Making the most of S3 - two S27 video cards in the MultiChrome mode
Date: 10.05.2006
|
|
By:Dmitry Sofronov
Vladimir Romanchenko
I must admit, while publishing our November material on the then prepared mass production of graphic cards built on the base of Chrome S25 and S27 chips made by S3 Graphics and describing the preliminary data on these novelties, we, following the established practice, cast some doubts whether the varied boxes with these card would reach the lab. Since the time when only two companies survived on the field of the manufacture of chips for modern 3D graphics aimed at desktop PCs, there have been numerous attempts to enter the "club". They normally ended up in "on-paper" announcements or prototype chips, or, like in the case of XGI Volari Duo, release of quite limited quantities of retail cards.
 As time has proved, this time the doubts cast upon the capabilities of S3 Graphics turned out to be in vain. This review and test run on a test bench assembled of S3 S27 video cards voluntarily purchased in the US retail are all a proof of that. Moreover, having presented its MultiChrome technology, from the very start the company lifted its arm against the class of SLI/CrossFire solutions, that is, systems with two graphic cards and honestly aligned promises with the reality. Moreover, already during CeBIT 2006 in Hannover VIA Technologies, the owner of S3 Graphics, demonstrated quite a number of samples of video cards built on S3 Chrome chips, and perhaps, more importantly, announced an impressive list of partners for the manufacture and sales of such cards.
    As practice shows, it's just the final stage when novelties are sent to the retail in mass quantities proved fatal for many excellent companies with revolutionary ideas. Well, fortunately, not this time. Currently, video cards built on S27 chips already sell by retail on the US market. At the same time, we note that they sell under the company's own brand name - S3 Graphics.
Among VIA's partners willing to open up other markets are companies like MSI, Axper (Gigabyte's daughter structure), Digicool, Onda, Yeston , and other, less known. As official representatives of VIA disclosed during CeBIT 2006, most of the available partners intend to ship S3 Chrome series video cards to China, but currently an expansion to the European market is on the way.
In a word, it seems like the marketing side is well thought out and this time VIA / S3 Graphics have got a real chance to come back to the market of 3D graphics and strengthen own positions on it. Our today's material is to find out in what extent the strengthening will be.
Architecture and technologies
While announcing the line of Chrome20 graphic chips which currently includes two graphic processors- Chrome S27 and Chrome S25 (or simply S27 and S25), S3 Graphics from the very start did not promise the moon or extreme performance results. S27 and S25 are being positioned by the company as solutions aimed at the mid-end and low-end sectors of the market of modern graphics, respectively. Especially, from the very beginning the following was known: S25 and S27 support only the Shader Model 2.0+, and no support for SM3.0 will be implemented in them.
Was there originally a marketing sense in advancing with video cards that offered performance at the level of GeForce 6600 or Radeon X1600XT? It seems there was a sense, and for several reasons at a time. First, at least for the sake of finally becoming a real player on the market of 3D graphics, in any segment, so that to move forwards afterwards. Secondly, correct price positioning of cards of these pricing ranges, the most popular, will let S3 earn more to further improve the architecture.
And finally a complete set of auxiliary features. Even without a peak performance in 3D games, video cards built on Chrome S27 and Chrome S25 chips are equipped with a complete "gentleman's pack" of technologies including those used in modern "digital homes" - this argument coupled with the price is among the decisive today in choosing the items for new platforms by the system integrator. Combination of all these factors plus use of Fujitsu's 90-nm process technology in the manufacture with low-k dielectrics and without lead - all these have made it possible to create universal 3D chips with the good "performance per watt" index.
 DirectX 9.0 graphic cores of the S3 Graphics Chrome S20 series offer four vertex and eight pixel processors of declared performance up to 5.6 bln pixel instructions per second, with 128-bit (4xFP32) precision for vertex operations and 96-bit (4xFP24) precision for pixel operations. Up to 16 parallel texture mapping passes are processed, there is support for 16x anisotropic filtering, volumetric and cubic texturing, programmable pixel-wise gamma correction, optimized read-write Z-buffer and many other modern technologies.
