S3

S3 presented us their brand-new PCI-Express GPU chip called GammaChrome S18.


Image taken from hkepc.com. Not confirmed by S3

In the past some websites speculated that S3 will use a PCI-E bridge chip, this is not the case as we verified. The chip has a native PCI-Express interface with support for x1, x8 and x16.
Full support for DirectX9 (4 pipelines) is included as well as HDTV and video acceleration. As S3 told us, they spent considerable time in improving video output quality for a best multimedia experience.

Their 400 MHz RAMDAC supports resolutions of up to 2048x1536 with two simulaneous outputs (Dual DVI / Dual CRT / CRT&DVI).
A unique feature in that price range is that the video card will support 10-bit-per-color which allows 1024 shades of color compared to only 256 shades of 32-bit display modes. While this is not important to home users (yet) it is a very important feature in scientific and medical applications.

At the moment only DDR1 memory with 128-bits interface is possible, during 2005 support for DDR2 and DDR3 will be added.
Targeted performance is a bit above X600XT levels, with targeted clock speeds of up to 500 MHz core and 450 MHz memory.
S3 says first boards should be available in march for ~$100, Club3D who will produce OmniChrome boards talks about Q3/2005.


The "normal" version of the S3 GammaChrome will be called Nitro and uses BGA memory with 400 MHz GPU clock.


A low cost version of the S18 with TSOP memory, called "Pro", will be available as well. Core clock is 300 MHz.