Image quality/Drivers

One aspect where DeltaChrome is a little weaker in comparison to the competition is its anti-aliasing engine. Whereas most of today’s graphics accelerators have implemented multisampling AA, DeltaChrome relies on supersampling. While supersampling does a good job of removing the aliasing (the jagged, broken lines you typically see in sports titles and racing games) present in the final image, it does so at a huge hit to the graphics accelerator's fill rate.

Back in the RADEON 8500/GeForce3/4 days, this really hurt ATI as their RADEON 8500 relied on supersampling while the GeForce cards used multisampling. This gave the GeForce cards a huge performance advantage. In fact, most RADEON 8500 users left AA off. ATI ultimately resolved this problem with the introduction of RADEON 9700 (and all of their follow-up products since its release) by implementing multisampling AA.

Due to S3’s reliance on supersampling, AA is limited to just 2X mode and resolutions up to 1024x768. At least, that’s where S3 plans on going, S3’s current display driver hasn’t implemented AA support yet. Quite frankly, this is probably the highest setting that will result in playable frame rates anyway. We did go ahead and take a few screenshots however in 3DMark 03 and Unreal Tournament 2003 however (all screenshots were taken with basic settings, 0xAA/0xAF):

ATI RADEON 9600 XT

S3 DeltaChrome

GeForce FX 5600

ATI card here

S3

GeForce FX 5600

Drivers

S3 was quite open with the fact that they’re still early in the development of the OpenGL portion of their display driver. Basically, they’ve reached the point where they’ve got OpenGL up and running and not much else. They have yet to begin any optimization work, so our performance numbers in Quake 3 should be regarded as a baseline, with performance improvements to come in the final driver.

S3 Gamma plus panel

S3 Info plus

S3 Refreshlock

S3 Colorplus panel

S3 Rotate

S3 display

Overall stability with Direct3D applications was for the most part very good, considering that we’re still dealing with early hardware and drivers. But there were quite a few little snags here and there that need to get fixed however. For instance, we noticed that IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles doesn’t work properly with FRAPS running in the background, but runs fine once FRAPS is left off. Therefore we didn’t run any benchmarks with IL-2. Textures would occasionally flash in Unreal Tournament 2003, while we were unable to benchmark Tomb Raider with depth of field disabled (and some benchmarks wouldn’t complete with DoF in place). S3’s water in Tomb Raider isn’t quite up to snuff either. Halo and 3DMark are the only applications where we’d really give S3 a thumbs-up at this point.

Up to 2xAA in driver but it is disabled

S3 Config D3D panel

S3 Chromotion panel

General tab

Here's where you can overclock!

Keep in mind that S3 is by no means finished optimizing the D3D portion of their driver, only they’re a little further along in D3D than they are with OGL.