S3 Savage3D

The S3 Savage3D 8MB SGRAM reference board

SGRAM was an exotic form of SDRAM

The next item I'm featuring is the S3 Savage3D, a card that very few people remember or consider important. S3 used to be the leader of the 2D graphics industry, producing very fast graphics cards with world-class drivers. In the very earliest stages of 3D graphics, the S3 Virge was a strong contender. After 3Dfx showed the world what gaming 3D was all about, S3 found itself struggling to produce a competitive chip. They missed a product cycle, but eventually produced the Savage3D, which was designed to compete against the Voodoo2, at a lower cost.

Very few people actually owned a Savage3D primarily because it was late to market. This was further compounded with the fact that the Savage3D did not have a multitexturing engine; many felt that the Savage3D was a card that would offer excellent performance for games available at the time, but would go obsolete quickly. The Savage3D was superior to the Voodoo Banshee in nearly all respects (except for Glide support), and was very competitive in 3D graphics when compared against NVIDIA's Riva TNT in Direct3D.

When it came to OpenGL, however, NVIDIA's drivers were vastly superior and for the Quake II playing gamer, S3 wasn't a contender. If you had to point out when NVIDIA started having its reputation for quality drivers, it's clearly the Riva TNT.

That said, even though the Savage3D never made a visible impact in the 3D industry, it is a graphics chip that truly deserves a spot in the history books.

A Technological Wonder

When I think about the Savage3D, I think of three technological advantages: S3TC, Void-cluster dithering, and world-class DVD quality.

S3 Texture Compression

The Savage3D was the first graphics card to support S3TC and optimized AGP 2X implementation. With S3TC, it was possible to have games with large 1024x1024 or even 2048x2048 textures running as fast as a Voodoo2 with only 256x256 sized textures. The 64x increase in detail was amazing and despite having only 8MB of SGRAM, the AGP implementation on the Savage3D worked superbly with large amounts of compressed textures.

Simulated 256x256 texture

Simulated 2048x2048 texture

Although all current graphics cards support S3TC (DXTC) texture compression, we have many games featuring large 2Kx2K textures. Part of the problem stems from differing implementations of S3TC from vendor to vendor in the early stages (no longer a problem). Today, the biggest problem is that high-resolution textures requires significant financial investments from the game development perspective.