S3 Graphics Launches Chrome 430 GT in the U.S. Market

[WarEagleAU]

ATI is a hell of a lot better with their drivers and support than Nvidia is. Sure they had a driver not fully optimized to take advantage of the card, but it was cleared up soon.

Back to topic...nice to see a cheap dx 10 card out there. If they get better support and crank up the specs, would be a nice alternative to the big two out there.

 

[Mussels]

they may do well here. a cheap card thats faster than the competition, without any serious flaws (noise? drivers?)

 

[Wile E]

Does it provide any playback acceleration for video?

 

[DaedalusHelios]

Does it provide any playback acceleration for video?

I hope so. Even the 8400gs does.

 

[Winterwind]

that 2k6 score doesnt show anything.
S3 and Volari and etc only optimize for 3dmarks.
sometimes they even use hacks to reduce image quality
to shine in 3dmarks..

 

[Cuzza]

wait a minute.. hav i been living in a cave in the woods? i've never heard of S3

 

[tkpenalty]

Somone on TPU review this already! lets hope they develop some super revolutionary architecture that challenges AMD and Nvidia.

Those numbers are certainly interesting. Something tells me that S3 have the stuff to make good cards but dont have the money to develop high end GPUs, because if such a low heat output GPU does that well, it tells a lot.

 

[Scrizz]

let's not mix CCC and drivers...

 

[btarunr]

wait a minute.. hav i been living in a cave in the woods? i've never heard of S3

It's a company almost as old as NVidia. All the VIA chipset based boards use integrated graphics designed by S3. VIA owns S3.

 

[Steevo]

Crap onboard video solutions that Intel and other low end motherboards use to make people think they have something cause it runs the pretty effects of WMP and WOW at low low settings.


HD3870 uses 2% GPU processing @ 300MHZ core to process 1680X1050 hardware accelerated G-force pretties for a comparison.

 

[psyko12]

Wow... I miss that company, use to own savage cards rofl.. Nice to see they comeback

 

[unsmart]

I love there chart, in the $60 range they real compete with the 8500gt and the 2600pro both 128bit cards that beat this card. The 8400 and 3450 are $40-50 cards and if history repeats it's self this S3 card wouldn't even touch those cards in game or even be able to run them.
Don't get me wrong here I like to see the little guy ruffle some feathers but for the price/performance this cards not a threat to anyone.
If it's so energy efficient why does it have and active heatsink when the "comparative" cards don't

 

[cdawall]

if this was out a couple weeks ago i would have gotten it instead of the pci-e 6200TC i got for my gf's parents...

 

[1c3d0g]

Trust me, your NVIDIA-based 6200TC is lightyears ahead of this piece of crap. Knowing S3 for as long as I do (I've owned multiple cards from them since 1998), the only thing they care about is their filling their wallets. Like someone said, they make ATI's drivers look bulletproof. They're incredibly bad, worse than anything Creative could come up with. They sucked pretty badly on their own, but once Via bought them, it was all over. Anything Via touches becomes instant bullshit.

 

[DaedalusHelios]

let's not mix CCC and drivers...

When the driver fails, it takes the CCC with it. Its what gives me the driver recovery
notification after it relaunches. LOL

 

[Assimilator]

The chart that OnBoard posted is interesting, but like tkpenalty I'd want to see some real-world performance before making a call on this card. 3DMark scores are largely academic because, as Winterwind noted, the graphics card companies simply optimise the hell out of their drivers so their products look good in benchmarking apps.

TPU staff, if you could get your hands on one of these cards I'd be very interested to hear the test results, but I'm not holding my breath - the previous card that S3 released, the Chrome S27, was also hyped but had a number of issues that prevented it from being a real contender (such as poor FSAA support).

 

[TheLostSwede]

S3 has actually been around for a lot longer than Nvidia and was once the graphcis card of choice is many a system alongside Cirrus Logic. The company never really had any glory days, but they've always made affordable graphics cards, if somewhat basic. The S3 Trio range was very common and the S3 Virge was more popular than it ought to have been. Besides, the standard texture compression in DirectX started its life as the S3 Texture Compression.
They lost grounds quickly when the 3D graphcis card battle took off and they've made several attempts to get back into the game, the last time was a couple of years ago with the DeltaChrome and GammaChrome as HTPC solutions, but due to poor driver support among other things, it didn't really work out for them.
VIA's integrated graphics is a couple of S3 generations old, i.e. the UniChrome is based on the very old ProSavage GPU.
Hopefully we'll see this latest GPU integrated in upcoming VIA chipsets, especially as the company now has a new CPU coming which should prove to be quite competitive against the single core Atom processors if it's possible to trust VIA...

 

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

heck.. afaik, S3 created the first graphics accellerator for windows

 

[DaedalusHelios]

heck.. afaik, S3 created the first graphics accellerator for windows

Cool! I didn't know that.

 

[cdawall]

Trust me, your NVIDIA-based 6200TC is lightyears ahead of this piece of crap. Knowing S3 for as long as I do (I've owned multiple cards from them since 1998), the only thing they care about is their filling their wallets. Like someone said, they make ATI's drivers look bulletproof. They're incredibly bad, worse than anything Creative could come up with. They sucked pretty badly on their own, but once Via bought them, it was all over. Anything Via touches becomes instant bullshit.

i use integrated VIA graphics and via chipsets on several boards without issues not only do they run great but they run cool and outperform the same price range intel/NV/ULi/AMD


want proof? run a PT880 board against i865PE or a K8M890 board against 7025/7050

 

[btarunr]

Trust me, your NVIDIA-based 6200TC is lightyears ahead of this piece of crap. Knowing S3 for as long as I do (I've owned multiple cards from them since 1998), the only thing they care about is their filling their wallets. Like someone said, they make ATI's drivers look bulletproof. They're incredibly bad, worse than anything Creative could come up with. They sucked pretty badly on their own, but once Via bought them, it was all over. Anything Via touches becomes instant bullshit.

Just because something doesn't sell in your markets doesn't imply it's bullshit. The success of a product lies in how much money it ends up earning for the company and not if the product is better/worse that another product. Speaking of graphics, if VIA manages to get the Chrome 430GT into a motherboard chipset, they will have a chipst that can blow away the AMD 780G (currently the best chipset with integrated graphics).

 

[eidairaman1]

Be nice of Via to Release a Platform that Competes with Intel and AMDs in the ATX/EATX X86 Market, along with a S3 Savage that gives AMD and Nvidia a Run for their Money (3850 Range at the least)

 

[candle_86]

It's a company almost as old as NVidia. All the VIA chipset based boards use integrated graphics designed by S3. VIA owns S3.

actully it predates 3dfx, it fell when the TNT2 came out and the Savage2000 was delayed and then its drivers never had working DX7 support so no Hardware TnL unit, negating the advantages of a DX7 class card all together.

Personally S3 does great work there last chrome cards could beat the 6600 DDR handily in more than 3dmark. Just lost once you started ocing the 6600. Also there drivers tend to be soild these days, the Savage 2000 even finally got DX7 support with the KM266 chipset when it was relabled Savage4 and to this day is a decent IGP for its day. There current stuff for IGP isnt half bad either, if you use VIA KM chipset board with the IGP in use, you are running an S3 card.