Introduction

The cards lined up

While ATI and NVIDIA have continued to release new products every six months in the high-end segment of the 3D market, the mainstream, and especially the value sectors have seen little change in the past year.

NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5200 family continues to service the value segment. And while GeForce MX 4000 was quietly introduced at the end of last year, this card is more of an OEM play – believe it or not there were some who wanted to replace their GeForce2 MX’s, but weren’t quite ready to pony up to a base GeForce FX 5200.

ATI has been just as reluctant to refresh their value lineup. RADEON 9200 is still the predominant offering, which is essentially just an AGP 8X rehash of RADEON 9000. ATI’s counter to the GeForce FX 5200 series, RADEON 9600 SE, has never really taken off due to its narrow 64-bit memory interface, crippling memory bandwidth and thus the card’s potential performance. ATI has just recently developed a solid DX9 value offering in the X300, but ATI currently has no plans to ever bring this card to market with an AGP interface.

This stagnation has quite frankly left the value market a dull segment to write about, nothing exciting has happened in this space for quite some time. S3 hopes to change all that though with their S4 DeltaChrome.

5200U and S4 Pro

The S4 Pro and RADEON 8500

The name DeltaChrome probably sounds familiar to you if you’ve been a long-time reader of this site, we’ve previewed one derivative or another of the DeltaChrome for the past 18 months now, with four articles dedicated to DeltaChrome and its development. S3’s plans for DeltaChrome have changed with the evolution of the 3D market. Whereas S3 had originally planned to produce three families of DeltaChrome cards, the highest end DeltaChrome variant, the “F1” line, was cancelled due to market conditions. S3’s S8 DeltaChrome line has seen a limited release so far, with boards shipping from a handful of board partners including Chaintech, Club3D, and IO Data. None of these cards have found their way to US shores however, where the 3D market is considerably more established and competitive.

Now S3 plans to bring their DeltaChrome technology first found in the S8 and S8 Nitro down to the value segment with their S4 family. With the window of opportunity still wide open in this space, and S4’s aggressive pricing and capable feature set, S3 hopes to put a solid dent in the 3D market, but does the S4 have enough gusto to challenge more established players like ATI and NVIDIA? That’s what we’re here today to find out!