created equal—a point NVIDIA has been hammering home since just before the NV30’s debut.

 

UT2004
Before we get too deep into more traditional benchmarks, let’s take a quick detour through the game of the hour, Unreal Tournament 2004. One of the first things I tried when I set up the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro was the UT2004 Demo, because I wanted to see whether the card could handle the best multiplayer shooter I’ve seen in a long, long while. To my surprise and delight, the S8 Nitro ran the UT2004 demo very well. At 1280×960 resolution, the game is fast and fluid, with few slowdowns and solid playability.

The UT2004 has demo recording disabled, so I wasn’t able to create a scripted benchmark for it. Alternately, I decided to fire up the game and run a frame rate capture program to see how it played over time. I repeated this procedure with all three cards, playing through an Onslaught botmatch with each one. I have no illusions about the numbers logged using this procedure being precisely comparable to one another. I didn’t move around in exactly the same way each time I played, and the game’s motion and interactions are simply too involved to make that practical. Still, I do think the overall picture is enlightening.

My strategy was the same for each game: hop into the Raptor immediately and head for the far power node (the “tank node”) on my team’s side of the map to build it up. Then, once the node is built, criss-cross the map to build the opposite “tank node” before the other team could do so. The cards played like so:

These results seem to confirm my subjective impressions. For the most part, the S8 Nitro played this game at 1280×960 in a fashion more or less equivalent to the mid-range ATI and NVIDIA cards. However, at certain points in the game, the frame rates dropped a little more than I’d have liked. In particular, the DeltaChrome’s frame rates seemed to suffer when lots of smoke was in the air. I recall one sequence in particular when the S8 Nitro struggled a little, when I was in a badly wounded tank storming through the valley down the middle of the map. Smoke was pouring out of my vehicle, and the card couldn’t quite keep up its end of the bargain. The effect wasn’t terrible, but frame rates were perceptibly lower. Overall, though, the S8 Nitro was very competent to run UT in that resolution.

The game looked great, too. Below are a couple of screenshots to give you some idea.

In UT2004, the DeltaChrome looks and plays, to the casual observer, very much like the competing GeForce or Radeon.

Unfortunately, I had less luck with another hot new game, Far Cry. The Far Cry demo didn’t look right at all with its default settings on the S8 Nitro. Of course, both the game and the video drivers are still in beta, so the incompatibility was no great shock.

 

Unreal Tournament 2003

The S8 Nitro acquits itself nicely in UT2003, tying with the competition at higher resolutions. The slower frame rates at 640×480 are probably the result of either a vertex shader limitation (i.e., lower polygon throughput than the other guys) or a driver execution bottleneck.

Comanche 4

The story is the opposite in Comanche 4. At lower resolutions, the DeltaChrome keeps up just fine, but at higher resolutions, it doesn’t have the oomph to run with the 5700 Ultra and 9600 XT.

Quake III Arena

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Quake III and Wolf: ET are both OpenGL games, and S3’s drivers for OpenGL aren’t quite up to speed yet. The performance gap in GL has markedly improved from our initial preview of the DeltaChrome S8, but S3 still has some work to do here.

AquaMark

AquaMark confirms what the other gaming benchmarks have been telling us. The S8 Nitro isn’t a bad performer, but it can’t quite live up to the standards set by the 9600 XT and 5700 Ultra.

 

Splinter Cell

The S8 Nitro struggles to keep up in Splinter Cell, which is a Direct3D game that uses pixel shaders for lighting and other effects. We can plot Splinter Cell frame rates over time to see how the gameplay progressed.

Even at 1024×768, the S8 Nitro’s performance presents playability concerns. We also noted some funny color artifacts in some levels of Splinter Cell, though not in our benchmark level.

 

Serious Sam SE
Serious Sam can run in either Direct3D or OpenGL. Since the game’s default mode is OpenGL, we ran our tests with that API. To keep things on an even playing field, we used the “Default settings” add-on to defeat Serious Sam SE’s graphics auto-tuning features.

Once more, the DeltaChrome couldn’t quite keep up with the other guys. Let’s break it out into second-by-second numbers.

All of the cards look quite playable at 1600×1200, with only the S8 Nitro dipping below 30 frames per second for just one moment.

 

3DMark03
Remember, at FutureMark’s request, we are using NVIDIA’s 52.16 drivers for this test. FutureMark says newer NVIDIA drivers have not been validated for use with 3DMark03.

