The Savage 3D graphics cards were designed by S3 in three main versions.

Contents

1 History 2 Chipsets 3 Market trends 4 External links

History

They represented an attempt to design a successful mass market high volume single die integrated 2D / 3D graphical accelerator. The previous 3D ViRGE range released by S3, was notorious for poor performance. While moderately successful, in 2001 the Savage technology was sold to VIA for use in motherboard chipsets, and development of Savage as a discrete card was discontinued.

Many members of internal management at S3 considered the company gave up too easily, and should have used its large cash reserves to take the time to perfect the Savage architecture. Had S3 shown the kind of corporate determination AMD has made famous, it is likely S3 and the Savage architecture would still be a high volume discrete graphics technology.

Chipsets

Chronological order

• S3 Savage - 1998
• S3 Savage 4 - 1999
• S3 Savage 2000 -

Market trends

Introduced in 1998 at the E3 Expo in Atlanta in a period when many thought S3 was exiting the graphics business, the first Savage 3D chipset suffered poor yields, due to S3's lack of experience with manufacturing integrated 3D/2D cores made. Only Hercules made any real effort to ship the chipset, and they had to hand pick suitable cores from the production line. Combined with poor drivers, it was not fit for mass market.

Many of the issues were addressed for the Savage 4 chipset, and the addition of single-pass multi-texturing was an important step forward. 32 bit color mode was impressive for a mere 10% performance drop. And the DVD acceleration remained first class. But overall, the Savage 4 was really only what the Savage 3D should have been, about 1-2 years late to the market.

The final discrete Savage card was the Savage 2000. Notable, for having about half of the amount of transistors of the GeForce (12 million vs 23 million), S3 claimed this did not excessively impact performance. But the real area of weakness was (once again) poor quality drivers.

Seemingly unwilling to invest the time and effort required to setup a structured internal driver development team, Savage technology was sold to VIA for $321m, where it become an integrated motherboard solution, initially as part of the Twister chipset.

External links

• Anandtech: S3 Savage4
• Anandtech: S3 Savage 2000 (Diamond Viper II)