S3 stopped by the GameSpot offices last week to show off its latest pet projects, two new graphics processors designed exclusively for laptop use. Called the Savage/MX and Savage/IX, these chips are a hybrid of the company's older Savage3D chipset that sit on a surprisingly small .18 micron process. Why "surprisingly" small? Because Intel is still two to three months away from bumping up (or down, as it were) its processors from the current .25 micron to the heat and energy-efficient .18. For S3 to be knocking on .18's door before Intel is impressive, to say the least.

　　The two Savage chips are essentially the same. Both offer support for 32bpp color rendering; both feature hardware-assisted bump mapping; both have support for 16MB of SGRAM; both support AGP 2X; both top off their fill rates at 125Mps; both are clocked at 100MHz internally; and, of course, both boast full S3TC texture-compression support. The primary difference between the two is the Savage/IX's integrated DRAM via its Multi Chip Module (MCM) memory design, making the IX a more promising 3D performer.

　　We were given the chance to play with a laptop powered by a 366MHz Celeron processor and 128MB of system memory. The notebook was equipped with an 8MB variant of the Savage/MX and ran through a suite of 3D games flawlessly. Two specific games that caught our attention, however, were Quake II and Unreal. The latter was running the now-infamous Ancient Egyptian S3TC-enhanced level at a beautiful 1024x768. While gamers might scoff at this "accomplishment," laptop owners will appreciate playing a game as processor- and graphics-intensive as Unreal at such a high resolution and with a more-than-adequate frame rate. Quake II told an even better story. Running at 800x600, the Savage/MX turned a 45.8fps frame rate. If that's not good enough, S3 hopes that figure will climb to 60fps when the chips hit final production.

　　S3 expects to ship both chips to OEM systems integrators this September. Both the MX and IX will ship in a variety of configurations, including 2MB, 4MB, 8MB and 16MB memory solutions. S3 claims that it has already secured three major design wins, with at least two more coming next month. In fact, the company is so confident in its new chips that it anticipates the MX/IX combination to corner more than 50 percent of the laptop market share throughout the next two years. ATI and NeoMagic, the manufacturers of the video chipsets found in the gross majority of notebooks certainly have their work cut out for them.

　　S3's Savage/MX-powered laptop certainly left a smile on our faces. Couple these new chips with the ever-increasing popularity of DVD-ROMs, and the future of notebooks as viable portable gaming/entertainment solutions becomes bright indeed.