S3 Graphics, Ltd design graphics chipsets for PCs.

Contents

1 History 2 Products 3 Graphics chipsets 4 Market Trends 5 External Links

History

S3® was founded and incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao and Ronald Yara. On March 5 1993 S3 began an Initial Public Offering of 2,000,000 shares of common stock on NASDAQ. After several profitable years as an independant startup company, struggling with the transition to integrated 3D cards, S3 decided to sell off their core graphics division to VIA for $323 million.

The reformed S3 company minus the core graphics division, carried over a substantial cash pile from the profitable TRIO days, and began trading on November 15 2000 under the stock symbol SBLU (SonicBlue). The new business model focused on digital media and information appliance opportunities. ReplayTV, Rio, and GoVideo, were some of the brands develped. On March 21, 2003 SONICblue filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Products

S3 produce graphics cards primarily for PCs. While the earlier products such as the TRIO range were 2D only, later 3D functionaity was added with the ViRGE and then Savage cards. More recently S3 chipsets have been sold as integrated VIA north bridge parts.

Graphics chipsets

• S3 911, 924 (1990) - S3's first Windows accelerators
• S3 928 - S3's first PCI Windows accelerator
• S3 801, 805, 805i - first "8xx" series (DRAM) of mainstream Windows accelerators
• S3 Vision864, Vision964 (1994) - 2nd generation Windows accelerators (64-bit wide framebuffer)
• S3 Vision868, Vision968 - S3's first motion video accelerator (zoom and YUV->RGB conversion)
• Trio 32, 64, 64V+, 64V2 (1995) - S3's first integrated (RAMDAC+VGA) accelerator. The 64 bit versions were S3's most successful product range.
• ViRGE DX, GX, GX2, VX, Trio3D - S3's first Windows 3D-accelerators. Notoriously poor 3D. Sold well to OEMS simply because of price and solid 2D-performance.
• Savage 3D, 4, 2000 (1998)- S3's first recognizably modern 3D hardware implementation. Flawed transform and lighting, poor yields meant actual clock speeds were 30% below expectations, and buggy drivers. Against that S3TC went on to become an industry standard, and the Savage3D's DVD acceleration was market leading at introduction.
• Aurora64V+, S3 ViRGE/MX, SuperSavage, ProSavage, SavageXP - Mobile chipsets
• Twister, UniChrome - Integrated implementations of Savage chipset for VIA motherboards
• GammaChrome, DeltaChrome - Discrete Savage hardware post acquisition by VIA.

Media chipsets

• Sonic/AD sound chipset - A programmable, sigma-delta audio DAC, featuring an integrated PLL, stereo 16-bit analogue output
• SonicVibes - PCI Audio Accelerator
• Scenic/MX2 - MPEG Decoder

Market Trends

From formation in 1989 it took S3 two years to develop the world's first single-chip Graphical User Interface (GUI) accelerator. Integrated functionality enabled attractive pricing, and solid features for competitive prices remained a hallmark of S3's strategy.

S3's most notable product range is the S3 TRIO 2D chipset. It remains one of the best selling graphics chipsets of all time. Updated in a number of timely revisions, each time S3 managed to keep the series one step ahead of the competition.

However, TRIO was a 2D range, and by the mid 1990s consumers and OEMs started to demand 3D functionality from graphics cards. Internally, S3 failed to recognise this transition quickly enough, and had to rush out the S3 ViRGE range of 3D cards. While cheap, and popular with some OEMs for this reason, performance and drivers were poor. Some enthusiasts even nicknamed them graphics decelerators

The integrated modern style 3D feature produced by S3, was the Savage series of graphics cards. Notably these pioneered S3TC under the proprietary METAL API interface, subsequently adopted by Microsoft under royalty, as an industry standard for texture texture compression in DirectX.

Savage also introduced an industry leading motion compensation engine, a quality video scaler, as well as hardware alpha-blended sub-picture blending, a first. However, the 3D performance of the Savage cards was never quite enough to take significant market share. Poor yields meant actual clock speeds were 30% lower than had been projected during development, and the transform and lighting engine implementation was flawed.

It became apparent the excellence of S3's integrated 2D technology, was no longer enough to ensure the overall success of the chipset. While S3 could have continued development of the Savage cards, and most likely resolved the outstanding issues, instead in 2001 the S3 management decided to sell off the core business to VIA for $323 million.

Subsequently, Savage derived chips turned up in numerous VIA motherboard chipsets as an integrated north bridge solution, such as Twister and UniChrome. More recent discrete derivations have carried the brand names DeltaChrome GammaChrome. In this manner, S3 derived chips have held onto about a 10% share of the overall PC graphics market.

External Links

• s3graphics
• S3.com products cached from 1997
• VIA Graphics
• Firingsquad: S3: From Virge to Savage 2000
• Xbitlabs: The Return of S3: DeltaChrome Graphics Card Review
• Extremetech: The Return of S3
• Techreport: A look at S3's DeltaChrome
• sonicblue