When S3 launched the Savage3D last year, it regained a measure of respect that had been lost with the company's original ViRGE accelerator (or 3D "decelerator," as many people called it). But the Savage3D still fell just a little short in several areas. While the 2D performance lagged considerably behind the competition, the two major issues were an 8MB memory limit and hardware drivers that were buggy for most of the year.

　　The Savage4, S3's latest effort, proposes to answer all those criticisms and then some. There's enough commonality with the Savage3D core so drivers should be less problematic. But the Savage4 isn't merely a faster Savage3D. S3's taken the breathing room that Savage3D gave and added a host of new features. S3 claims that the Savage4's dual rendering pipeline is built in such a way that the chip can deliver single-pass multitexturing with single cycle trilinear MIP-mapping. In addition, the Savage4 is AGP 4x capable, one of the first out to the market.

　　One big shortcoming that's being addressed is memory, and S3 has divided memory into two levels of product. The Savage3D Pro supports up to 32MB of video RAM and AGP 4X, while the Savage4 GT is an AGP 2x part supporting up to 16MB of video memory. Other added features include enhancements to S3TC, S3's own texture compression scheme (now incorporated into DirectX 6.0), but the new wrinkle is support for textures up to 2,048x2,048. There's also a hardware stencil buffer (which can assist with realistic, volumetric shadow effects), support for AMD's 3DNow and Intel's Streaming SIMD (Katmai) instruction sets, anisotropic filtering, better DVD support, vertex buffers, and, of course, 32-bit rendering output.

　　The proof is in the pudding. While I didn't get a real hands-on experience, I did see the rev A version (rev B will be the shipping part) running on a 450MHz Pentium II. I can't comment on performance - this is early beta stuff - but suffice to say that things moved along smoothly in some Unreal Tournament levels. S3 has been working with Epic to incorporate some higher-resolution textures, and the image quality is absolutely stunning. After having stared at overfiltered Voodoo2 textures for way too long, the crispness of the image quality was like a breath of fresh air (see screenshots).

　　You might ask why texture compression is even needed with a board that has 32MB of onboard video memory. The answer is bandwidth. Even AGP4x has a maximum transfer rate of 1GB per second, and that's being optimistic. A developer using a lot of high-resolution textures could soak up that bandwidth in a hurry. Downloading compressed textures can alleviate a lot of the bandwidth problem. It saves cost and space for game developers, too. For example, Unreal Tournament will ship with over 1GB of textures on a single CD-ROM.

　　Unfortunately, the best thing about both versions of the chip will be price. The Savage3D is a 0.25 micron part and will be available in US$25 in 10,000 unit quantities. A board using 32MB of 143MHz RAM could come in at under $150 - certainly under $175. At those prices, the Savage4 may be the bargain of the year.