S3 Savage

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Savage was a product-line of PC graphics chipsets designed by S3.

Contents

[edit] Graphics Processors

[edit] Savage 3D

At the 1998 E3 Expo S3 introduced the first Savage product, Savage3D. Compared to its ViRGE-derived predecessor (Trio3D), Savage3D was a technological leap forward. Its innovative feature-set included the following:

  • "free" (single-cycle) trilinear-filtering
  • hardware motion-compensation and subpicture alpha-blending (MPEG-2 video)
  • integrated NTSC/PAL TV-encoder, (optional) Macrovision
  • S3 Texture Compression (S3TC)
  • multi-tap X/Y interpolating front-end (BITBLT) and back-end (overlay) video-scaler

Unfortunately for S3, deliveries of the Savage3D were hampered by poor manufacturing yields. Only one major board-vendor, Hercules, made any real effort to ship a Savage3D product. S3's yield problems forced Hercules to hand pick usable chips from the silicon wafers. Combined with poor drivers and the chip's lack of multitexturing support, the Savage3D failed in the market.

In early 1999, S3 retired the Savage3D and released the Savage4 family. Many of the Savage3D's limitations were addressed for the Savage 4 chipset.

[edit] Savage4

Comparative screenshots of special edition of Unreal Tournament game with high resolution S3TC compressed textures on Savage4. See the S3 Savage texture compression for more explanation.
Comparative screenshots of special edition of Unreal Tournament game with high resolution S3TC compressed textures on Savage4. See the S3 Savage texture compression for more explanation.


Savage4 was an evolution of Savage 3D technology in many ways. S3 refined the chip, fixing hardware bugs and streamlining the chip for both cost reduction and performance. They added single-pass multi-texturing, meaning the board could sample 2 textures per pixel in one pass (not one clock cycle) through the rendering engine instead of halving its texture fillrate in dual-textured games like Savage 3D. Savage4 supported the then-new AGP 4X. It was manufactured on a 250 nm process, like Savage 3D. The graphics core was clocked at 125 MHz, with the board's SDRAM clocked at either 125 MHz or 143 MHz (Savage4 Pro). They could be equipped with 8-32 MiB memory. And while an integrated TV encoder was dropped, the DVD acceleration was commendable, and the chip supported an early version of the DVI interface for LCDs.

The Savage4 gained numerous design-wins with board-vendors, including Diamond Multimedia (Stealth III S540) and Creative Labs. The Savage4 series' single cycle trilinear filtering and S3TC texture compression created a 3D card with exceptional image quality. However, by continuing with a bandwidth-constraining 64-bit memory bus, S3 guaranteed this graphics card would never be a performance part under 32-bit color. Drivers were again an issue with S3's product; holding back overall performance and causing compatibility issues with software and hardware.

Savage4 was hardly a match for the new 3dfx Voodoo3, ATI Rage 128, Matrox G400, or NVIDIA Riva TNT2. In OpenGL games such as Quake II, Savage4 performed about as well as G400 did with its slow initial OpenGL support and was far behind TNT2 and Voodoo3. Within Direct3D titles such as Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Savage 4 scored almost 50% slower than TNT2 and Voodoo3 even at a low resolution such as 800x600.[1] The chip was very popular for budget machines, with many generic retail products based on it and OEM PC wins.

Only the high-quality texture capability from its S3TC support gave it good mind share with the gaming community. Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena, two popular games at the time, shipped with built-in support for S3TC. The compressed textures were a vast improvement over the standard textures used on all other cards. Not only that, but S3TC allowed these much higher quality textures to be rendered with negligible performance impact.

Video of a typical example of the S3 Savage Texture Compression

Interestingly, this old card can do "Direct Rendering" in Unix and Linux operating systems using the "savage" driver. This opens the possibility of composite rendering using AIGLX or Xgl with Compiz or Beryl, or other composite managers.

[edit] Savage 2000

Diamond's Viper II Z200 Box:1,2
Diamond's Viper II Z200 Box:1,2

In late 1999, S3 announced the Savage 2000. Diamond and S3 had recently merged and this was the first product from the combined companies, to be released initially as Diamond Viper II Z200. Savage 2000 was S3's most advanced effort yet, and would remain their most sophisticated design for years to come.

It consisted of about half the number of transistors of the NVIDIA GeForce 256 (12 million vs 23 million) while being marketed as a part with similar features and performance. Savage 2000 supported S3's popular S3TC texture compression, a hardware transform and lighting engine called "S3TL", and was home to a "QuadTexture Engine" capable of a single quad-textured pixel per clock (or 2 dual-textured pixels per clock). This gave it texture fillrate theoretically equivalent to GeForce 256 at the same clock speed, but a potential pixel fillrate disadvantage if a game didn't use more than one texture layer (unlikely with most games being multi-textured by that time). Of much curiosity was the S3TL engine that was so much less transistor-heavy than GeForce 256's T&L engine. S3 engineers had claimed pre-release that the S3TL engine was as feature-filled as GeForce 256's engine, and that it could render 2.5 million lit and clipped triangles/second.[1] It shipped completely non-functional in initial drivers, primarily because initial drivers were Direct3D 6-based (Direct3D 7 was the first release with HW T&L support). Savage 2000 was an AGP 2X/4X card and had an internal 350 MHz RAMDAC.

