S3's ViRGE chip has been vilified as everything from a serious underperformer to evidence of the apocalypse. In truth, it was a decent 2D chip and arrived on the scene before most 3D accelerators. Even so, as a 3D chip, it lacked punch in a big way. Despite products from Matrox, ATI, and other mainstream vendors, S3 only updated the ViRGE in minor ways, leaving industry watchers wondering if one of the pioneers of the graphics accelerator had finally lost it. The Savage3D should calm some of those voices.

　　The Savage3D represents S3's return to the 3D fray. It's an interesting chip with some limitations, but it's also a very strong contender. Recently, I spent an afternoon with a couple of S3 folk. We popped an alpha Savage3D board into GameSpot's own Power Rig and checked out its performance.

　　Overall, the numbers looked pretty good. We ran 3D Winbench 98, Forsaken, Incoming, F22 ADF, and Quake II through the mill. Most of the numbers you see on the Net were captured using the DirectX 6 beta and Windows 98, but I insisted we use DirectX 5 and Windows 95 so we could get an accurate picture of performance comparisons with other emerging chips. What I saw looked pretty good, despite the alpha nature of the drivers and hardware. Certainly performance was comparable to what I've seen with the Matrox G200 and even the RIVA TNT (though we didn't run at very high resolutions). It's certainly on a par with a single Voodoo2, but with better image quality.

　　The most interesting thing, though, was the texture compression. Microsoft has licensed (and embedded in DirectX 6) S3's method for compressing textures. Since the Savage3D is limited to 8MB, texture compression becomes quite important. In fact, S3's drivers will automatically compress textures in games that don't use it, creating a second, compressed copy of the game's textures. If a game does have problems with this auto-compression, there will be a control panel checkbox to turn it off.

　　The Savage3D marks the comeback of an established player in the graphics chip arena. With strengths in the 2D and digital video arenas and, now, full-featured, high-performance 3D, it looks like S3 will be around after all.