Forget Y2K... S2K Is Here

Any hard-core gamer waiting for the next generation of video chipsets has undoubtedly heard of S3's upcoming GX4 chipset. While rumors about its specifications have been floating around the Net lately, S3 has remained tight-lipped about revealing any official details of its own. Last week, however, S3 stopped by the GameSpot offices to show off its new graphics chipset.

The chip has lost its GX4 namesake and taken on a more popular Savage2000 label. S3 hopes that the Savage2000, which will be developed on a tiny .18 micron process, will deliver all the speed, power, and image quality of the next generation of video cards, while keeping the price low enough for the mainstream consumer to afford.

"Savage2000 significantly raises the level of performance that consumers can expect to find from S3 on store shelves by the end of this year," comments JPA president Jon Peddie. "Giving S3 a complete top-to-bottom volume product offering, Savage2000 is well positioned to succeed in the high-performance graphics-controller market, which our research indicates exceeding 46 million units in 2000."

How fast will the Savage2000 really be? Well, initially, S3 will be bin sorting its chipset in order to yield two different speeds. The vanilla Savage 2000 will be clocked between 143 and 150MHz internally, and support memory speeds up to 166MHz. The faster yield, dubbed the Savage2000+, will zip along between 166 and 200MHz at the internal clock and 200MHz at the memory clock - admittedly impressive figures.

Also impressive is the feature set of the Savage2000. To make it competitive with the upcoming Nvidia NV10, S3 has implemented its own transform and lighting engine onto the chipset. Called S3TL, the technology processes all geometry calculations on the Savage2000 chipset, offloading a giant chunk of overhead from the system CPU, and allows for an increased polygon count in near-future games. The Savage2000's other notable feature is its new texture engine, which can texture four pixels in a single clock cycle. In layman's terms, this means that the Savage2000 can add effects like bump-mapping, reflections, and shadows to textures in only one cycle, instead of taking up three or four cycles to render each effect separately. All said and done, the Savage2000 cranks out over 700 MegaTexels per second. In comparison, the fill rates of 3dfx's Voodoo3 3500 and Nvidia's TNT2 Ultra are 366 and 350 MegaTexels respectively.

The Savage2000 also has full support for S3TC, S3's texture compression technology (the first game to make full use of S3TC, Unreal Tournament, is nearing completion and will not only look amazing on this chipset, but will also run at a frame rate that will appease even the most critical of hard-core fraggers), and for hardware DVD motion compensation.

Undoubtedly, however, the most attractive feature of the new Savage2000 is its price tag. S3 has always been known for manufacturing bang-for-the-buck products that don't break the bank, and the Savage2000 will be no different. In quantities of 10,000 units, the Savage2000 will be priced at US$29, while the beefier Savage2000+ will go for $35. Expect the first Savage2000-powered card to come from Diamond Multimedia, obviously, with companies like Elsa and Number Nine to follow shortly thereafter. Don't look towards Creative Labs to bring out a video card with this new chipset, however, as the partnership between S3 and Diamond (Creative Labs' biggest competitor) has driven a wedge between CL and S3.

Savage2000 chipsets are currently being sampled by S3 and are expected to hit the retail market around the October/November time frame.