The core architecture that inherited the generic developments from the previous generation of GammaChrome, along with the full-featured support for DirectX 9.0 has been enriched with a number of modern process improvements. Among them is primarily the native support for the PCI Express bus in any of its version – from PCI Express 1x to 16x, which allows using S3 Graphics Chrome S20 series chips in video cards for a wide spectrum of applications.
Another key acquisition of the new core is a flexible universal memory controller that supports any types of the graphic memory - GDDR1, GDDR2, and GDDR3, which also imparts substantial flexibility in creating a wide spectrum of video cards with varied "price/performance" combination. The Chrome S27 chip supports the 32/64/128-bit memory bus, 32/64/128/256 MB of GDDR1/GDDR3 memory or 32/64/128/256/512 MB of GDDR2 memory, and the peak performance of the controller using GDDR3 memory reaches 22.4 GB/s (at the clock speed 700 MHz).
Finally, it is the S3 Graphics MultiChrome technology presented for the first time in S3 Graphics Chrome S27 series cards, which allows building the performance of a graphic system due to plugging in a second video card. In so doing, neither additional cables nor jumpers, nor special versions of cards on the base of Chrome S27 are needed, since the MultiChrome technology is supported by each of them by default – it suffices only a motherboard with matching PCI Express slots. In the MultiChrome mode, cards built on the base of S27 chips support two rendering modes - the Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) in which each chip processes even/odd frames, and the Split Frame Rendering (SFR) in which each chip is in charge of processing its own (upper or lower) part of the frame.
 Systems with two Chrome S27 video cards support resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 @ 75 Hz. Coupled with support for the HDMI interface the Chromotion 3.0 - full-featured output HDTV modes - up to 1080p, including the 16:9 format, hardware processing of MPEG-2 and WMV-HD, we get quite a balanced graphic subsystem for a second-rate PC.
The economical enough operation of Chrome S20 series chips is provided due to support for the S3 Graphics Power Wise, which provides a precise control over the power consumption, as well as due to the optimized design. At the same time, the number of transistors in the chips of S3 Graphics Chrome S20 series does not exceed 70 mln. It's just that coupled with the modern 90-nm Fujitsu process technology which allowed raising the clock speed of S3 Graphics Chrome S27 chips to 700 MHz (mClk700 MHz), which is higher than in any other modern mass-produced 3D chips for desktop PCs.
As regards low-end S3 Graphics Chrome S25 graphic processors, they are also used to produce video cards of the PCI Express õ16, x8, x4 and x1 bus, which will let achieve the clock speed of the core as high as 600 MHz and even more (mClk 400 MHz). The memory bus in S25 can be configured as 32-bit, 64-bit and 128-bit, at the same time there is support for up to 128 MB of DDR1, DDR2 memory, or the AcceleRAM Technology which is similar to the turbo technologies by ATI and NVIDIA, when additionally to the available onboard memory a distributed system memory - up to 128 MB in the 32-bit mode - is used.
The S3 Graphics Chrome S27 series offers the new video engine Chromotion Video Engine 3.0 which supports the vast majority of modern video standards and codecs, including Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9), MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, and is fully compatible to Microsoft DirectX-VA.
Owing to the HDTV Hi-Def technology, there is support for all the 18 ATSC DTV standards, including the 1080p. The chips offer support for the component (YPbPr) output, 4:4:4 transformation with 10-bit resolutions of the DAC, S-video and composite TV-outs in NTSC/PAL, 10-bit 400 MHz CRT DAC, ChromoColor technologies for a wide spectrum of color space transformations. In general, S3 Graphics Chrome S27 video cards support displays of resolutions up to 2048 x 1536 QXGA (3.1 mln pixels), as well as output to two monitors (HDTV/CRT, DVI/CRT, TV/CRT, or LVDS/CRT).
 Let's sum up the brief research into the potential capabilities of S3 Graphics Chrome S20 series chips inherent to the architecture. No doubt, today you can't surprise with four vertex and eight pixel processors, and it is far not the fact that the clock speed 700 MHz will help make use of performance of these chips. On the other hand, the S3 Graphics Chrome S20 series chips offer a flexible enough memory interface, which coupled with the modern HDTV Chromotion 3.0 video engine allows this generation of 3D graphics by S3 to pretend for a certain place in the sun. To talk about some potential shares of the market, let's first take a look what these chips are capable of while running test and real gaming applications.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
