S3 Deltachrome S8

S3 has long been associated with graphics kit, but the company has been quiet on the serious new launch front for a very long time. Long since absorbed into chipset giant Via, S3 seems excited by the impending arrival of video cards based on its Deltachrome GPUs.

S3 claims the DirectX 9-compliant Deltachrome will offer excellent 3D performance and 2D enhancements to make Windows XP look good without loading the processor too much. All this is expected to be delivered at a competitive price.

We tested an early 256MB board. Despite the bold claims and high hopes, we were a bit disappointed by this early production board. In regular 1,024 x 768 tests, everything ran fine and then we hit problems. Although the card was happy to bench at all resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200, as soon as full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) was enabled, things started to go wrong. We got a test result with two-times FSAA but the benchmarks crashed at four-times FSAA.

Although this is an early build, such flakiness on standard benchmarks is a bit of a worry. The scores we did get suggest the Deltachrome could perform to a respectable mid-range standard about on a par with an Nvidia FX5700. If S3 can develop solid driver support for the card, it could have potential, but we'll need to wait for full retail versions before we make any decisions.

Contact: S3
www.s3graphics.com

Specifications:

• 300MHz core
• 300MHz Ramdac
• 256MB DDR-Ram
• 9.6Gbytes/sec memory bandwidth
• VGA, DVI, composite and S-video
• DirectX 9
• OpenGL 1.4
• AGP 8x