Number Nine Announces SR9

Number Nine unveiled the details behind its upcoming SR9 Series of video cards this morning. Powered by S3's Savage4 Pro chipset, the SR9 Series is designed for both corporate use and mainstream gaming.

The new video cards will ship in 16 and 32MB configurations in both AGP and PCI flavors. The ability to display texture sizes as large as 2048 x 2048 pixels, a digital flat panel-out, 32-bit color rendering, bump mapping, single pass multiple texturing, hardware-assisted DVD motion compensation and support for Intel's SSE and AMD's 3DNow! instruction sets are among the boards' more impressive list of gaming features. Additionally, the SR9 Series will be one of the first video cards on the market to use 4X AGP. However, 4X AGP is currently useless to gamers, as Intel is still 3 - 4 months away from releasing a motherboard logic chipset that supports the feature.

SR9's most appealing feature, though, is the ability to make full use of S3's S3TC compression algorithm. This technology lets game developers compress massive textures down to a fraction of their original size, thus saving precious memory resources. These textures are then decompressed in real-time by the SR9's Savage4 processor and displayed on-screen, while at the same time minimizing any loss in image quality.

Number Nine also plans to release an 8MB version of the SR9 for use in home/office and business environments.

The SR9 Series will begin shipping in May to selected distributors. Pricing is as follows:SR9 Pro AGP 4X 16 MB - US$109SR9 Pro AGP 4X 32 MB - $149SR9 Pro PCI 32 MB - $149