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 Creative Labs S3 Savage4
The Beauty but not a Beast
(Review by MS, May 30, 1999)

Fluctuat nec mergitur is the logo of the city of Paris (France). Battered by the waves, it still won’t sink, and a similar logo seems to underly the struggles of S3, not long ago one of the leading manufacturers of graphics adapters. If it is true that pressure often opens buried resources, S3 is a good example that sometimes the lack of success can force a re-evaluation of the current strategies followed by a radical change in order to squeeze out the maximum of currently available resources. These resources may not even have popped up just recently but been around for quite some time while they were neglected as long as a successful line of products did not force their extensive use.

The key word here is AGP which is aimed primarily at 3D applications and has the advantage over the older PCI bus of being capable of reaching up to 528 MB/s whereas the PCI bus is limited to a maximum of 133 MB/s. The real advantage of the AGP concept is, at least theoretically, that not only the video card memory (linear frame buffer, LFB) can be used to store textures but that the much larger system memory can be enslaved to do part of this job. The only way to accomplish this, of course is the extremely high transfer, at least in 2x mode. The amount of system memory that can be accessed for storage of graphics textures is usually refered to as AGP aperture.

From the above, it follows that textures can be swapped between the LFB and the system memory at high exchange rates and that, of course, is necessary to provide the input to the digital-analog-converter (RAMDAC) that shapes the analog output signal for the monitor. On the other hand, according to the AGP specifications, it is not necessary to retrieve all textures from the system memory into the LFB in order to do the necessary processing. In fact, texture manipulation can be performed within the more abundant system memory through a process also known as direct memory execution or DiME. In reality, however, with the current explosion of local on-board memory on the graphics adapters, there is hardly any need for the utilization of DiME.


This is certainly a valid argument as long as the resolution of a given game is kept at “reasonable” levels, however, nobody can deny that running at higher resolution adds substantially to the image quality, of course with the drawback of a substantial performance hit. So we are looking at two inversely correlated demands: quality and speed and things are not getting better as the new generation of video games is in the process of implementing even larger textures and more complicated effects. In other words, for the next generation of games, even the sytem memory may prove to provide some limitations to the amount of texture that can be stored or processed in its remote location. However, we live in the age of zipping and unzipping large files and why not do the same with graphics textures?

This is where the current S3 architecture comes into play. S3 developed a texture compression protocol (S3 Texture Compression; S3TC protocol) and licensed it to Microsoft to implement it into DX per the release of DX 6.0. The specs for S3TC are a 6:1 texture compression without visual penalty because decompression of the data is supposed to be happening on-the-fly (according to the S3 specs). This, of course allows for much larger textures, up to a maximum of 4 Megabytes / frame.

All of this is said in anticipation of a new dimension in video performance but does the concept hold up to reality?

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