Our 3DMark results track with the expectations we’re beginning to establish for the S8 Nitro. Let’s look at the individual games that make up the 3DMark overall score.

The DeltaChrome S8 Nitro may be a little slower overall than the other cards, but it shows no significant weaknesses in any one test. To the contrary, the S8 Nitro manages to outpace the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in the torturous, pixel shader 2.0-driven Mother Nature scene.

3DMark’s two purely synthetic feature tests both show the S8 Nitro running off pace of the leaders. The 9600 XT has the more powerful pixel shaders, and the 5700 Ultra leads in the vertex shader test.

 

3DMark image quality
The Mother Nature scene from 3DMark has been the source of some controversy over time, so I wanted to include some screenshots to show how the three cards compare. On this page and in all the following pages with screenshots, you’re looking at low-compression JPEG images. You can click on the image to open a new window with a lossless PNG version of the image.


Radeon 9600 XT


DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

They all look quite good to my eye.

 

ShaderMark 2.0
ShaderMark measures performance in a range of DirectX 9-class pixel shaders created to produce common effects, including lighting, bump mapping, procedural texturing, and more. Neither the GeForce FX nor the DeltaChrome will run all of the shaders, because some require a floating-point texture format these cards don’t support. S3 says DeltaChrome does support some floating-point texture formats, just not the right ones, apparently, for ShaderMark.

The GeForce FX can make use of multiple pixel shader models and precision levels in ShaderMark. For completeness, I’ve run it with both “partial precision” (16-bit pixel shader precision) and the default mode (which will be 32 bits of precision on the GeForce FX). Both the Radeon and the DeltaChrome have 24 bits of floating-point color precision in their pixel shaders for each red, green, blue, and alpha channel.

The Radeon 9600 XT dominates every one of the ShaderMark tests, but the S8 Nitro puts in a respectable showing, beating out the GeForce FX in the diffuse lighting test and a pair of environment mapping shaders.

 

ShaderMark image quality
In our first look at the DeltaChrome S8, we found a number of problems with the DeltaChrome’s handling of ShaderMark’s shaders. You can see screenshots showing the problems here. This time around, we’ve conducted the same test using S3’s latest drivers, and the results are below. As before, we’re comparing the DeltaChrome’s output to the DX9 gold standard, ATI’s R300-series GPUs. The images shown are the S8 Nitro screenshots, until you run your mouse over them, at which point the Radeon-generated images will appear.

And yes, the mouseover script should work so long as you have JavaScript enabled. The differences are just sometimes rather subtle.

Per pixel diffuse lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Point phong lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Spot phong lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Directional anisotropic lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Bump mapping with phong lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Self shadowing bump mapping with phong lighting (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Procedural stone shader (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output)

Procedural wood shader (move mouse over the image to see the Radeon 9600 XT’s output) Kudos to the S3 driver development team for fixing the ShaderMark problems. Obviously, S3 has been making considerable progress with its DirectX graphics drivers, and the result is nearly picture-perfect shader output. (I don’t have the images online here, but the DX9 reference rasterizer produces images very similar to those produced by the Radeon 9600 XT and DeltaChrome.) All in all, very impressive.

 

Texture filtering
To measure texture filtering performance, we used Serious Sam SE running at 1600×1200 resolution in Direct3D mode.

The S8 Nitro’s performance scales reasonably well as texture filtering load increases. Strikingly, there’s almost no performance hit for adding trilinear filtering alongside anisotropic filtering, which is not typical of the other GPUs. S3’s drivers offer two options for the “fast trilinear” setting: Auto and On. There is no way to turn it off.

S3 says this fast trilinear mode saves on memory bandwidth by taking fewer samples from the adjacent mip maps and doing some extrapolation. This technique reminded me instantly of one used by the Kyro II chip, also called “fast trilinear.” This technique isn’t apparent in normally rendered images, but it does show up when we use mip map identification tools. Let’s go on to the screenshots.

 

Texture filtering quality
Here’s a sample scene from Serious Sam, grabbed in Direct3D mode, that shows texture filtering in action along the wall, the floor, and on that 45-degree inclined surface between the two.


Trilinear filtering – Radeon 9600 XT


Trilinear filtering – DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


Trilinear filtering – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

All three cards look to be producing roughly equivalent images, with no readily apparent mip map transitions.