Upon release, the card was reviewed by many publications online and offline. Initial pre-release specifications had called for a 175 MHz core clock, with a resulting 700 million texels/second fillrate.[2] The actual released card shipped 50 MHz slower, at 125 MHz, resulting in a fillrate of 500 MTexels/second (only slightly ahead of GeForce 256).[2] Also strange, the card shipped with 166 MHz SDRAM clocked at only 155 MHz. The card displayed performance ahead of the prior generation of cards (Matrox G400, ATI Rage Fury MAXX, NVIDIA RIVA TNT2, 3dfx Voodoo3) but it did not always keep up with the GeForce 256 and rarely bested it (especially GeForce 256 DDR).[2] Drivers were discovered to be quite buggy, a significant disappointment because S3's history of poor drivers continued on again. Reviewers were, however, hopeful that future driver releases could improve performance and compatibility, especially once S3TL was enabled.

Eventually, Diamond shipped drivers with S3TL support for OpenGL and Direct3D. Unfortunately, it was discovered that S3TL was almost entirely non-working. In all HW T&L-supporting applications, enabling S3TL caused significant visual anomalies. Missing textures, errors in geometry and models, and very little performance gain. Whether the issues were a result of poor drivers or dysfunctional hardware is unknown. Driver development didn't continue past 2002 and HW T&L never became usable.

Seemingly unwilling to invest the time and effort required to set up a structured internal driver development team, S3's graphics division was sold to VIA for $321 million. ATI had experienced similar problems with drivers, but prioritised development internally, and turned the company around. To this extent, had S3 shown the kind of corporate determination AMD has made famous, it is likely they could have remained a major player in the discrete graphics card market. S3 would regroup in later years create the Chrome series.

[edit] Motherboard integrated chipsets

As a result of being sold to VIA for $321m, Savage hardware became an integrated motherboard solution, initially as part of the Twister chipset, where Savage 2000 2D silicon was merged with Savage 4 3D hardware. In this respect at least, S3's economical use of transistors proved highly advantageous. Development of Savage as a discrete card was discontinued. The dominant GPU market share once held by S3, now fell primarily to NVIDIA with its GeForce line, and ATI's Radeon series.

The hybrid Savage4/Savage2000 ProSavage IGP was part of chipsets such as KM133, KM266, and KM333, and PL133T, PM133T, PL133T and P4M266. Variants called SuperSavage MX & IX were used in notebooks as well.

The Savage IGP range was superseded by the CastleRock, which later was christened UniChrome.

Chip Pipeline
Pixel/TMU		 Memory
clock		 Memory
interface		 Notes
ProSavage(4/8/DDR) 1 x 2 System RAM 64-bit aka Twister. Memory clock corresponds to chosen system DDR speed.
SuperSavage MX & IX 1 x 2 Varies 64/128-bit Notebook chips

[edit] Models

Chronological order

Chip Release Die process Core clock Pipeline
Pixel/TMU		 Fillrate max (MT/s) Memory clock Memory interface Notes
Savage 3D 6/1998 0.25 100-120 MHz 1 x 1 100-120 120 MHz 64-bit AGP 2X or PCI. Versions: 390, 391 with Macrovision.
Savage 4 Pro 2/1999 0.25 110-143 MHz 1 x 2 220-286 125-143 MHz 64-bit AGP 4X or PCI. Sav4 added single-pass multitexturing.
Savage 4 GT 2/1999 0.25 110 MHz 1 x 2 220 125 MHz 64-bit AGP 4X.
Savage 4 MX 2/1999 0.25 1 x 2 64-bit Notebooks. AGP 4X.
Savage 4 Xtreme 8/1999 0.25 166 MHz 1 x 2 322 166 MHz 64-bit Diamond Stealth III. AGP 4X.
Savage 2000 11/1999 0.18/0.22 125 MHz 2 x 2 500 155 MHz 128-bit aka GX4. Hybrid process. AGP 4X. Non-functional T&L.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Orozco, Silvino.S3 Savage 2000 Preview, Tom's Hardware, November 2, 1999.
  2. ^ a b c Lal Shimpi, Anand. S3 Savage 2000 (Diamond Viper II), Anandtech.com, November 18, 1999.

[edit] External links

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Centaur Technology • Products of VIA Technologies • S3 Graphics
VIA chipsets • Cyrix III • VIA C3 • VIA C7 • VIA Nano • VIA Eden • VIA CoreFusion • S3 Savage series • S3 Chrome series • EPIA • VIA Envy
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S3 Graphics graphics processors
S3TC | S3 Trio | S3 ViRGE | Savage 3D / Savage4 / Savage 2000 | Chrome series