DeltaChrome Models

S3 has been working on three DeltaChrome variants to service the high-end, mainstream, and value segments of the graphics market: the F1 family, S8 series, and finally, for the value segment, S4.

S3’s F1

S3’s F1 family consists of two products, F1, and F1 Pole. Originally these cards were intended to take on the low-end of the high-end segment but recent market pressures have probably ensured that these cards will never likely see the light of day. When you’re competition is selling graphics cards with 256-bit memory interfaces and high-speed DDR memory at the $200 price point (read: RADEON 9800, GeForce FX 5900/GeForce FX 5900 XT) it’s pretty hard to compete with a card that boasts significantly less memory bandwidth.

F1’s specifications call for a core/memory clock speed of 350MHz, equating to a fill-rate that’s not too bad in comparison to ATI’s latest offerings, but as we mentioned, considerably less bandwidth. As a result, S3 has no schedule for this product at this time.

Mainstream Graphics Feature Comparison
GPU	Core Clock (MHz)	Pixel Pipelines	Memory Clock (MHz)	Peak fill rate (Mpixels/sec)	Peak fill rate (Mtexels/sec)	Peak Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)
RADEON 9500	275	4	540	1100	1100	8.6
RADEON 9600	325	4	400	1300	1300	6.4
RADEON 9500 PRO	275	8	540	2200	2200	8.6
RADEON 9600 PRO	400	4	600	1600	1600	9.6
RADEON 9600 XT	500	4	600	2000	2000	9.6
GeForce FX 5600	325	4	550	1300	1300	8.8
GeForce FX 5700	425	4	550	1700	1700	8.8
GeForce FX 5600 Ultra	400	4	800	1600	1600	12.8
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra	475	4	900	1900	1900	14.4
DeltaChrome S8	300	8	600	2400	2400	9.6
DeltaChrome S8 Nitro	315	8	630	2520	2520	10.1

The S8

Unlike F1, S3’s S8 family is very much a viable product thanks to its eight pixel pipes, a feature that is unique to S8 now that the RADEON 9500 PRO is gone. S3 will be producing two S8 cards, the S8 and the S8 Nitro, with the only difference between the two cards being clock speeds. S3 clocks the standard S8 at 300MHz on the core and its memory, while the S8 Nitro checks in at 315/315MHz.

If you refer back to our article in September, these clock speeds are right in line with S3’s earlier estimates, in fact they slightly exceed them. S3 was originally shooting for a clock frequency range of 275-300MHz. And while these figures are below ATI and NVIDIA’s latest and greatest mainstream products, thanks to the chip’s 8-pixel pipeline architecture, it doesn’t need breakthrough clock frequencies to achieve high fill rates. In fact, at 300MHz, the S8 already exceeds RADEON 9600 XT in terms of texel fill rate, and matches the chip in memory bandwidth, both at 9.6GB/sec.

This could make the S8 a very worthy competitor to the remains of ATI’s RADEON 9600 (whose status has recently been changed to EOL) and NVIDIA’s vanilla GeForce FX 5700, both of which it will be taking on directly in terms of price. Both S8 parts are slated to hit retail channels in Q1 of next year.

S3 S4: Battling at the low-end

Unlike the cards we’ve mentioned above, S3’s S4 series cut the number of pixel pipelines from eight to four in order to reduce transistor count, and ultimately, manufacturing cost. Likewise, the number of vertex shaders is reduced from four to two.

Stats-wise, this puts S4 in good company, although final details on its clock speeds have not been determined. S3 says they will at least meet S8 Nitro’s 315MHz as a minimum specification, although they haven’t gotten more specific than that. It’s also unclear what type of memory interface retail boards will support. The chip is capable of supporting a 128-bit interface to its main memory, which will be present in S4 Nitro, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some vendors built 64-bit S4 boards. (Two variants are planned, the S4 and S4 Nitro.)

Ideally, we’d like to think the days of 64-bit video cards are long gone, but as the RADEON 9600 SE has just recently shown us, this unfortunately isn’t the case. NVIDIA also has a 64-bit version of GeForce FX 5200, which makes a 64-bit S4 more than just a quick guess on our part.

S3 doesn’t plan to launch S4 until the CeBIT/GDC timeframe, so they still have a few months to sort out the final details on this board.