 

Texture filtering quality


Trilinear filtering – Radeon 9600 XT


Trilinear filtering – DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


Trilinear filtering – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

When we use Serious Sam’s tex_bColorizeMipmaps variable, we can earn ourselves a drug-free drug trip! We can also see how the different mip map levels are arranged. The DeltaChrome and Radeon 9600 XT look nearly identical. All the cards’ images are very similar, in fact, with the exception that the GeForce FX is noticeably more aggressive at filtering on the 45-degree inclined surface.

 

Anisotropic texture filtering quality


16X anisotropic filtering – Radeon 9600 XT


16X anisotropic filtering – DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


8X anisotropic filtering – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

As you can tell, anisotropic filtering really sharpens up the images. We’ve left trilinear filtering turned on here, so you’re see the effect of both methods, which are complementary. The GeForce FX only supports up to 8X anisotropy, but I can’t see any appreciable deficit between its output and that of the other two cards. All three look good to my eye.

 

Anisotropic texture filtering quality


16X anisotropic filtering – Radeon 9600 XT


16X anisotropic filtering – DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


8X anisotropic filtering – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

With colorized mip maps enabled, the DeltaChrome looks like it’s not doing trilinear filtering at all. I believe this is S3’s “fast trilinear” in action. The results looked good on the last page, remember, with no visible mip map transitions. In fact, the colorized output looks very similar to what we saw from the Kyro II’s fast trilinear way back when. So long as the results are good, the technique is fine by us.

We should note that none of our screenshots have shown any evidence of the “brilinear” hybrid filtering technique NVIDIA made infamous in early revisions of the GeForce FX drivers. I believe NVIDIA’s drivers still turn on brilinear filtering for some applications, regardless of the user’s settings in the control panel, but that’s not the case here.

Also, note again how the GeForce FX is much more aggressive at filtering the inclined surface than the other two cards are.

 

Antialiasing
The DeltaChrome has only one antialiasing mode, and though we’ve taken to talking about “edge antialiasing,” it’s actually a full-scene technique based on supersampling. Supersampling touches virtually every pixel on screen, providing some benefits in the form of texture AA and the like. (Essentially, supersampling is like rendering the image at 2X or 4X the target resolution, then scaling down.) However, supersampling is much less efficient than the multisampling techniques used by ATI and NVIDIA. Generally, the best setup is a combination of efficient edge AA and quality texture filtering.

Like the old Voodoo 5 cards, the DeltaChrome does its supersampling on a rotated grid pattern, at the subpixel level, to fool the eye’s strong sense of pattern recognition and thus more effectively combat aliasing effects.

There’s one big quirk of S3’s AA mode, and it’s the name. S3 calls it “2X” antialiasing, but in reality, it’s 4X AA according to the standard way of talking about such things. There are four samples taken, and it’s basically standard 4X rotated grid supersampling that we’re dealing with here.

Clearly S3 didn’t put much effort into giving the DeltaChrome killer AA. Supersampling has fallen out of favor because of its relative inefficiency. DeltaChrome also lacks color compression, a performance enhancement which both the NVIDIA and ATI chips have, and when I asked S3 about gamma-corrected blends, they weren’t quite sure whether DeltaChrome had them. For the record, ATI’s R300-series chips do, and their AA output is the best in the business as a result.

As expected, S3’s AA mode causes a performance hit. Let’s see how it looks.

 

Antialiasing quality
We’ll start off with non-AA images, just to establish a baseline.


No AA – Radeon 9600 XT


No AA – DeltaChrome


No AA – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

 

Antialiasing quality


4X AA – Radeon 9600 XT


4X AA – DeltaChrome


4X AA – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

DeltaChrome’s AA is comparable to NVIDIA’s in terms of image output. Both near-vertical and near-horizontal edges are smoothed, as you can see by looking at the tail wings of the aircraft in the screenshots. However, I suspect the DeltaChrome’s sub-pixel blends are not gamma corrected, because the Radeon 9600 XT’s output looks superior to both of the other cards by leaps and bounds.

 

Antialiasing quality
To illustrate the difference between multisampling and supersampling, I’ve run a “diff” operation on each card’s original output and 4X antialiased output.


Difference between no AA and 4X AA – Radeon 9600 XT


Difference between no AA and 4X AA – DeltaChrome


Difference between no AA and 4X AA – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

The DeltaChrome’s supersampling has more effect on many more pixels than the multisampling techniques used by NVIDIA and ATI, even though ATI’s technique produces better edge antialiasing than DeltaChrome’s.

 

High dynamic range image-based lighting
Now let’s look briefly at some DirectX 9 rendering goodness. I have a crush on this DX9 demo that uses floating-point texture formats and pixel shaders to produce incredible images on DX9-class graphics cards. For the longest time, only the ATI R300-series GPUs would handle it properly, but DeltaChrome’s latest drivers allow it to strut its stuff, too. Some screenshots:


Radeon 9600 XT


DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

The ATI card still looks best, but the DeltaChrome comes a close second. There’s a little more motion blur in the DeltaChrome image because it runs the demo at about half the speed of the 9600 XT, but otherwise, they’re quite similar. The GeForce FX, on the other hand, can’t quite seem to get the lighting right. Click on its screenshot to view the uncompressed PNG version, and you’ll see that the artifacts onscreen are an apparent product of the FX’s pixel shaders, not my JPEG compression.

 

High dynamic range image-based lighting
So the DeltaChrome does well in our little DX9 demo, but it’s not perfect. Neither the DeltaChrome nor the GeForce FX supports the 16-bit floating-point texture formats the application prefers, so it has to revert to 8-bit format. The result is banding on all but the Radeon card.


Radeon 9600 XT


DeltaChrome S8 Nitro


GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

Still, I’m giddy about the fact that the S8 Nitro does as well as it does with this application. S3 has delivered a well and truly competent DirectX 9 GPU, and that’s no mean feat.

 
Conclusions
I’ve had less than a week to play with the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro, so I haven’t been able to devote proper attention to a number of the card’s noteworthy features. I did watch some DVD movies on it and futzed around with the real-time pixel shader effects. There’s nothing quite like an embossed hobbit. I can tell you I’m generally pleased to see this functionality present in the DeltaChrome, because I think pixel shader manipulation of video streams in real time is a very cool feature to have. I’m just waiting for a useful application to come along and prove it.

The InterVideo WinDVD version S3 supplied us had a number of interesting effects, like soften, sharpen, and something called “cinema” that magically enhances clarity and color saturation. These filters hold promise for DeltaChrome in HTPC-type applications, where pixel shader effects might offset the quirks of, say, an LCD or DLP projector hitting an off-white wall. We’ll have to report on these features after spending more time with the S8 Nitro and its HDTV component output.

Those omissions aside, I think we’ve formed a reasonably good sense for the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro’s virtues as a 3D GPU. Performance wise, the S8 Nitro would have benefited from arriving nine months or so sooner, when it would have been competing against the GeForce FX 5600 and Radeon 9600 Pro at its purported $169 price point. The Radeon 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra are killers. The S8 Nitro isn’t completely out of the game, but S3 will have to sell it on the strength of its non-3D features and, most importantly, price. They’ve gotta undercut ATI and NVIDIA to make this work, especially with ridiculous deals like the GeForce FX 5900 XT lurking out there at just 20 bucks or so more than the mid-range cards and next-gen chips looming on the horizon.

Still, the DeltaChrome holds up well as a 3D graphics chip. As far as I’ve been able to tell, S3 hasn’t resorted to any obvious cheats in order to obtain this level of performance. The texture filtering and image quality generally look right, unlike the cheat-laden drivers we’ve seen from the likes of XGI. The pixel and vertex shaders are a bit slow, but the pixel shaders have the necessary precision to generate some stunning graphics in real time.

S3’s drivers have progressed nicely, although it may be a bit of a blessing in disguise that the DeltaChrome won’t be widely available in North America until later this year. There’s still work to be done assuring broad compatibility with games and applications, and those OpenGL drivers still need some tweaking. S3 will have to continue improving and updating its drivers at a steady pace in order to succeed, especially as games like Doom III and Half-Life 2 approach.

All told, the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro is a pretty good start for S3. Now that the basic technology is headed out the door to customers in at least some parts of the world, S3 should be building on this foundation. Higher clock speeds, more pixel pipes, faster drivers, and incremental improvements in key areas, like the chip’s memory controller, are all possibilities—and some are necessities. More immediately, we should see a four-pipe DeltaChrome S4 in the value segment. Of course, VIA will use this technology in various ways, too, from chipsets with built-in video to mini-ITX motherboards for the EPIA platform. One way or another, DeltaChrome technology should find its way into lots of PCs and PC-derived devices. Given what we’ve seen from the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro, that’s a very positive development indeed.  

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